Hawking 1974, "Black hole explosions?" (Nature paywall) <https://www.nature.com/articles/248030a0> (sci-hub antipaywall) <https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/248030a0> ("... the time dependence of the metric during the collapse will cause a certain amount of mixing of positive and negative frequencies [...] Part of this wave will be scattered by the curvature of the static Schwarzschild solution outside the black hole ... Another part of the wave will propagate backwards into the star") was certainly not for science journalists and is not at all "far-fetched". The only missing piece here is possibly discussion of his particular approach to second-quantization of the matter fields and how one might interpret that; Hawking's peers fifty years ago did not need assistance there.
This was followed in detail by Hawking 1975 (open access via Project Euclid) <https://projecteuclid.org/journals/communications-in-mathema...> where the most relevant bit surrounds eqns (2.27-28) and there is nothing wrong with talking about signed "contributions to the probability flux into the collapsing body" (as opposed to identifying those contributions as particles).
Hawking himself wrote simpler pop-sci explanations in a number of places, including his book, where a reader would not be expected to understand how canonicalizations of wave functions in other than position space and directly-measured particles differ. However none of those works is the equivalent of the brief "explosions?" letter and its follow-on.
This was followed in detail by Hawking 1975 (open access via Project Euclid) <https://projecteuclid.org/journals/communications-in-mathema...> where the most relevant bit surrounds eqns (2.27-28) and there is nothing wrong with talking about signed "contributions to the probability flux into the collapsing body" (as opposed to identifying those contributions as particles).
Hawking himself wrote simpler pop-sci explanations in a number of places, including his book, where a reader would not be expected to understand how canonicalizations of wave functions in other than position space and directly-measured particles differ. However none of those works is the equivalent of the brief "explosions?" letter and its follow-on.