I have finished building the final bundle of audio interviews, original notes that inspired the conversations that make up the recordings, and a collection of images. Polypores provided the soundtrack, and it’s divine.
This work started as an idea for a book, for which I wrote the first draft. However, upon reflection, it needed more. So I sat on it for a while and then asked Sequoyah if he’d like to help me expand the vision. He agreed, and I think you’ll like what we did.
I will transcribe the audio in a print/digital book version to follow the audiobook/notes combo.
As it stands today, there will be three versions of this work.
An audio work with accompanying digital notes to be experienced separately. This is to be considered the primary work.
An audio-only version.
A print/eBook version.
The notes are not a transcription of the conversation. If I can suggest, the best way to experience this work is to listen to the conversations and then read the notes, which include links, so you may follow up with the ideas I’m trying to highlight. Think of it as a hybrid, extended storytelling session and accompanying research manual. The audio clocks in at over 14 hours, and the linked notes are over 28,000 words, so you will get your money’s worth.
Expect more information on purchasing these versions to be released in 2025, starting in February. I will notify everyone via this Substack, social media, and my website.
Respond to this message if you are a press person seeking a review copy.
On a crisp October morning in 1926, a strange and mysterious pit appeared overnight in the heart of the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. At nearly fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep, its eerie precision and lack of explanation sparked wild theories. Could it be a gateway to another dimension? Was it the result of secret government experiments? Or perhaps something even more unexplainable? Join us as we dive into the chilling history of the Ong’s Hat Mystery, a case that combines strange scientific phenomena, folklore, and conspiracy theories. From vanishing people to strange humming sounds, this eerie tale has captivated generations. What secrets still lie hidden in the Pine Barrens? Watch now and uncover the truth behind this haunting enigma!
Introduction
Ong’s Hat stands as one of the earliest and most enduring Internet-based secret history conspiracy theories, often recognized as the first Alternate Reality Game (ARG). Originating in the late 1980s, it evolved into a sprawling piece of collaborative fiction blending speculative science, metaphysics, and transmedia storytelling. Created by Joseph Matheny and several collaborators, the narrative blurred the lines between myth, conspiracy theory, and science fiction, laying the groundwork for modern ARGs and Internet-based storytelling.
Origins in Digital Culture
The Ong’s Hat story was born from early digital and analog communication platforms, including bulletin board systems (BBS), mail art networks, faxlore, and zines. These channels allowed the creators to weave a narrative that appeared both ancient and cutting-edge. Initially, it functioned as a memetic experiment—a participatory fiction to see how far an embedded myth could spread.
As technology evolved, so did the means of dissemination. By the 1990s, Ong’s Hat had infiltrated print media, radio broadcasts, television segments, CD-ROMs, and eventually the Internet itself. It was an experiment in transmedia storytelling before the term was coined—a work of interactive myth-making designed to thrive in digital culture.
GamesTM magazine later observed that “Ong’s Hat was more of an experiment in transmedia storytelling than what we would now consider to be an ARG, but its DNA—the concept of telling a story across various platforms and new media—is evident in every alternate reality game that came after.”
The Story: A Quantum Conspiracy
At the heart of the Ong’s Hat narrative is a series of conspiracy theories involving rogue Princeton scientists, secret quantum experiments, and interdimensional travel. According to the mythos, renegade researchers specializing in quantum physics and chaos theory fled Princeton after controversial experiments. They sought refuge deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, settling in the ghost town of Ong’s Hat—a place shrouded in local mystery long before the story emerged.
In this secret laboratory, the researchers allegedly developed The Egg, a device resembling a sensory deprivation chamber. Designed to isolate and amplify consciousness, The Egg was said to manipulate quantum reality itself. During one pivotal experiment, the machine vanished—along with its human occupant—only to return minutes later. The test subject described visiting a version of Earth free of human life, suggesting that they had traveled to another dimension.
As military threats closed in, the researchers gradually moved their entire ashram to this parallel Earth, leaving behind only the abandoned research site and an enigmatic dimensional gateway.
Related Cultural Threads
The themes within Ong’s Hat reflect long-standing fascinations in popular culture, from “Many Worlds” quantum theory to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider sparking speculative fears of dimensional breaches. Its narrative structure also parallels the John Titor time-travel hoax, which captivated Internet forums in the early 2000s. Both stories leverage pseudo-science, plausible deniability, and immersive fiction to create deeply engaging mythologies.
Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) and geocaching also echo Ong’s Hat’s participatory aspects, emphasizing exploration, discovery, and hidden knowledge. Players of modern ARGs like The Beast (linked to A.I.: Artificial Intelligence) and Halo’s I Love Bees owe a creative debt to the trailblazing interactivity of the Ong’s Hat project.
A Deliberate Fiction or Something More?
While Joseph Matheny has consistently framed The Incunabula Papers: Ong’s Hat and Other Gateways to New Dimensions as fiction, many still believe the story contains hidden truths. Matheny acknowledged that the project was designed as an “open-ended narrative,” deliberately leaving clues and gaps for curious minds to fill. His denials only fueled speculation, with some claiming he was under government surveillance or involved in a covert cover-up operation.
The creators established strict rules early on, forbidding the project from becoming a recruitment tool for cults or extremist movements. Despite these precautions, the blend of science, mysticism, and conspiracy has proven irresistible to seekers of alternate realities, ensuring the story’s viral spread.
Legacy and Cultural Impact
The Ong’s Hat experiment set a precedent for interactive storytelling in the digital age. It anticipated the rise of ARGs and immersive transmedia campaigns that now dominate entertainment marketing. Even toy companies like Lego adapted elements of the narrative for promotional campaigns, including the Canadian TV series Galidor in 2002.
By embracing collective myth-making, transmedia storytelling, and interactive fiction, Ong’s Hat became more than a conspiracy theory—it became a new form of participatory art. Its influence lingers in today’s digital culture, where lines between fiction and reality remain more blurred than ever.
Whether viewed as Internet folklore, digital anthropology, or a precursor to the modern ARG genre, Ong’s Hat endures as a landmark in the evolving landscape of online myth-making and immersive narrative design. It remains a living mystery—an open-source mythology designed for an age where stories are no longer simply told but experienced, shared, and believed.
Urban Legend: The Mystery of Ong’s Hat (Location)
Main Article: Ong’s Hat
The town of Ong’s Hat has become the centerpiece of an enduring urban legend steeped in conspiracy theories and speculative fiction. From the 1980s onward, stories circulated claiming that a group of rogue scientists in the remote New Jersey Pine Barrens succeeded in opening a portal to a parallel dimension from a secret research site hidden within the town’s borders.
Origins of the Legend
The tale took root in Joseph Matheny’s cult-favorite book, The Incunabula Papers: Ong’s Hat and Other Gateways to New Dimensions. Written in a deeply immersive, first-person style, the narrative follows an investigative journalist unraveling a bizarre conspiracy centered on Ong’s Hat. Matheny’s vivid, layered storytelling blends fringe science, alternate realities, and secret government projects, giving the book a documentary-like authenticity.
Fact or Fiction?
Although Matheny always intended The Incunabula Papers as a work of fiction and an early experiment in interactive storytelling, its realism sparked something far greater than he anticipated. Many readers became convinced that the events described were real, interpreting the book as leaked evidence of a government cover-up involving clandestine experiments in quantum physics and dimensional travel.
Matheny’s repeated denials that the story was factual only deepened the conspiracy theories. Some enthusiasts argued that his statements were themselves part of a calculated disinformation campaign, possibly enforced by government agencies eager to suppress the “truth.”
Cultural Impact
The legend of Ong’s Hat has since become a touchstone in the realm of conspiracy folklore and alternate reality gaming (ARG). It’s frequently cited as one of the first internet-based ARGs, blurring the line between fiction and reality in a way that would inspire countless digital storytelling projects in the years to follow.
Whether viewed as a masterful narrative experiment or a legitimate conspiracy theory, Ong’s Hat continues to intrigue and inspire those fascinated by secret histories, parallel universes, and the mysteries lurking at the edges of perception.
Explore the enigmatic tale of the Ong’s Hat conspiracy, a story that blurs the line between reality and myth. Delve into a narrative filled with secret experiments, mystical dimensions, and hidden histories.
I’m excited to announce another addition to our COMPLEAT project.
The audiobook will feature music, sounds, and atmosphere by the multi-talented Polypores (aka Stephen James Buckley). I love Polypores’ music and soundscapes and am excited that they will provide our atmospheres.
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.
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.
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…
In Cronenberg’s cinematic interpretation of Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” Peter Weller’s Bill Lee character is confronted by Hank with pages of reports he cannot remember writing. Bill Lee drawls laconically, “I never saw these pages before. I truly do suspect some colossal con.”
I echo that sentiment. A podcast with a voice that appears to be mine has been released. However, I have no memory of ever being involved in this podcast. Mind control? Sorcery? Technical chicanery? You be the judge. Happy Samhain, Blessed Be.
About this Episode
Since October 2023, Vayse HQ has been regularly receiving mysterious, confusing and unsettling emails, seemingly from all over the world, all hinting towards the same impossible conclusion.
In this episode the Vayse boys launch an investigation into where these weird communications might be coming from and who might be behind them with a little help and a lot of expertise from some familiar and very welcome faces: Douglas Batchelor, Darragh Mason, Sequoyah Kennedy, Joseph Matheny, Stephanie Quick and AP Strange. The deeper they dig, the more they find themselves falling down rabbit holes within rabbit holes within rabbit holes… (Recorded October 2024)
