Ong’s Hat © Patrick Tappe/Shutterstock.com Tucked into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Ong’s Hat may be found on actual maps from the early days of the region. The small town finds naming on maps but most likely, it was merely the site where Ong (presumed a farmer) parked in a hut (Ong’s hut) on regular long journeys to and from market. As late as the 1930s, Ong’s Hat appeared on maps but nothing could be done to prove the place ever existed, save finding the ruins of one single hut in the middle of the forest.

It wasn’t until the 1980s when strange tales emerged on various bullet board services and magazines of conspiracy theorists that people thought about the place again. The publications detailed elaborate conspiracies involving mystics and scientists breaking through to another realm via Ong’s Hat. The tales arose from the novel “Incunabula Papers: Ong’s Hat and Other Gateways to New Dimensions.” Author Joseph Matheny probably didn’t anticipate his fictional tales would lead to theorists believing every word until the 2000s, seeking answers of the “truth.”

If you find one of the outdated maps from the 1930s or earlier, you may well be able to pop over to the ruins with your drone. Or visit Google and find the Ong’s Hat Parking area at the Batona Trail and hike out.

LINK: https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/article/7-famous-places-that-don-t-actually-exist/ss-AA1XgCi9

■Incunabula: Ong’s Hat

It all started with the emergence of a pamphlet, “Ongu’s Hut: Gateway to Multiple Dimensions, Full-Color Pamphlet for the Chaos Institute and the Moorish Scientific Monastery,” which suddenly began circulating in the late 1980s. According to the pamphlet, Ongu’s Hut was once the site of secret experiments by quantum mechanics researchers the Dobbs Brothers. Nearby, the mystic Wali Fard had founded the Moorish Scientific Monastery. Eventually, scientists and mystics met, merging metaphysical disciplines—including meditation, physics, alchemy, and remote viewing—in unprecedented ways, opening up new frontiers for further experimentation. The pamphlet describes how, after repeated complex and bizarre experiments, they finally pierced the veil between parallel worlds and developed the “Egg,” a pod that allows travel to other dimensions. However, after a mysterious nuclear accident at a nearby military base exposed them to the risk of radioactive contamination, they used the Egg’s technology to transport the entire monastery and its inhabitants to a parallel Earth, leaving only the building for the gateway behind. The end of the pamphlet invites readers to Ongu’s Hut and discover the transdimensional community there, but cautions that it will not be easy.

Matheny first launched the project around 1988, collaborating with anarchist author Peter Lamborn Wilson, physicist Nick Herbert, and artist James Cohenlein to create a legend of paranormal activity in New Jersey. Initially, Matheny and his friends spread the legends through catalogs of magazine articles and ghost books that they compiled and mailed out, but in 1993 they continued the story using the then-new medium of the internet.

From: THE COMMERCIAL VIABILITY OF ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES: A PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR PROFITABILITY AND SCALABILITY

However, preceding Publius Enigma was what expert Szulborski (2005) suggests was truly the first ARG experience, Ong’s Hat / Incunabula. The Ong’s Hat experience differed in that it intertwined two different narrative from both Ong’s Hat Ashram in the 1970’s as well as that of “Incunabla Papers” (Szulborski, 2005a). Moreover, this experience is only said to have precluded the modern ARG because it began so many years prior to the introduction of technologies that now characterize the genre. The experience was so large and spanned over so many years, that experts are unable to agree on when it actually began. Furthermore, this experience was so ahead of its time that it has been dubbed as a “literary/digital crossover” (Szulborski, 2005a) that incorporated mediums such as the CD-Rom, traditional print, bulletin boards and eventually, the internet(Szulborski, 2005a). In fact, a co-creator of the experience’s CD-Rom has suggested that Ong’s Hat included 23 complex puzzles, some of which have yet to be solved or even identified (Szulborski, 2005a). Consequently, many lessons were learned in this generation of ARGs that aided insofar as identifying feasible experiential scope, depth of cross-media convergence and appropriate timelines for the current generation. Additionally, because this generation of ARGs would effectively draw to a close in the early to mid 1990’s, a majority of the technologies that characterize the current generation of ARGs were beginning to emerge and shape the next generation.