Hawking Radiation Does Not License Transit Ontology - A Short Interpretive No-Go on Horizon-Conditioned Particle Appearance

A short interpretive no-go on Hawking radiation. The standard quantum-field-theoretic account gives an exterior thermal flux at future infinity through the mismatch between pre-collapse and late-time field-mode decompositions. It does not establish that a photon, particle, or quantum traveled from the black-hole interior to infinity. This note proves four narrow propositions: (1) the virtual-pair narration is a heuristic image, not literal horizon-straddling particle ontology; (2) Bogoliubov mode mixing is a relation between mode bases, not a spacetime trajectory, and does not assign a photon rest frame, internal clock, or sequence of occupied intermediate locations; (3) exterior detection does not entail that the detected quantum possessed a prior localized identity in the black-hole interior; (4) the semiclassical tunneling formulation of Parikh and Wilczek gives an emission probability and a backreaction-corrected spectrum, not a continuous carrier history — the classical path appearing in the action integral is a calculational object, the path along which the action is evaluated to extract a rate, not an experimentally licensed worldline of a persistent quantum carrier. The negative-energy partner narration is shown to be calculational bookkeeping for the same reason: turning energy-balance language into particle ontology repeats the error of the virtual-pair picture. The result is independent of any proposed modification to physics. It is an interpretive restriction on what the standard account of Hawking radiation permits one to infer. Lawful detection does not imply carrier history. The horizon licenses exterior appearance under horizon-conditioned field structure, not transit. This is a short interpretive note (4 pages) intended for readers in foundations of physics, quantum field theory in curved spacetime, and philosophy of physics.