Imaginary Worlds - Catching the Mind Virus

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

The town of Ong's Hat in New Jersey may have been the site of a top secret experiment that brought scientists to a parallel world in another dimension. Or it's the subject of a big inside joke and perhaps the first alternate reality game on the Internet. This week’s episode comes from the Slate podcast Decoder Ring, where the host Willa Paskin explores questions that have haunted me for a long time. When a fantasy world and the real world blur together, does it matter if we don’t know the difference? What happens when we suspend our disbelief too much? This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here or email [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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In the meantime, I want to play you something that I think is really cool. A few months ago, I put out an episode about digital folklore called Monsters in the Static. In that episode, we talked about the fact that people are really interested in this moment in history, when the world shifted from analog to digital in the late 90s and early 2000s. The podcast Decoder Ring put out an episode about that moment when the internet felt new and strange. The episode is also about the first science fiction alternate reality game on the internet, except many people playing the game didn't know it was a game.

By the way, Decoder Ring is a show from Slate. It's a great podcast that unpacks cultural mysteries. They've covered many topics that I've talked about before, like fan fiction, video games, and vampires. And their new season begins in April. In this particular episode that I'm going to play, the host Willa Paskin explores a subject which has fascinated me for a long time. What happens when the dividing line between a fantasy world and the real world gets blurry? What happens when we suspend our disbelief too much? Another thing that I like

about this episode is that it's not just about digital folklore. The episode itself becomes a type of digital folklore. Not to give too much away, but there might be moments where you're a little confused or you think something's gone wrong with the audio. Don't worry, everything will be revealed. Like a Marvel movie, you have to stay through the end credits to get the full story. Okay, so here is the host of Dakota Ring, Willa Paskin, and this episode was called The Incanabula Papers. The Pine Barrens is a forest of over a million acres that sprawls across the southern part of New Jersey. It's thick with pines, oaks, wildlife, and carnivorous plants, but it's called

the Barrens because of its acidic, sandy soil, which prevented early settlers from cultivating crops there. And so the Pine Barrens is barren in another sense, too. There's almost no one there. Starting in the late 1700s, a place in the northwest corner of the Pines, a town called Ong's Hat, started appearing on maps. Ong was the surname of a family that had lived in the area, but it's unlikely there was ever a real settlement there, beyond just a building or two. Still, the location stayed on maps into the 2000s, and to this day, people show up in the Pine Barrens looking for it. Ong's Hat, hidden village or whatever. We do have people occasionally pop in and just, you know, ask about it. Kim Hildick works for the Department of Environmental Protection

at the Brandon T. Byrne State Forest in New Jersey, where Ongshat is located. There's nothing out there. It's nothing that anyone has ever been able to find that I know of. Let's put it that way. These searchers aren't just looking for a hidden village, though. In 1978, a jazz musician named Wally Ford purchased 200 acres of land in the Pine Barrens near Ong's hat and set up an ashram there called the Moorish Science Ashram.

It was for seekers interested in studying spirituality, radical politics, tantra, psychopharmacology, and other counterculture interests. A couple of former Princeton scientists ended up there, and other oddball researchers soon followed. They founded the Institute for Chaos Studies at the ashram, full of people who were interested in exploring hard science using esoteric spiritual tools. By the late 80s, they had developed a device called the egg to explore something called cognitive chaos. It was a kind of modified sensory deprivation chamber. They were hoping it would help them experience the point at which a wave becomes a particle. But during a test of the egg, with a young man inside of it, the whole thing just disappeared. Seven minutes later, it came back. And the young man, who was still inside, still alive, told them what had happened. He had dived down to the quantum level and followed a wave all the way

into an alternate dimension, into another version of Earth. This other Earth is geologically similar to our own, thick with forest but with no trace of human life. Over the next few years, the scientists move their operation over to this alternate Earth, leaving behind only a secret laboratory, where the egg occasionally returns with its passengers to restock supplies. Throughout the 90s and the very early 2000s, pieces of apparent evidence,

evidence supporting the existence of this alternate dimension, would occasionally appear online. One example was this interview, allegedly with two childhood survivors of the ashram. I wanted to ask you, did you, when you were at the almshouse ashram, and you guys were kids, I know, but did you actually physically see

one of the travel devices known as an egg that supposedly was housed at the almshouse ashram? I did. I didn't know. I knew it was... Don't cry now, loud. Okay. So maybe you're confused now.

I promise, by the end of this episode, you won't be. But in the meantime, I want you to let yourself sit in that confusion for a bit longer. Because that sensation, when you're not quite sure when fact has ended and fiction has begun, But in the meantime, I want you to let yourself sit in that confusion for a bit longer. Because that sensation when you're not quite sure when fact has ended and fiction has begun, that's the essence of the Ong's Hat legend.

And the Ong's Hat legend is real. It's real in the sense that it's a real story that is still inspiring people to go to the Pine Barrens looking for Ong's Hat. So we're trying to find an abandoned town called Ong's Hat. Here in the Pine Barrens, it's supposed to be a gateway to another dimension. Is that what it says? That's a YouTube video from a user called ThatHandsomeDevil. It's not the only one like it. It's a real story in the sense that it captivated thousands of people who encountered it on the early Internet and who didn't know quite what it was.

A spiritual quest, a game, a cult, the truth. All they knew is that they wanted to find out. This is Decoder Ring, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Slate's TV critic, Willa Paskin. Every month we take a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters. The story of Ong's Hat isn't just some urban legend.

It was relayed in a series of documents that first started appearing in 1989, hitting the peak of their popularity on the internet from 1999 to 2001. An online community formed around these documents, investigating their scientific suppositions, parsing their references, exploring their spiritual ramifications, and debating how much of them were true. These documents have been downloaded two million times. The documents were created by a number of people and over a period of years under the influence of more people they became a kind of

crowdsourced conspiracy theory. But there is still one man who is primarily responsible for Ong's hat. A mastermind who wasn't trying to birth a conspiracy theory but who unleashed one nonetheless. Today on Decoder Ring, what is Ong's hat? Now's the time we must talk about a sponsor, Aleph Mattresses. At Aleph, they believe inspiration is as easy as getting a good night's sleep. Each Aleph is handcrafted in Brooklyn, New York, from six different kinds of foam, including their exclusive SoftBounce foam with memory technology, which means the bed remembers how you like to sleep,

getting more and more comfortable each time you sleep on it. The Aleph is also the first mattress to feature Sense-activated sleep tech that helps you learn more about your sleep patterns via their website and upcoming exclusive Aleph app. To find out more, go to TrustAleph.com. T-R-U-S-T-A-L-E-P-H dot com. Dream big, dream better with Aleph. Dream big, dream better, with Aleph. In order to understand the Ongshat legend, you've got to know a bit about the documents that created that legend. The way that most people first heard the story of Ongshat was through a piece of writing called Ongshat, Gateway to the Dimensions. It was laid out like a brochure for the ashram, and it told a much more detailed version of the story than what I relayed earlier.

This is how it begins. You would not be reading this brochure if you had not already penetrated halfway to the ICS. You have been searching for us without knowing it. Following oblique references in crudely xeroxed marginal samizdat publications, crackpot mystical pamphlets, mail-order courses in chaos magic, a paper trail and a coded series of rumors

spread at street level through circles involved in the illicit distribution of certain controlled substances. And we know your address. In the early 1990s, copies of this brochure were passed around through the mail, occasionally appearing in zines, and were even stuffed into brochure racks on hiking trails in the Pine Barrens. But the brochure is not the only source for the story. Here's Dakota Ring

producer Benjamin Frisch. There's a second document, a cryptic catalog of books called Inconabula, a catalog of rare books, manuscripts, and curiosa, conspiracy theory, frontier science, and alternative worlds. It's a list of books about quantum physics and spirituality that are available for purchase. Some of them are completely made up, and some of them you can still buy on Amazon, like Quantum Reality, a book by the physicist Nick Herbert. Each entry in the catalog is like a mini-essay describing one book, but taken all together, the entries reveal a larger story, an alternative to one told in the brochure,

including contradictory details about the work of another group of scientists on the West Coast who had opened a gateway to yet more worlds. Eventually, two more documents would appear, two interviews. Both of these interviews were conducted by someone investigating the veracity of the Ongshat story, a man named Joseph Matheny. In the first document, Matheny interviews the physicist Nick Herbert, and in the second, Matheny interviews Emery Cranston, the publisher of the mysterious book catalog who says that all the secrets to interdimensional travel are hidden within the documents, just waiting to be unlocked. All of these documents together are collectively known as the Incanabula Papers.

If you couldn't tell, Ben got really into this thing. It felt a little bit like I was going crazy. If you couldn't tell, Ben got really into this thing. real physicist, but it was a whole page dedicated to something called quantum tantra, which ties into the egg and the Ong's hat story. And it was just like this experience where truth and fiction drop away and you feel very vulnerable. It's weird. Okay. So far we've got documents and supporting materials that are a mix of real world science,

really speculative science, spirituality, science fiction, conspiracy theory. Who made this thing? To answer that, we have to go back to the 1980s, not to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, but to San Francisco, California. Most pressing of all my interests is communication among humans, because I see that it was something that's become broken and is becoming more broken as time goes on. That's Joseph Matheny, the same Joseph Matheny who appears in the Incanabula papers, supposedly investigating whether or not the Ong's hat story is true.

He's a real person, and these days he makes his living as a computer programmer, engineer, and product manager. But he also describes himself as an artist and a technologist. We talk to each other less and less and less and I think that talking to each other and telling each other stories is something we've always done and it's something we've kind of turned over to merchants in a lot of ways. So I try to find subversive ways to bring people back around to realizing that they are the storytellers. In the late 80s, Matheny was living in San Francisco and fascinated by fringe culture.

He loved zines and Xeroxed homemade mailers that addressed a huge variety of strange subjects you couldn't learn about elsewhere, including conspiracy theories. I've always loved Americana, and I've always seen conspiracy culture as kind of a folksy Americana. It's gotten a little darker and more dangerous in these days, but back then it was kind of folksy and it was cute. It's hard to understand, for those of us who don't remember it, what it was like trying to learn about things before the Internet existed.

Before Wikipedia, before Google, before the millions of online forums addressing every topic in the universe. If you wanted to know about a band or an author or a TV show or meditation or crackpot theories about alternate universes, how would you begin if you couldn't begin with an online search? In the late 80s and early 90s, one of the answers to this question was, read the classified sections of alt-weeklies. All the UFO stuff and paranormal stuff that you see on the internet now was sitting in a P.O. box somewhere waiting for you to send $2 in a stamped envelope.

And if you did that, then they would send you back their information, which they probably published via Xerox. In 1989, Matheny read a story written by an acquaintance of his, Peter Lamborn Wilson, an anarchist philosopher, in a fringe science fiction publication called Edge Detector. It was framed as a kind of found object, and it fit right into the tradition of the ironic school of conspiracy, simultaneously playing with conspiracy theory and elaborating on it,

mimicking it and sending it up. It started like this. You'll recognize it. You would not be reading this brochure if you had not already penetrated halfway to the ICS. That's from an audiobook version of the Inconabula papers. This story, which was titled Ong's Hat, Gateway to the Dimensions, is the text of the original brochure about the Ong's Hat ashram. It wasn't a brochure just yet, though. It was laid out like a magazine piece.

But upon reading it, Matheny was inspired. Did a layout, did some desktop publishing on it, and then started remailing them myself, only I didn't make them look like they'd come from a magazine. I was making them look like the brochure. When it was done, Matheny began to Xerox the brochure and mail it to people. He says he was joined in this by Peter Lamborn Wilson, the author, and James Kenline, an artist who frequently collaborated with Wilson. They sent the brochure to friends and other people who were already receiving mail about oddball topics. Basically, they sent it out to the equivalent of a fringe culture mailing list.

You address all this stuff, and you put it in envelopes, and then you put all the envelopes in an envelope or a box, and then you send it to this remailing service in Hong Kong, and you give them a check for $25. and you give them a check for $25, and then they stamp and send these things out for you with a return address and the posted shipment mark from Hong Kong. So it looks like you're getting, well, you are, you're getting a letter from Hong Kong. That's amazing. It's a very early version of a proxy. When I asked Matheny why he went to such elaborate lengths, he told me, it was a way to utilize an alternate medium

as a method of distribution. And a bit of a joke. It was art. It doesn't always have to have a purpose. In the mid-80s, before the Incanabula project had even begun, Matheny had gotten really into bulletin board systems, BBS, a precursor to the modern internet. They were essentially message boards, forums, but they didn't exist online.

They existed on siloed machines, and to access one, you had to dial into it directly. You had to know the phone number. Some of them were public and they charged by the hour, but others were underground. I had a couple of them that were running out of my apartment in San Francisco that had no names. It was kind of like Fight Club. You didn't talk about it. But, you know, if you kind of vetted somebody and you hung out with them for a while and you thought they were cool and you found out that they had a computer and a modem, you would eventually say, hey, do you do bulletin board systems?

Yeah, yeah, here's a number. Dial that one. Matheny's interest in BBS and his interest in Ong's hat had originally been separate. But after sending the original Ong's hat story around in the mail for a few years, he started to do the same with the Incanabula book catalog after Lamborn Wilson and James Kenline

wrote and illustrated it. He realized he wanted to combine these interests. He wanted to put the papers on BBS. So Matheny began putting the documents on bulletin board systems. So by the early mid-90s, the court... Hey Willa, it's Clayton from LF Mattresses. Listen, I just got off the phone with our ad team and we need to just touch base. Give me a call back, we'll touch base. And yeah, talk to you soon. Thanks. Even on BBS, though, the papers were still being circulated among a relatively small community of like-minded people. These people might not have known what was true and what was false in the incunabula papers, but they would have at least recognized the type of thing that it was. but they would have at least recognized the type of thing that it was.

After all, they had been part of a system, the mail, that had been distributing printed material about the fringy, the weird, and the prankish to interested parties for decades. When they encountered the incunabula papers, they knew what genre they came from. They'd seen the ironic school of conspiracy style before, and they knew what to do with it. Play along. Somebody, I don't know who to this day, but props. Somebody went down to Ong's Hat into the Lebanon State Forest to the ranger station

and stuffed the brochure rack with these brochures from the Ong's Hat Institute. And I called the ranger out there one day and I said, did you ever see this brochure, Bobo? He goes, oh God, yes. That thing's like, we can't get rid of that thing. It keeps coming back. But as the document started to be spread around a larger, increasingly public internet, the context that had previously existed around them began to disappear. Instead of being something recognizable to the people encountering it, the Ong's Hat story turned into something alien. It turned into something new. After the break, we'll hear how this early internet joke

took on a life of its own and became much stranger than anyone imagined. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea.

That's Old Spice Total Body deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body deodorant now. As the internet started to come online, various bulletin board systems began to put their archives there, where they could be searched. In the mid-90s, Matheny set up incunabula.org, where he would archive any and all references to Ong's hat.

There are now hundreds of references to it on the internet, with Matheny seeding more and more sites all the time, creating rabbit holes for people to fall into seemingly serendipitously. My first interaction with it was in the very early days of the web. That's Denny Unger, who is currently CEO of Cloud Games, a VR gaming company. About 19 years ago, he fell through one of Matheny's rabbit holes. It was this weird, almost like art house website,

where they would have these kind of fractal images and a little poetic saying below them. And you'd click on the image, and it would take you to another page that had another artistic fractal image, and then it would start branching. As you kind of dug deeper into the website, it started giving you more information

about what it was all about. It took me about a week to dig through the very bottom of it. The first bit of information that I found was kind of telling the tallest of tall tales about the Inky Nebula. So it was super attractive to me right away. I'm like, what the hell is this? What did you think that it was then?

Well, I definitely thought it was a cult. And the way that they recruited was by seeding a lot of real verifiable information with a lot of garbage. So at that point, to me, it was more about teasing out what parts of the story were true and what parts weren't. And so over the course of doing that, I ended up forming a website called Dark Planet Online. And that ended up kind of being the nexus point for a lot of where people would kind of compare and contrast the different things that they had discovered or found out about the story. There was lots of new stuff to discover. Matheny made sure of that.

If you pushed on the names, the references, the science mentioned in the documents, you would find additional layers, other puzzles, more things to investigate. Matheny, for example, dropped hints that Emery Cranston, the supposed publisher of the Inconabula catalog, had a Hotmail account. If you took a chance and emailed Emery underscore Cranston at Hotmail.com, you'd get a response from a bot that Matheny had set up. They would say, you know, I see things different than most of the world. You know, I've had paranormal experiences and da-da-da-da, you know, and just like kind of opening their soul to this bot. I don't know if they completely knew or I don't know if they completely cared. This is somebody or something that I can talk to that is a safe space. That was very touching. In the e-book version of the papers,

which came out in 1999, he included a hidden animation that if you clicked on it would prompt a request for a password that you could deduce from the text. If you figured it out, you were sent to another website and another puzzle where you were eventually given GPS coordinates to Ongsat, New Jersey, where Matheny had buried some things. One box had buffalo head nickel, a eagle feather, an old pharmacy bottle that had an opium label on it, but there was no opium in the bottle. There was no meaning to that. But, of course, the person that found it wrote me, like, these long letters about what it meant. The result of all these clues and mysteries is that they made the people who were interacting with the story feel like they had stumbled into a conspiracy,

which they were actively working to uncover. Here's Vinny Caggiano, a musician in Venice Beach, talking about what it felt like at the time. I actually kind of was living through a kind of altered reality. Really weird things began to happen, including strange phone calls with strange, kind of like garbled voice saying something, but not being able to make out what it is. So it became a lot of fun. It was like a living adventure, you know.

We have no way to verify if the phone calls Vinny is talking about were a part of the Ong's hat experience, or if they were just a coincidence, or if they even happened at all. But strange coincidences and synchronicities are something that people into the Incanabula papers report experiencing, or maybe just noticing, in unusually large numbers. Here's Denny Unger again. And it really only happened at that period of my life when I was looking into the material. And it was just like a lot of kind of, you know, non-important synchronicities would occur, but the number of synchronicities was insane. Like, and this is a very common experience when you're digging into Ong's hat stuff. I had a couple of these while working on this episode.

Umberto Eco, the novelist and semiotician who was a big influence on Matheny, kept popping up everywhere for a while. And one night, I had a dream that involved a pair of suspenders I'd had as a kid, and the next day, Instagram served me an ad for fashionable suspenders. And even though a few coincidences in the space of a month is totally normal, just knowing that this was a thing that happened to people who were looking into Ong's hat, it gave them a little extra sizzle. Matheny says that Ong's hat was designed to create these kinds of experiences though. There was enough space in between so that people could have their own liminal experiences. And if you leave enough flexibility in the

framework of a story, people will find those meaningful moments. So I would get emails from people telling me things like this. Like I was reading, I was reading the website and, you know, this really odd synchronicity happened. And a lot of that, I mean, a lot of emails. To a certain extent, Matheny stoked this confusion. He was regularly on the boards in character as the lead investigator of the Ong's Hat materials, a man who seemed to have a special connection to the papers. Hat materials, a man who seemed to have a special connection to the papers. Here's Denny Unger in 1999 or 2000 when he did a few web radio broadcasts about Ong's Hat, describing to his listeners how he believed Matheny fit into the picture. Joseph Matheny himself has said that when he first

received the documents, he didn't believe them. He thought it was a joke. But he did plant the seed anyways. He dropped it into the public eye. And when he did that, a lot of strange things started happening in his life. He was receiving threats and his phones were tapped or freaking out or whatever. His office was ransacked. Matheny would also use the boards to stay abreast of the conversation, often planting clues having to do with topics the forum was really fixated on,

which gave participants the sense the mystery was responding to them. One thing that struck me over and over again as we were reporting this episode is just how strange the early internet was. Not just because so much of it was quirky individual websites. You know, physicists who made webpages for themselves

and then made webpages for their dogs, which was apparently a thing. Because of how new, how magical it was to be able to seamlessly communicate with so many different people who were basically invisible to you. Obviously, people believed outlandish stories and conspiracy theories before the internet, and they believe them now, when the internet is no longer brand new. But this inflection point, when the internet was first widely adopted, is it crazy to think that it might have made other, fringier kinds of science briefly seem more plausible? Like if the internet was possible, then who was to say interdimensional travel wasn't?

You can kind of recreate this headspace for yourself just by considering contemporary technologies in development that sound far-fetched if you don't know anything about them, but aren't so crazy when someone explains them to you. Things like self-driving cars or genome editing or the ability to record someone else's dreams. There are so many apps that can already monitor your sleep and the quality of your sleep, and we're making so much progress on being able to monitor the function of the visual cortex, even remotely. I think we'll be able to record dreams in the near future.

We're even working on controlling them, giving people the tools to suppress their nightmares, to regularly experience waking dreams, and so on and so forth. It's really fascinating stuff. That's Clayton Droum, the founder of Aleph Mattresses, one of our sponsors. At its peak around the year 2000, there were thousands of people actively engaged with Ong's hat, discussing and analyzing it on message boards, looking for clues, trying to parse the real from the fake. Meanwhile, Matheny was doing everything he could to spread Ong's hat.

This is around the time when he recorded that interview with the childhood ashram survivors we played at the top of the show and put it online. Like nobody would shoo us away per se, but it was very, for what I know, for finding out how to do about it as opposed to what I knew then, it was very much. In 2000, he put out a press release, in character, saying that Matheny, with the backing of an outside institute, was going to vet the documents. That press release got picked up. I don't know how it got picked up the way it did, but it got picked up. And I spent the next couple of months on talk radio all over the world. And I decided to play it straight. And so I did. And then lo and behold,

Coast to Coast called me. And I thought to myself, 20 million listeners. Can I do better than that? No. Okay. So I played it straight. I admit. Me a couple. All right, folks, here we are back at it. Good to have you with us. Mike Siegel with you. We're talking with Joseph Matheny. And we are talking about ultimately leading up to dimensional travel. This is a major turning point for the Ongs Hat story.

Coast to Coast AM is a very famous, very long-running conspiracy theory radio show with a reputation for entertaining very fringe ideas. It's not a place steeped in the ironic style of conspiracy. When Matheny says he played it straight, he means he played it straight. Is it possible we're dealing with a giant scam here? I don't think so. You know, in the beginning, I kind of thought that myself. And as time progressed and more and more things started to come forward,

you know, just the very fact that I started finding out that there was a scientific group in this area at all was a big shock to me. They went to another universe. Now, how would they have written the document before they left to know they wouldn't be back? Matheny says this appearance on Coast to Coast precipitated a huge influx of more serious paranoid conspiracy theorists into the project. As things went on, more and more participants began to believe that Matheny, his motive, his identity, were the core part of the Ong's hat mystery.

Obviously, they were on to something. But instead of feeling as though they'd solved the puzzle, some of them felt betrayed. What he was doing, like kind of duping naive people, which I was naive, you know, at the time. So I was way into it. That's Vinny Caggiano again. As Ong's hat went on, Vinny fell in with a small group led by a forum regular.

She declined to speak with us for this episode. They became convinced that Matheny was a malevolent hoaxster. She took this stuff really seriously, and she dug and dug and dug and dug. And her whole modus operandi was to expose Joseph Matheny for being a P.T. Barnum of modern times. Like, the whole thing was just a big ploy for him to get media attention. Another group began to attribute

otherworldly powers to him, specifically the ability to create the synchronicities mentioned earlier. People were having synchronistic experiences. And instead of realizing that it was them creating that phenomena, they're looking at me as the creator of the phenomena. This is how cults get started. For Matheny, who estimates he's been contacted by tens of thousands of people about Ong's hat, the whole experience, online and in the real world, began to get very dark.

I've woken up to people peering through my windows. I mean, there was people camping on my lawn. This got weird. I would ask them what they wanted, what they were after, what they were looking for. Try to turn their back on themselves and say, I don't have anything for you. You have everything for you. Did that work? Sometimes.

Other times they would get angry. Matheny had always intended for people to know that part of the story was made up. But it was around this point that he became convinced he had not accomplished this particular goal. I was imagining that people also, that there was enough clues in the text that people would not take it seriously completely. I was wrong about that, I guess. Eventually, I came to the conclusion

that I was wrong about that. And the people who believed in Ong's hack completely, they started to ruin the experience for Matheny. You have people that showed up that absolutely positively were convinced that we were up to something nefarious, that we were probably a government mind control program, that we were whatever. And those people are not pleasant. They don't make the environment pleasant. And they started to make the game unpleasant.

If you were to look up Ong's hat right now, you would find that it is widely considered to be a game. In fact, it is widely considered to be one of the first, if not the first, examples of a specific type of game, an alternate reality game, an ARG. An ARG is a form that uses different types of media, not just the internet, but phones, texts, chats, bots, real-life encounters, to engage players in a kind of boundaryless play, presenting them with puzzles and mysteries no one person could solve by him or herself. At the same time that Matheny was starting to have misgivings about his own creation, other ARGs, ones that were bigger and better funded, began to appear. One of the first and most notable of these was called The Beast,

which was released in 2001. The Beast was created by Elon Lee and Jordan Weissman from Microsoft as a tie-in to the Steven Spielberg movie AI. It's probably helpful to think of Ong's hat as a scruffy experimental prototype, and ARGs like The Beast as a more professionalized, gamer-oriented final product. Both involved intricate mythologies, obscure clues, and puzzles. But The Beast had an entire staff dedicated to creating gameplay, millions of players,

a storyline that progressed, and clues that led somewhere, led to an ending. Ong's hat, in comparison, had no end. The clues didn't lead to anything but more mystery. The journey was the destination. Still, like Ong's hat, the beast faithfully abided by one rule, that this is not a game. This is not a game is, we all know this is a game, therefore we don't have to talk about the fact that it's a game and ruin the game. Of all the people we spoke to for this story, the person who had the most insight into why Ong's hat fell apart,

the people we spoke to for this story, the person who had the most insight into why Ong's hat fell apart, why the this-is-not-a-game ethos almost predicted the sour turn Ong's hat eventually took. It was the Beast co-creator, Elon Lee. At one point for the Beast, he planned an event in Chicago at a bar for which he had hired an actor to pretend to be murdered. The idea was that as the actor lay on the floor, the players who were there would gather clues and then, you know, leave. But a few players wouldn't do that. Instead, they stayed, staring at the actor who was pretending to be dead until he finally had to get up and go home. Here's Lee with the rest of the story. They thought this was part of the game because this isn't a game, because everything's in bounds, because we told everyone this is real, this is real, this is real. So they followed him thinking, why is this corpse walking around?

And he got onto a bus and they got on the bus. And at that point, he got off the bus and they got off the bus and he stopped them and he said, listen, totally out of game here. I'm an actor. They hired me to do this thing. I did the thing. Stop following me. And they looked at each other and they thought, oh, this is so cool. And they kept following him. And he went to his house and they followed him to his house and he went in his front door and they sat on his front porch and he called the police and the police showed up and they threw these guys in cop cars and the players looked at each other and they thought this is the coolest game ever. And that's where we got into just so much trouble because like I had to bail these guys out of jail

and we had to talk to the authorities and we had to like clarify all this stuff. Lee, like Matheny, had assumed that there was a limit to how far players would go to solve their mysteries. But they underestimated them, not just because the players were so much more dedicated than they had imagined, but because the very structure of these games made it inevitable that some players would run afoul of the rules. When you walk into a movie theater, you're entering into an agreement with the makers of that movie. The agreement is, I'm going to sit in this chair, and I'm going to look at the screen, and I'm going to believe the things on the screen. But I always know that I can get up out of this chair, and the exit is right behind me. I know those things, and you know those things, and we're going to agree on those things. And as long as we can all agree on those things, I'm going to sit here and stare at the screen and believe your fiction. those things, I'm going to sit here and stare at the screen and believe your fiction. In our thing, when we scream, this is not a game, we have no agreement with the players.

Nobody knows where the edges of the screen are. Nobody knows where the seat is. Nobody knows where the exit is. And when those things aren't known, the parameters of the game are very unclear. And it creates huge problems because nothing is out of bounds. And when nothing is out of bounds, the game has to fall apart because in essence, it has boundaries. And where it butts up against the real world, if those boundaries are invisible, then the players have no ability to play versus not play. If you don't know where the game ends, if in the case of Ongsat, you don't even know it's a game at all, at some point, you may, unbeknownst to yourself, have slipped off the board. You will then be behaving inappropriately, irrationally, perhaps in a way that is dangerous to yourself or to others, not in some game, but instead in the very real world.

but instead in the very real world. In August of 2001, troubled by the fan response and seeing bigger, more corporate ARGs like The Beast, Matheny pulled the plug. I made some lifelong friends and I saw some people go off and do some amazing things. But then I also saw this very dark side, which is these people becoming obsessive compulsive around it.

And then I began to realize that if anything stays around long enough, it becomes an institution. And then, of course, it does become ugly. So I blew it up. He wrote a not entirely straightforward note online, and he stopped creating content for the game. Open letter to the conspiracy community. I decided today to publicly announce in the near future that the Ong's Hat project has now concluded. I think we were successful in laying the groundwork for the coming change. The gateways are open now. P.S. This is not a joke.

The player response was mixed. Some people were disappointed, some were outraged, some didn't believe it, some just thought it was another clue. But soon after, without Matheny seeding new material, and then with the arrival of September 11th, Ongshat kind of died out. Denny Unger's Dark Planet site stayed online for several more years, but the forums grew more and more desolate. Still, the idea that there's something to Ongshat persists. Bits and pieces of the story have survived in other conspiracy theories, and people still visit Ongsh hat, New Jersey, looking for that interdimensional portal. Here's Denny Unger again. It gave me a very different perspective on reality in a really positive way. If it was an ARG, it was a very noble cause.

You think it might not be so? The way that the material tried to tease out certain personality types was really interesting to me because it didn't feel like an ARG. It felt like a recruitment tool. Yeah, I mean, Joseph would hate me saying this because I think he just wants it to end. I think he just wants it to end. But I do, I think that there's, I'm just saying there's a possibility that the idea of a travel cult that gets together and discusses these ideas and pushes them really hard. I think that's totally possible. Whether or not they travel to other worlds, totally a different discussion.

Matheny would really hate this. I'm so over it, man. You have no idea how over it I am. It turns out that being known for creating one of the first ARGs is actually kind of complicated. For one thing, though Matheny still makes games, he doesn't really make ARGs anymore. Very few people do. They've become extremely hard to scale. Players have gotten so savvy that the amount of resources one would need to mount a game is enormous. That can really only happen with the backing of a really lucrative marketing tie-in, which might undermine the

strange, mysterious vibe of any game, and would certainly undermine Matheny's non-commercial philosophy. But- Hey, Willa Clayton. he moved past ARG is the way that his work on Ongshad has been used by other conspiracy theories. The thing that probably irritates me the most is that a lot of the methodology of ARG has been co-opted by projects that I don't care to associate with and I don't like my work being associated with. It seems worth noting here that what happens to conspiracy theorists is that to a certain extent they turn real life into a game. They look at reality and begin to see in it clues, hints, a pattern, a way to turn coincidences and synchronicities into something meaningful. a way to turn coincidences and synchronicities into something meaningful.

Ong's hat asked people to do this kind of pattern recognition. It actually supplied them with clues, hints, and patterns until they began to create their own. One of the great ironies of Ong's hat is that though it was not originally a conspiracy theory, it was, in a sense, an actual conspiracy. Not a criminal one, but a plot, an art project, masterminded by one man. And when the players began to figure this out, instead of accepting the simple explanation, they instead saw a whole new level to the conspiracy. And while I can understand why Matheny hated this, he of all people should understand why that happened. Why the players, when confronted with the truth,

with an explanation, with an ending, wanted instead to keep searching. It's what he taught them to do. So we tried to confirm everything that we could about Matheny's story. And while everything more or less checked out, and Matheny never seemed to be anything less than totally straightforward with us,

we would be remiss if we did not point out that much of this piece is based on his word, is based on what Matheny says happened. And as you now know, that hasn't always been completely reliable. So even after all of this, there's still an element of uncertainty. This is why, even though Ong's Hat is widely considered to be a game, thinking of it as just a game is reductive. It's something much less well-defined, a new kind of game, yes, but also a piece of literature,

an art project, what Matheny calls a living book. This lack of definition is what drew people to it, is what let them see in it what they wanted to see in it, however disturbing. in it what they wanted to see in it, however disturbing. Personally, I have to say I don't find the story of the Ong's hat story all that dark, because I can't get over how generous the whole thing is. It's like if your smartest, weirdest friend put Echo and Pynchon and Nabokov and Borges and a ton of science fiction, some cutting-edge physics research papers, and a whole lot of computer code into a blender,

and then made you a scavenger hunt out of the results. A scavenger hunt that spanned years and the entire internet. The amount of work Matheny put into this thing, just to entertain people, to try to enlighten them, to give them something to play with. I find it sweet. And it bums me out that Matheny doesn't get any joy from it anymore. But even if he doesn't, there are people who played it who still do. Here's Vinny Caggiano.

It was a moment in history, but only select people were there for it, you know? If his intention is what I think it might have been, it was actually a work of genius, all told. While people played Onkshat, they got to feel like a different version of themselves. An adventurer inside of an unfolding mystery, living in a different version of reality, one full of strange possibility, where access to the truth was just one revelation away. Onkshat never literally transported anyone to another Earth. But also, it did. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Pas-

Hi, Clayton. This is Willa Paskin. Hey, Willa. Listen. It has nothing to do with Aleph. It has nothing to do with mattresses or sleep. It's finished. We're happy with it. It's nothing to do with Aleph. It has nothing to do with mattresses or sleep. It's finished. We're happy with it. It's going up in a week. Like, we don't have time to crash another episode. Not that we would.

I actually don't quite understand why we're... This is me telling you that the episode needs to be pulled. I'm not... I have to tell you. I'm obligated to tell you that because it's disrupting our tech. It's disrupting your tech? It's a mind virus, Willa. It's bananas?

I thought I was... I'm dead serious, Willa. And we're concerned that if you air it, you should be concerned about our concerns. We're airing the episode. I am not threatening you, Willa,

but I am telling you that if you do air this episode, you will regret it. All right. Have a good night. or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. This podcast was co-written and edited by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch, who also produced it and does illustrations for every episode.

You can download the art for this episode on our show page. Thanks to June Thomas, Danielle Hewitt, Haley Gavin, Matthew Dessim, Dan Coyce, Gabe Roth, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way. We would also like to give a special thanks to Michael Kinsella,

whose book about Ong's hat was an indispensable resource. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next month. No warning. If you keep listening to this episode... Sorry, we have to talk. What's going on? Did you just see those guys?

What? No, I was... These guys in black, they just walked in and then they took my computer. Who? All my hard drives, my backup. The episode is gone. Do you know, like, did they say who they were? We all know who they were. What are we going to do?

We do exactly what they told us to do. We do something else. We do the conspiracy theory thing, Ong's hat or whatever it's called. We can't do that in a week. We don't have a choice. We cannot get it back. There's like no thing you're not thinking of. Like we just do not have it.

The only people that have it now is what they have. I guess it's probably on their website somewhere. Like that is totally useless to us. I mean unless somebody were to like hack into their website, I guess. How would anybody do that? to like hack into their website, I guess. How would anybody do that? I mean, I could leave clues in the episode so that people would know to at least try.

Somebody should hear this. Why don't we try? Because, Willa, they're watching us while we sleep. Men in Black just came and took all of my stuff.