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 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)
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.
