Sometimes the best fan theories aren’t the ones that are true—they’re the ones that are just scientifically plausible enough to make an astrophysicist sigh.
Take the movie Paul.
Here’s the completely ridiculous theory:
Paul didn’t just help Steven Spielberg make Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He used it as an emergency beacon.
The famous five-note sequence?
Not fiction.
His SOS.
Since radio and television broadcasts travel at the speed of light, every airing of Close Encounters has been expanding outward into space for decades. If Paul’s home world were only 10–15 light-years away, the timing actually works. They receive the signal, recognize the communication pattern, and send someone back.
Is it likely?
Absolutely not.
Does the timing work?
Surprisingly… yes.
Now comes the part that would make Neil deGrasse Tyson rub his temples.
Television broadcasts become incredibly weak over interstellar distances. In reality, detecting them would be extraordinarily difficult.
But here’s the loophole.
Paul already knows who’s listening.
He doesn’t need to broadcast to the entire galaxy. He only needs to embed a communication pattern that his people would recognize. They already know what they’re looking for.
And remember, Paul can transfer memories directly into people’s minds.
Who’s to say Spielberg didn’t think he was just having a brilliant creative idea while subconsciously reconstructing memories Paul planted years earlier?
Congratulations.
You’ve now built a fan theory that’s mostly held together by actual light-speed physics, a little radio astronomy, one psychic alien, and a healthy disrespect for reality.
This is what I like to call scientifically organized bullshit.
It’s probably wrong.
But it’s wrong in all the right ways.
One More Thing That Makes This Fan Theory Even Funnier
Here’s the part that really ties the knot on this whole ridiculous idea.
Look at where Paul ends.
Where do the aliens pick him up?
The exact same location that inspired Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Now, think about it from Paul’s point of view.
If he really did inspire Close Encounters, then he wasn’t just making a movie. He was leaving directions.
The five-note sequence.
The mountain.
The rendezvous.
The peaceful contact.
It wasn’t just an emergency call.
It was, “When you get here, this is where I’ll be.”
So when his people finally receive the signal decades later, they don’t have to search the entire Earth.
They already know the destination.
Fly to the mountain.
Scan the area.
Find Paul.
Considering what we see Paul do throughout the movie—heal fatal injuries, transfer memories directly into people’s minds, communicate telepathically, and possess abilities far beyond human understanding—it’s not much of a stretch, within the movie’s own rules, to assume his species could identify him from orbit.
Maybe it’s a biological signature.
Maybe it’s an energy pattern.
Maybe every member of his species gives off something unique that their technology can recognize.
Whatever it is, they wouldn’t need to search billions of humans one by one.
They’d simply arrive at the rendezvous point and look for the one signal they already knew belonged to Paul.
Is that what the filmmakers intended?
Probably not.
Does the movie ever say that’s how it works?
No.
But as a fan theory, it stitches the ending of Paul and Close Encounters together surprisingly well.
And that’s what makes it fun.
No, this isn’t AI hallucinating.
This is the idiot who runs this page taking a comedy, some astrophysics, a few classic science-fiction movies, and just enough logic to build a theory that’s completely ridiculous…
…yet just internally consistent enough to make someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson spend fifteen minutes explaining why it couldn’t possibly work.
And honestly…
that’s half the fun.