  Through an illuminating thought experiment we demonstrate that the
nonsingular "continued collapse" picture of a black hole is the only consistent
and physical one. We provide a class exact solutions on the boundary of the
space of physical configurations. This will show that all the other known exact
solutions are unphysical near the surface of the event horizon or in the
interior. This will have important consequences for the no-hair conjecture and
the kinds of persistent fields that can emerge from a black hole as well as the
evolution during collisions and near grazing events. The interior of these
holes are characterized by a limiting degenerate metric and these regions tend
to well defined volumes and radii in contrast with what is inferred from
singular solutions. Surprisingly, these depend on past history and not simply
the mass or external fields of the body. It is shown that there is often a well
defined "hidden" flat background that can be used to equivalently reformulate
GR in terms of a classical nonlinear gravity field and gives local conservation
laws. This has implications for unification efforts and numerical approaches to
handle the degenerate metric regions reminiscent of the Rankine-Hugoniot
conditions. Possible consistency problems with current numerical approaches to
black hole dynamics are discussed.
