Deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a group of disgraced scientists and counter culturists gathered to do tests on a mysterious object called The Egg. And they would make a startling discovery: a way to travel to parallel worlds. This includes a parallel Earth devoid of humans. Realizing governments and others would want this technology, the scientist decided to move to this other world mostly permanently. Or at least, that’s what the books Incunabula: A Catalog of Rare Books, Manuscripts & Curiosa, Conspiracy Theory, Frontier Science & Alternative Worlds says, and a book wouldn’t lie, would it? Okay, maybe they would. See, Ong’s Hat was one of the first internet fiction projects, an ARG before we even got close to creating their term. Created by Joseph Matheny, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Nick Herbert, and James Koehnline in the 1980s, the fist version of the story would appear in Edge Detector magazine. But after this, the group would spread this story in numerous ways, from leaving photocopied versions of the original article in coffee shops, to mail-order zines and even in-character radio show appearances. However, with the birth of the internet the project would only grow in scope. Not only did it allow the creators to tell the story in new ways via message boards, fake blogs, and even making emails and homepages for the story’s various characters. It also led to the project taking on a mind of its own, to the point that Ong’s Hat became a frequent talking point of real conspiracy theorists and it wasn’t uncommon to see web users cite the books as factual rather than fictional. Thus, after having people literally camping out on his lawn demanding secrets to inter-dimensional travel, Joseph Matheny ended the project and came clean about the whole thing in 2001. Ong’s Hat is a crucial part of internet history as not only is it a fun art project, the fact that the story, despite its weirdness, was able to embed itself in actual conspiracy lore foreshadowed our modern misinformation problem, years before anyone would talk about it. It is enough to make you want to move to the alternative-reality pine barrens. Deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a group of disgraced scientists and counterculturalists gathered around a mysterious object called The Egg, and discovered a way to travel to parallel worlds, including a version of Earth entirely devoid of humans. Realizing what governments would do if they found out, they quietly relocated there. More or less permanently. Or at least, that’s what the book Incunabula: A Catalog of Rare Books, Manuscripts & Curiosa says. And a book wouldn’t lie. Well. Ong’s Hat is one of the earliest ARGs ever made. created by Joseph Matheny, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Nick Herbert, and James Koehnline, in the 1980s, long before anyone had a word for what they were doing. The first version of the story appeared in a magazine called Edge Detector. From there it spread through photocopied articles left in coffee shops, mail-order zines, and radio appearances where the creators would pretend to be people who were involved with, or saw the fallout of the things that happened at Ong’s Hat. Naturally, when the internet became a thing, the creators quickly leaned into this new medium, seeding the story on message boards, as well as making numerous fake blogs and webpages. But the audience that found it wasn’t treating it as fiction. Ong’s Hat quickly embedded itself in actual conspiracy theory circles. People cited Incunabula and the other Ong’s Hat books as actual facts, and started to include the Things quickly spiraled out of hand, to the point that Joseph Matheny had people literally camping on his lawn demanding the secrets to interdimensional travel. He called it quits in 2001, coming out and explaining the history of the project and making it clear the whole thing was just art, nothing more. #arg#internethistory#internetmysteries#weirdhistory#conspiracytiktok
That a group of renegade Princeton physicists and mystics, working in secret at Ong’s Hat, New Jersey, used chaos-theory and consciousness research to build a machine (the “Egg,” and later the “Gate”) that opened a doorway to parallel dimensions, that they escaped into one of those worlds, and that the story was suppressed rather than invented.
I had fun doing this interview. As I said when I announced that I was doing this interview, after deciding at the beginning of this year I would no longer do interviews, this will be my last interview I do. I made an exception this time because AJ and I had emailed a few years ago; he brought up my doing an interview, and I agreed. The Why Files team was very gracious and accommodated my schedule, so here is the result. I hope you enjoy it. Interviews have lost their luster for me, and god knows, you have plenty of examples of me blathering on. I wish you all well. –JM
Joseph Matheny invented something in 1989 that nobody had a name for yet. He called it a story. The internet called it the first alternate reality game. The Navy called him to ask how he did it. He turned them down.
Tonight he’s in the basement explaining how he built an early AI, game-mastered Robert Anton Wilson at Esalen, and why QAnon looks so familiar to him.
Some things are better understood when you know how the trick works.
Tonight he’s in the basement explaining how he built an early AI, game-mastered Robert Anton Wilson at Esalen, and why QAnon looks so familiar to him.
Some things are better understood when you know how the trick works.
“Reality is often less interesting than fiction.”
“I would not have said this 20 years ago, but I’m going to say this now: make sure there is a very clear line between reality and fiction in your work. Make sure that you don’t present something as a real thing. Like, you have to believe to a certain extent that what you’re about to read or watch is real, at least for the time that you’re experiencing it. But what you have to realize is—and I don’t know where this happened—in the last 20 years, especially with the Internet, a lot of people have lost the definition between reality and fiction.”
This is what Joseph Matheny, the salt and pepper beard-having mastermind behind Ong’s Hat, told me last year at some point during our 2-hour call. These words have been coming up to me ever since, not only because the blending of reality and fiction is a running motif in ARGs and pseudo-ARGs, but because I’d be hearing the same point being made, albeit in a different combination of words, with everyone I spoke with for this piece.[3]
For readers who’re not familiar with the name, Ong’s Hat is the Ur Alternative Reality Game. The real deal; the Spacewar! of ARGs. In the mid-to-late 80s, when the Internet as we know it was still in its bulletin board systems-clad diapers and ‘polygons’ weren’t even a thing (at least not outside garages where self-taught devs tinkered with their Macintoshes), Matheny, a software engineer-cum-LARPer, got the idea to do a fictional story based around a mysterious place called Ong’s Hat, located in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.
According to a mysterious brochure that started popping up in the late 80s called “Ong’s Hat: Gateway to the Dimensions,” – which, I imagine, is not unlike something scientologists were handing out back in the day – bespectacled scientists were joined by a group of mystic scholars, who discovered an alternative reality via a device called “the egg”.
“You have been searching for us without knowing it,” the pamphlet began, some ten-plus years before the same words would be uttered by Trinity, Neo’s personal, latex-clad White Rabbit. It claimed to know “you, your interests, deeds and desires, works and days” and where you hang your tighty whities.
It reads like Isaac Asimov high on couch syrup, if he were tasked with writing a Star Trek-inspired LARP. There are mentions of extremist Shiite revolutionary philosophy, lucid dreaming, exotic pharmacology, and some Sanskrit thrown in for good measure. At one point, it drops this: “Unlike Baudelaire who pleaded, “Anywhere! – so long as out of this world!” we knew where we were going. Ong’s Hat has indeed vanished from New Jersey, except for the hidden laboratory deep in the backwoods where the gate ‘exists.’”
While setting up a wide net of somewhat-connected puzzle pieces took a while before Ong’s Hat conspiracy-turned-ARG escaped the confines of dorm rooms and dim-lit cafes, Matheny was ready to mindfuck with self-proclaimed “eggheads” on a level unheard of since Orson Welles’ legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
According to a guy named David, who witnessed Ong’s Hat in its peak (as told to Gizmondo): “You kind of knew it was some kind of game, but there was this level of question that was left open. It would bleed into your life.”
Similar to contemporary ARGs, Matheny and his collaborators’ brainchild pulled in every existing medium at the time. Booklets (some sent all the way from Hong Kong, allegedly) to what would become the Internet. Hired actors who would phone you in the middle of the night after reaching a certain point in the puzzle. An AI-like bot created to direct the game, which, in a stranger than fiction manner, materialized as a G-Man-like persona that started taunting Matheny.
But more than the sum of its parts, it was this make-belief slowly bleeding into your life, immersion getting out of hand, then, which attracted me to Ong’s Hat. That there was a handful of like-minded individuals, crazy and idiosyncratic enough to pave the way for ARGs like The Blair Witch Project and Petscop, before the creepypastas and GameTheory’s MatPat—doing this for the thrill of it, all gas no brakes, to see how far the barely visible line separating reality and fiction can be stretched and bent before it snaps like a rubber band.
“I was actually trying to achieve the crossover between reality and fiction,” reasoned Matheny with academic-cum-mad scientist curiosity at the time. He told me how Greeks used to do it back in the day with theatre, entire audiences believing they were witnessing gods on that stage.[4]
It’s hard to say whether Matheny’s make-belief was too smart and convincing for its own good, or simply that the game’s participants happened to enjoy sporting hats made out of tinfoil a bit too much. It was an era of no disclaimers; a time before you could find any answers on Reddit, a time before Pizzagate, and nobody—even Matheny himself, making it all up as he moved along with Ong’s Hat—knew any better.
For him, it was a mere matter of “want[ing]to see what would happen”. To see how deep this paranormal rabbit hole could go and how far his followers were willing to roll along. But with no actual endgame in sight—no hands or message threads to guide you along — it was a matter of time before someone lost grasp of that thin liminal line between reality and fiction.
A B S T R A C T
Using ˇZiˇzek’s concept of ontological incompleteness, we theorise the touristic appeal of online
legend-tripping as derived from the fantasy of traversing reality’s uncharted horizons. While
online legends such as ‘the Backrooms’ invoke curiosity in suffering and the macabre, they
deviate from the sense of heritage, moral guardianship, and evidential integrity that characterise
physical dark tourism. Drawing upon an observational netnography of the ‘r/backrooms’ community
on Reddit, we unpack processes of temporal suspension, ‘good’ alienation, and transcendence
downward which enable online legend-tripping to function as a ‘para-terrestrial’ variant of dark
tourism. The importance of real-world referents recedes, giving way to subjective encounters with
the unknown. Obscene enjoyment displaces moral engagement, and participatory mythmaking
supplants the bureaucratisation and commoditisation of travel experiences.
You know, it is gratifying when you point out a very obvious (to you) hanging thread, and someone takes the time to follow it and, most importantly, has the capacity to comprehend it. Good job, lads.
The truth is out there… sometimes… maybe… well, Hine and Buckley just aren’t sure. UFOs, UAPs, Flying Saucers, Alien Spacecraft, whatever you think they are, you don’t know for sure – and if you think you do know for sure, it’s a sure sign you don’t.
What you do know for sure is that you are told a lot of different things about them by a lot of different people: abductees spinning stories of high strangeness, senators pressuring whistle-blowers for information in congress, devoutly religious authors telling tales of angels and demons, folklorists and scholars of comparative religion painting vivid pictures of ancient beings dressed up in the skin of Technicolor sci-fi nightmares… no-one agrees and everyone is out to prove that their interpretation is the right interpretation – but what does any of it actually mean?
In this episode Hine and Buckley don’t analyse the verisimilitude of the stories or the veracity of the storytellers but instead examine the discourse around the phenomena or more accurately the discourse around the discourse around UFOs. The mechanisms with which people might think about this topic and the reasons that they may think in that way.
The conversation around UFOs is big business, a lot of people making a lot of money – but who are these people and what happens to that money? Where did it all start? Was it Peter Levenda that stealthily laid the ground work over the last 50 years to shape the UFO movement as we know it today? Why would people lie about this stuff? Why should you believe some conspiracy theorist warning you of the terrible dangers of the existential crisis that UFOs pose anymore than you should trust some conspiracy theorist warning you of the terrible dangers of vaccines and their link to childhood autism?… and if the people who are trying to take control of the discourse are lying, overly-gullible or deluded, then is there really any truth out there at all? (recorded 23 April 2026)
