Other commentators have suggested that the children may have been aliens, or inhabitants of a world beneath the Earth. In a 1996 article published in the magazine "Analog", astronomer Duncan Lunan hypothesised that the children were accidentally transported to Woolpit from their home planet as the result of a "matter transmitter" malfunction. Lunan suggests that the planet from which the children were expelled may be trapped in synchronous orbit around its sun, presenting the conditions for life only in a narrow twilight zone between a fiercely hot surface and a frozen dark side. He explains the children's green colouration as a side effect of consuming the genetically modified alien plants eaten by the planet's inhabitants.