Inconsistent Histories

I have been reading Leonard Susskind's The black Hole Wars and intend to do a book review, but meanwhile, I have gotten to the point where he presents his principle of "Black Hole Complementarity." This is a riff on Bohr's Complemetarity Principle which maintains that the apparently mutually contradictictory wave and particle pictures of matter describe complementary aspects of a reality not fully captured by either. Ask an electron a "wave question", and you get a wave type answer, ask it a "particle question" and you get a particle answer.

For black holes, the contrasting pictures are these: If you lower a probe (Julio, say) and stop it very close to the surface of the black hole, he sees a hellishly seething bath of Hawking radiation. I need to mention at this point that although the BH looks very cold to an outside observer, that is just due to the huge gravitational red shift. Julio's beer can, though, falls freely through the horizon and finds the trip quite uneventfully radiation free, at least until it gets to the overwhelming tidal forces closer to singularity at the center of the BH. So what does the outside observer see? He sees the beer can fall toward the horizon but never reach it, being annihilated and having his energy and bits become part of the seething bath of Hawking radiation.

The complementary elements are the inconsistent histories of the beer can - does it fall through the horizon untouched (the beer can view) or is it annihilated before it reaches the horizon? These seem utterly incompatible, but it appears that no experimental test can discriminate between them. This is a bit shocking.