https://audio3.redcircle.com/episodes/371b280b-3467-4771-8d57-a776e96e6be7/stream.mp3?_=1
Ever start telling a story as a joke and it gets out of hand? People believe it no matter how much you swear you made it up and try to destroy your life? No, just Joseph Matheny? This week we tackle Ong’s Hat, the internets first honest to goodness hoax that took on a life of its own and to this day has people believing it is all true. They also believe the man claiming responsibility is just a government shill planted to throw us off the truth. And the story has everything: Weird religious cults, quantum physics, dimensional travel, hidden laboratories, luxurious silk top hats, carpet salesmen… We are banging on all cylinders! All that and more this week on the podcast that knows a thing or two about other dimensions… at least the Lower 4th Dimension… Hysteria 51!
LINK TO SHOW
Ep. 4 Behind the Scenes of the Incident at Ong’s Hat Episode 4
APPEARANCE
ZOOM OPTION Holly Elsdon- Portals, Otherworlds, and the Legend of Ong’s Hat
Time & Location
18 Feb, 16:00
Todmorden, Todmorden, UK
About the event
With special guest Joseph Matheny joining us via Zoom from the US! He has also kindly agreed to answer questions during the post-talk discussion.
Drawing parallels from folklore and early accounts of Otherworld experiences, Holly will be expanding on the case of ‘Ong’s Hat’: did a bizarre confluence of esoteric spirituality and cutting-edge quantum science find a portal to another dimension in the New Jersey Pine Barrens? Or was this merely ‘the first internet conspiracy’ and a model for future Alternate Reality Games? How did the story start, and how did the process of trans-media storytelling end up having serious ‘real-world’ repercussions? A must for anyone curious after listening to the recent Radio 4 drama based on this legend!
The Zoom link will be emailed 1 hour prior to the talk.
In this video were going to jump down the rabbit hole of the worlds first internet conspiracy theory and what happens when the actual creator of the hoax comes forward and admits that its just that. A big fat hoax.
Did Scientists In Ong’s Hat, NJ, Burrow Into Another Dimension?
Near where New Jersey Route 72 intersects with Route 70, there’s little left to mark what was once a small town called Ong’s Hat – but it was, in fact, really there. You can find evidence of its history in things like a local street called Ong’s Hat Road.
Depending on who you ask, it may have once been a bustling town, or nothing more than a stopover point for a farmer with the surname Ong who was transporting goods from Little Egg Harbor to Burlington. Midway between, the farmer built a hut where he could spend the night, and over time, Ong’s Hut became Ong’s Hat.
Whatever the case may be, the town (if ever was one) is no longer there, but it left its mark. In fact, there’s an online conspiracy theory suggesting the town is gone because it’s in another dimension. But if that’s not the case, where did the story come from?
The answer lies in a sort of alternate reality game (ARG) or a work of meta-fiction created by Joseph Matheny, among others, on early BBS sites and other places during the internet’s early years. The story suggested that some Princeton scientists working in Ong’s Hat had found a way to reach another dimension and, ultimately, took themselves and their studies to this alternate Earth. Alternatively, the government wiped them out to keep their discoveries quiet.
If it is, in fact, widely known that this story of inter-dimensional scientists is fiction, why would people still believe it? Because, according to conspiracy theorists, its creators supposedly had to pretend it was fiction in order to protect themselves from the government.
Ong’s Hat — not the ghost town in New Jersey but the fictional town-story overlaid on it by Joseph Matheny and later collaborators/followers — isn’t a place, though it’s certainly tied to one. Rather, it’s a way of experiencing a place: once again we’re recasting supposed discrete form and substance as modes of relation. Understanding story-system, meaning-system, ideological system, etc. as perceptual filters, you might be better able to imagine how they stack and interact, and how they seem to alter experiences deeply but not so predictably and not at all consistently.
Ong’s Hat doesn’t need to make sense, only to perturb sense — it’s ‘true’ in the way any filtering functioning is ‘true’: it does what it does to how you see. It un-senses you.
Seeing the transmedia project in this way we can avoid the twin traps of (1) reducing it to ‘just’ a game/story and (2) treating it like a set of fact-claims. ‘You determine your own level of involvement.’ As with so many conspiracy theories (not only explicitly, intentionally fictional ones), the fiction offers entry to a feedback loop between new/fictional thought, new/provisional belief, and new/exploratory action. All three arcs of the circle might be termed ‘generative’ — creative. Fiction, provision, exploration.
In the 1980s, a writer and transmedia artist called Joseph Wayne Matheny, who was born on Christmas Eve in the early sixties, wrote The Incunabula Papers, a tale that follows a series of narratives about time travel, and tells the story of a gateway to a parallel dimension at Ong’s Hat. When Matheny stated that the books were mere fiction, many saw these denials as evidence of government intervention and suppression, and they continue to this day to accept the gateway as fact, despite the improbability of a door to another world.
The truth of Ong’s Hat will probably never be known, and its rise and fall – if it ever rose and fell – is lost to the decades that have wiped the town from today’s maps.
P. Emerson Williams is a multi-media artist who has a hard time separating music, art, writing, and video. More people listen to the sounds of P. Emerson Williams every day than realize it, for much of it is embedded in extensive associated and pseudonymous projects past, present, and ongoing. P. Emerson Williams is an artist and illustrator whose work takes shape in physical and digital media, and his passion is for embodying mythic, melding visual and sonic art with narrative form. His singular touch takes projects spanning physical and digital media, genres, and modes of performance into strange realms.
You may also recognize Peter’s name from past projects with me, such asThe Incunabula Papers- Platinum 20th Anniversary Audio Book Edition, editing and playing a role as Milfred Connely, shortwave conspiracy researcher extraordinaire. And who can forget Peter’s role as Ralph in Xen: The Zen of the Other audio-drama, as well as his production contributions to these projects and contributions to some of my past projects like Greylodge.
There is some speculation if BTS is some adjacent lead-in for an ARG or a treasure hunt for, say, The Liminal Trilogy. What would be the purpose of that? This and one more non-fiction series coming out later this year is my farewell to the OH subject. Besides, if I was going to do an ARG, I’d probably make it far too large and complicated with a very real payoff. Who has the time and attention span for that?
Sarah Larsen, a yoga instructor, and her friend Charlie Brill went in search of Ong’s Hat, a fabled gateway to another dimension. Now Sarah is missing, and maybe this urban legend isn’t a legend at all…
Cast: Charlie – Corey Brill Sarah – Avital Ash Rodney Ascher – Himself Det. Stecco – James Bacon Casey – Hayley Taylor Ringo – Benjamin Williams Kit – Randall Keller Denny Unger – Himself Joseph Matheny – Himself Newscasters: Elizabeth Saydah, Dean Wendt
Created and Produced by Jon Frechette and Todd Luoto Inspired by Ong’s Hat: The Beginning by Joseph Matheny Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Jon Frechette, Chris Zabriskie, Anthéne, Macrogramma (under Creative Commons) Editing and Sound Design – Jon Frechette Additional Editing – Brandon Kotfila and Greg Myers Special Thanks – Ben Fineman
Written and Directed by Jon Frechette Executive Producer – John Scott Dryden
“Ong’s Hat Survivors Interview” courtesy of Joseph Matheny Visit thegardenofforkedpaths.com and josephmatheny.com
