So… this was in the mailbox of our little bakery this morning… other than it being conspiracy theory, I have no idea what I’m looking at. I don’t even know if this is the right order for the pages…
byu/VMey inWTF

I think the interview is the new art form. – Jim Morrison

This work was initially planned as an ordinary “book.” However, I’ve grown tired of that outdated description of a unit of measure. “The book” doesn’t mean the same thing in the digital information age that it once did. The concept of this project outgrew and then demanded to be represented in a way that fit the amorphous form of the ideas and concepts within. So, I recruited the help of a friend that I knew had a grasp of what I was trying to convey, and we now have the interdisciplinary form that this kind of project requires. The project, a living concept, approves of this new skin.

Working from the rough draft of the original book I had planned, and with the help of Sequoyah Kennedy, co-host and producer of the Nonsense Bazaar podcast, we have grown the ideas into the complete forms they wished to inhabit.

Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT will be a multi-chapter audiobook of conversations between Sequoyah and me about essential periods in my life during the lead-up to and development of the Ong’s Hat hypersigil and my interaction with various disembodied intelligences that aided in that work.

The audiobook will feature music, sounds, and atmosphere by the multi-talented Polypores (aka Stephen James Buckley). Most of their music is at polypores.bandcamp.com, but the latest album is here: https://polypores-cis.bandcamp.com/album/there-are-other-worlds. On Twitter as @stephenjbuckley and Instagram as @sjbuckers Youtube as @polyporeshq

Each chapter will include fully linked and notated digital documents comprised of the original notes we were working off of. For the print version, we will consist of transcriptions of those conversations with the notes included and endnotes, including the URLs for reference. I will also include relevant photos, diagrams, and copies of other pertinent documents. You could think of it as an interdisciplinary scrapbook covering a particular project, period of gestation, and the adjacent people, places, and things.

We are still on schedule to deliver this in early 2025. I think this version will be more inclusive and representative of the work and ideas discussed therein.

Announcement information and update on my Substack.

A faithful reissue of the Hyperborean Skateboarding Association Protective Sigil Deck

(Ong’s Hat fans will get this wildly inside joke provided by the roasters of the official coffee of the Institute for Chaos Studies)

• Description

Redshift and the Hyperborean Skateboarding Association have collaborated to re-create the deck designed by Teofila herself and used on Java2 by the teenagers of the first generation travelers. These decks faithfully reproduce the correct sigil sequence to provide maximum protection from invisible beings. The only safe way to skate the abandoned monuments on Earth2. Each deck comes with an apotropaic amulet made from authentic Java2 obsidian.

We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid…we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function…zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coal-tars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling…this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others…

Perhaps one of the most famous stories of portals being opened is that of a place called Ong’s Hat. The setting for this particular tale is the ghost town of Ong’s Hat, merely a speck on the map and one of the numerous abandoned old villages scattered throughout the remote Pine Barrens of the U.S. state of New Jersey. Purportedly getting its name from a man named Ong, who once threw up his fancy silk hat in frustration when the jealous lover of a woman he was having an affair with stomped on it, after which it became stuck on a pine branch, the town supposedly started as a single hut. By the 1860s, the village had apparently grown into quite a lively town known for bootlegging and supplying booze to the outlying areas. However, the town declined dramatically in the following years, and by the 1930s was all but abandoned, although it still showed up on maps; in modern days it is merely feral, weed-choked ruins, crumbling buildings, and empty lots.

The small, rural town would perhaps have forever remained an obscure backwater ghost town if not for a curious book called Ong’s Hat: The Beginning, which was written by Joseph Matheny and published in 2002, although the tales go back farther than that. The book claims that in 1978 a man by the name of Wali Fard settled in the New Jersey Pine Barrens after purchasing 200 acres there. Fard, who was a member of the secretive cult the Moorish Orthodox Church of America, had allegedly just returned from traveling the world studying various philosophies, magical practices and spiritualist techniques in such exotic locales as India, Persia, and Afghanistan, and he would then join another cult called the Moorish Science Ashram. He was apparently an eccentric man, to say the least, moving onto the property with a ragtag group composed of some runaway boys and two lesbian anarchists.

Once relocating to New Jersey, the book claims that Fard went about spreading the teachings of his sect and managing to draw about him quite a number of followers. Among this motley group of misfits, cultists, weirdos, and general oddballs were two scientists by the names of Frank and Althea Dobbs, who were brother and sister and had their own bizarre history, as they had been apparently raised within a UFO-worshipping commune run by their father in the badlands of Texas. The two had been doing research at Princeton on something they referred to as “cognitive chaos,” which is quite complex but basically entailed utilizing untapped parts of the brain to unlock vast human potential in the form of a wide variety of powers such as ESP, telepathy, curing diseases, conscious control of autonomic functions, and even halting the aging process, but they had earned the ire of their peers for their far-out fringe theories and been kicked out for what the university called “seditious nonsense.”  It seems that the two siblings had never really been accepted in the mainstream or in academia, but with Fard, they found themselves among outcast kindred spirits willing to listen to them.

As soon as they migrated to the remote Pine Barrens, Frank and Althea supposedly immediately went about creating a makeshift lab in an abandoned barn, from which they could continue their work unfettered by the harsh criticism they had been subjected to before, with a blank check to do whatever they wanted. So intrigued with their work was Fard and his cult that they subsequently established the “Institute of Chaos Studies” based on it, and this enabled the two scientists to have the funding and equipment that they needed to make progress the likes of which they had never seen before, as well as attracting two more local fringe scientists named Harold Acton and Martine Kallikak to help them. Among their many bizarre experiments were using various psychedelic drugs in an attempt to unlock mind powers, monitoring brain activity, and using electrical stimulation to try and manipulate the brain waves to produce the abilities they were convinced were lurking untapped within the mind.

These experiments made use of an array of odd machines and devices, all slapped together and unorthodox to say the least. Among these was a device they called “The Egg,” which was supposedly more or less a modified sensory deprivation chamber hooked up to computers and with various electrodes attached to a human subject to measure physiological responses, as well as a helmet equipped with “brain wave manipulators.” Apparently there were several versions of the machine built, which showed some promise in allegedly providing better control of autonomous body functions and bestowing various other powers such as inner heat, enhanced healing, and remission of sickness. However, it wasn’t until the 4th iteration of the device that things allegedly got truly bizarre.

By the third generation of the egg they had already been experimenting with trying to descend consciousness down to the quantum level, which they believed would enable actual travel to parallel dimensions, but they had not been successful. With the 4th generation machine, they further refined the process and tested it on one of the runaways, who was nicknamed Kit. During the test, the machine purportedly completely vanished before everyone’s eyes, only to reappear 7 minutes later with a startled but excited Kit, who claimed that he had been briefly transported to another dimension. The scientists were astounded by this, and called the portal they had apparently opened “The Gate.” They purportedly made several more successful jumps to this alternate reality, which was described as having an abundance of plant life and water, but no humans.

To add to all of this weirdness, Ong’s Hat was supposedly eventually threatened with a leak of dangerous nuclear material from nearby Fort Dix. In response, the residents began to use The Gate to flee to the parallel dimension, where they intended to stay and reestablish their town. According to the tale, the government found out about the experiments and the capabilities of the machine, which prompted them to storm the compound in a raid that killed several people there who were in the process of jumping over. The writer of the accounts, Joseph Matheny, apparently claimed to have found documents outlining these events and even interviewed one of the scientists involved with the creation of The Gate, which he had then posted online and later made into his book, but there has never been any corroboration that these alleged documents ever existed at all. Making matters further muddied is that Matheny has been rather vague on whether any of it was intended as fact, fiction, or a fusion of both.

Considering its remarkably dramatic nature, a lack of any evidence at all, and the sci-fi feel to the whole story, there are many who believe that this is all just that; science fiction that was picked up by the Internet, elaborated upon, and turned into a big conspiracy hoax. The story first started making the rounds in the 1980s, so it is also thought that it may have been an early attempt to create an alternate reality game (ARG), a work of transmedia storytelling across platforms, and indeed it eventually spread from Internet bulletin board systems to CD-ROM and DVD mediums, or it may have been a sort of memetic experiment to see how memes spread and how far. The main idea now is that it is all most certainly fiction that was picked up and made into a pseudo-documentary style of book, although originally created by who or for what purposes remains unclear.

However, despite the fact that the tale of Ong’s Hat is mostly regarded as fiction and urban legend, there are still those who think that it is in fact a reality, or at least based on reality, that has perhaps been made to merely look like a hoax to protect those behind its release to the public or to keep people from actually believing any of it. Whatever the case may be, it is certainly a weird story, and Ong’s Hat continues to fuel conspiracy theories and is occasionally brought up as a potentially real case of interdimensional travel. Whether any of it really happened or not, it certainly is an interesting tale and a fascinating glimpse of how urban Internet legends are born and propagated.

Source: https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2024/10/Strange-Tales-of-People-Who-Built-Portals-to-Other-Dimensions/

Chapter 1: The Birth of a Legend
In the early 1990s, the advent of technology shrank the world, allowing individuals to connect and share vast amounts of information. This newfound access opened doors to unique experiences that many had never encountered before. Among these emerging narratives was the Ong’s Hat tale, a captivating blend of reality, virtual worlds, and fiction that drew audiences into its web.

LINK:  https://johnburnsonline.com/mysterious-ongs-hat-internet-conspiracy.html

See this link for background on this second-hand story: https://josephmatheny.com/2019/03/18/corrections-to-brian-dunnings-skeptoid-podcast-about-ongs-hat/

Heute werden wir uns tief in ein Kaninchenloch mit einigen wirklich unerwarteten Wendungen begeben. Es begann als urbane Legende, von der Sie nur erfahren konnten, wenn Sie bestimmte Mailorder-Newsletter abonniert hatten. Es wuchs und wurde zu einer lokalen Legende, die sich um einen Ort namens Ong’s Hat, New Jersey drehte, den Schauplatz der in der Legende beschriebenen umwerfenden Ereignisse. Wir reisen nicht nur in diesen tiefgrünen Wald, sondern noch viel weiter; vielleicht sogar in eine andere Dimension. Dies ist die Geschichte einer Geschichte, von der Sie vielleicht eine oder beide gehört haben. Und wenn nicht, dann bereiten Sie sich auf ein Erzählerlebnis vor, wie Sie es noch nie zuvor gehört haben.

Die Geschichte besagt, dass sich Ende der 1970er Jahre auf 200 Morgen Land in den Pine Barrens in New Jersey, einer flachen, dicht bewaldeten Küstenebene, an einem Ort namens Ong’s Hat eine Kommune gründete. Die Kommune hieß Moorish Science Ashram und wurde von Intellektuellen, Spiritualisten, Schriftstellern, Musikern und Aktivisten besucht. Sie praktizierten Transzendentalismus und Psychopharmakologie und schrieben und sprachen über die Grenzen von Wissenschaft und Spiritualismus. Einige der dort lebenden Wissenschaftler begannen, diese Ideen ernster zu nehmen und gründeten ein Labor, das sie ICS nannten, oder Institute for Chaos Studies. Sie experimentierten mit der Chaostheorie, mit der Zeit, mit psychedelischen Drogen und mit der Quantenmechanik.

Was dann geschah, brachte die Geschichte an die Öffentlichkeit. Die ICS hatten eine Art Kapsel gebaut, die sie Ei nannten. Eine Person wurde darin eingeschlossen, trug einen Helm voller Sensoren und sah auf einem Computerbildschirm Animationen, die sie in einen seltsamen Bewusstseinszustand versetzen sollten. Schließlich unternahm einer der ursprünglichen Bewohner des Ashrams – ein Ausreißer namens Kit – einmal eine Reise in dem Ei. Das gesamte Gerät verschwand. Als es ein paar Minuten später wieder auftauchte, berichtete Kit, er sei in eine andere Welt in einer anderen Dimension transportiert worden. Bald hatten viele der Wissenschaftler und anderen Bewohner die Reise angetreten. Und allmählich wurden ihre Zahlen weniger. Die ICS nutzten das Ei, um sich und ihr gesamtes Unternehmen in diese andere Welt zu transportieren – wo sie vermutlich bis heute bleiben und nur gelegentlich im Ei wieder auftauchen, um frische Vorräte zu holen. Was vom Ashram übrig blieb, verfiel, und heute ist nichts mehr übrig als Wald.

Dem, was im Internet verfügbar ist, zufolge scheint der Schriftsteller Joseph Matheny der erste gewesen zu sein, der die Ereignisse in Ong’s Hat untersuchte und ein Buch mit dem Titel Ong’s Hat: The Beginning veröffentlichte . Es gelang ihm, ziemlich viel zu recherchieren, und er nahm sogar ein Audio-Interview mit zwei jungen Männern auf, die in dem Ashram aufgewachsen waren. Matheny hatte auch eine Broschüre für das ICS ausgegraben, mit dem Titel Ong’s Hat: Gateway to the Dimensions , in der das gesamte Experiment mit dem Ei dargelegt wurde. Matheny machte die Broschüre per Postversand verfügbar, aber um den Ball ins Rollen zu bringen, bevor irgendjemand davon gehört hatte, steckte er sie zunächst in die Umschläge von Leuten, die andere ähnliche Newsletter abonniert hatten. Als diese begannen, die Broschüre viral zu verbreiten, erfuhren auch andere Leute davon. Als dann Computer-Bulletinboards diese auf den Rückseiten von Zeitschriften veröffentlichten Newsletter ablösten, lud Matheny seine Story dort hoch, wo mehr Leute sie finden und teilen konnten. Als dann das Internet aufkam, stellte er es auch dort online, und irgendwann in diesem Prozess erreichte die Geschichte von Ong’s Hat eine kritische Masse und vermarktete sich von selbst. Das Interesse begann sich auszubreiten. Bezirksämter in New Jersey erhielten Anfragen, wo die Leute diesen Ort finden könnten. In bestimmten Gemeinden erlangte er eine Art kleinen Kultstatus.

In den 2000er Jahren gab es nicht nur tatsächlich Wanderer, die auf den Pfaden der Pine Barrens nach Ongs Hut suchten, sondern auch die Menge an Online-Inhalten über das ICS-Experiment war so groß geworden, mit so vielen Bezügen zu legitimen Namen, Büchern und Orten, dass nur wenige, die es verfolgten, daran zweifelten, dass tatsächlich eine der außergewöhnlichsten Schwellen in der Geschichte der Menschheit überschritten worden war.

Aber wenn man innehält und über all das aus der Perspektive einer Untersuchung im Stil von Skeptoid nachdenkt, drängt sich eine offensichtliche Frage auf. Was war die Quelle dieser erstaunlichen Geschichte und woher hatte Joseph Matheny all seine Informationen darüber ?