I havent a clue, but this sounds like a very interesting side effect. I'd suggest it's something to do with the fading of the latent image coupled with the build up of fog. The latent image somehow masks the negative so that the fog "fills in" the unexposed areas, while the original latent image fades away, so you're left with a positive image. The flaw in that logic is that I'm not sure why the original exposure would fade away while fog would be retained. XP1 was cutting edge technology for it's day, so I doubt they could have known the sort of long term storage problems it could have had, maybe this was a product feature we never knew about
I'd be interested to hear from someone who actually has some idea what they were talking about, very interesting stuff.