At the dawn of the Internet, three friends from Santa Cruz wrote the legend about the entrance to a parallel reality, found by scientists in the forests of New Jersey. But they provided history with such compelling evidence that over the next ten years, thousands of people across America were looking for this entrance.
On a sunny morning in early 2000, Joseph Matheny discovered that conspiracy theorists had again settled on his lawn. The young people were about twenty; one looked into the windows, three more loomed behind him. Matheny sighed and went outside. He knew perfectly well what they needed from him: the secret of traveling to parallel worlds.
The young people were not aggressive, and he made them leave pretty quickly. Whether it was a year ago, when conspiracy theorists broke into his house and he had to take them out at gunpoint. When he and his girlfriend constantly received calls and threatening letters. When the anonymous people called his employer and said about him no one knows what. When, after ten years of secrets, the Ongs Hat experiment got out of hand.
Ongs Hat was one of the first Internet conspiracy theories. The name was given to him by the ruins in the forests of New Jersey, 5 thousand kilometers from Santa Cruz. For many years, there were rumors that something paranormal had happened here - something that warped reality and opened doors to strange, incomprehensible worlds.
Hidden behind dense forests, the Pine Barrens area in southern New Jersey is a deserted and lonely place. Once upon a time, they built ships here, mined coal, traded in iron, but all this came to naught more than a century ago. Only ghost towns and dilapidated factories remained.
Ongs Hat is also often referred to as a ghost town, although it is unclear if it was ever a town at all. The strange name ("Ong's Hat") local folklore associated with the name of Jacob Ong, who lived here in the 17th century and once, in a fit of anger, threw his hat on a tree. Some of the descendants of Ong, however, said that the place was formerly called Ongs Hut ("Ong's Hut") and it was not a city at all, but a couple of buildings. Be that as it may, the forest has since completely swallowed Ongs Hat, although the name still occasionally pops up on maps.
Why has this ordinary place become a Mecca for lovers of the supernatural? It all began in the late 1980s with a brochure entitled Ongs Hat: Gateways to Other Dimensions. A full-color brochure from the Institute for Chaos Research and Science Ashram. The brochure stated that Ongs Hat was once the site of secret experiments. They were conducted by the Twins twins - a pair of Princeton scientists who fell into disgrace for their work on "chaos research" and were forced to build themselves a secret laboratory in the forests of New Jersey. And nearby a mystic and carpet merchant named Wali Fard founded the Science Ashram. Over time, scientists and enlightenment seekers met and joined forces, intricately mixing meditation, physics, alchemy and metaphysical disciplines.
According to the brochure, which described in every detail the daily life and scientific research in the ashram, "the spiritual rhythms that permeate this place were perfect." Experiments became more and more outlandish and esoteric - researchers tried to manipulate the quantum foundations of reality with the power of thought. A few years later, they created the "egg" - a technology that really made it possible to overcome the thin border between parallel universes and travel to other dimensions.
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But here, at a nearby military base, a nuclear accident occurred, the residents of the area were under the threat of radiation, and local authorities began to show interest in the ashram and its strange inhabitants. Then, with the help of the "egg", they transferred the entire ashram to the parallel Earth (on which human life never originated). There is only one building left, inside of which there is an entrance to a parallel reality. The brochure encouraged readers to travel to Ongs Hat and find this entrance. Although, she warned, "it can be difficult to find him."
Later, stories of “survivors” appeared on the Internet - those who grew up in the ashram and remembered the brutal raid of government agents designed to destroy the “egg” and the entrance to a parallel world. Even later, there was evidence that a whirlwind still swirls at the entrance, sometimes engulfing an accidental tourist or an unlucky squirrel.
… The first mentions of Ongs Hat appeared on the Web at the dawn of the Internet. The details of the story looked odd, but true. For example, the plutonium leak that the authorities had been hiding for years was very real. And Jersey residents talked about military exercises that suspiciously resembled the raid described in the brochure. And the mention of the brochure itself was found in the catalog of rare books "Incunabula".
The catalog was supposedly compiled by a man named Emory Cranston. In the preface, he wrote that the books listed in the catalog together reveal the history of the study of parallel universes. In addition to the brochure, there were many more books that seemed to really confirm even the strangest episodes of the legend. Among them were rare old volumes, and publicly available publications on science, medicine, Sufi mysticism and occultism. This includes several works by renowned physicist Nick Herbert, such as Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics and Faster Than Light.
In fact, there was indeed a direct connection between Herbert's research and the Ongs Hat story. Herbert was a member of the Fundamental Physics Group at Berkeley, a company of scientists who in the 1970s tried to push the boundaries of reality through quantum experiments. In his book How Hippies Saved Physics, David Kaiser says that the group half-jokingly, half-seriously turned to both telepathy and the practice of communicating with the dead.
Along with Herbert's more famous works, the Incunabula mentioned a draft of his own book, Alternative Dimensions. The catalog said that the publishers refused to print it, and yet it is "the most accurate and complete work on travel between worlds in our entire collection." And Herbert himself on his website spoke about a concept called "quantum tantra": there he mentioned the "door" and combined shamanic beliefs with modern physics.
… In the 1990s and early 2000s, many believed that just reading the Ongs Hat story changes them from the inside. "People have reported synchronicities, strange dreams, unusual visual sensations, and changes in perception of reality," says University of Michigan professor Michael Kinsella, author of Supernatural Folklore and the Quest for the Ongs Hat. Everyone who was fond of science fiction or paranormal phenomena inevitably came across the story of Ongs Hat: she walked through chats, forums, guest books, and it was impossible to resist her, eyewitnesses recall.
It was not a commonplace urban legend that teenagers tell around a campfire. Matheny and his friends have been creating this story for more than ten years, now and then supporting them with false documents or mentions in the media. She was so compelling that internet detectives wrote hundreds of pages of their own research and theories about what really happened at Ongs Hat.
… The brochure of the Institute for Chaos Research, which began the procession of the legend across the United States, first appeared in 1988 in the Edge Detector magazine. Behind it were Joseph Matheny himself and his friends - anarchist writer Peter Wilson and physicist Nick Herbert. In 1989, they and their entourage distributed photocopies of the articles by all means: they left them on tables in cafes, at concert venues, sent them by mail to UFO lovers … Then they created the Incunabula catalog, and then, according to Matheny, he and Herbert “literally obsessed with this project."
At that time, Matheny had recently moved to California, made friends with intellectuals and young scientists, tried psychedelics and magical rituals. On the newly emerging Internet, he immediately recognized a platform that would help him spread his story much wider than was possible by mail. He posted her wherever he could reach. He invented a character for himself - a brave reporter who investigates this story - and actively communicated with everyone who wanted to discuss the secrets of the Ongs Hat. He used his real name and did not draw any particular line between himself and his hero-reporter.
At first, Matheny says, he was just having fun - and most readers of the brochure at the time did not believe in the story of the ashram and the mysterious scientists. But as the plot got more complicated and the evidence multiplied, so did the number of people taking the story seriously. Gradually, the game began to spiral out of control.
The fact that the famous physicist Herbert willingly confirmed this story, as if reinforcing it with his professional authority, attracted more and more attention to it. In principle, anyone who wanted to take a closer look would immediately find a fake: scans of interviews were posted on Matheny's website, where he directly called Ongs Hat a game, and in one of the versions of the brochure, under the guise of pictures of the "survivors", they placed photographs of the heroes of the famous sitcom. But people still believed, and Matheny helped them in this.
He published a book. Established communication with "serious" conspiracy theorists. Now his story intersected with similar conspiracy theories (for example, about the Montauk project and the Philadelphia experiment), mutated, absorbed elements from other conspiracy pantheons. Now other conspiracy theorists also wrote about Ongs Hat (unlike Matheny, quite seriously), and the author lost the ability to control the story. “I wondered what would happen next,” he says.
People became obsessed with this story and more and more insistently demanded answers from Matheny. And after he appeared several times in the most popular late night radio show about the paranormal, massive invasions began in his personal and professional life.
Finally, in 2001, he ended the experiment with a post addressed to the "conspiracy community." “Nick and I want to publicly admit that the Ongs Hat project has been completed. I think we have laid the foundation for further change. The way is open. " Not everyone believed. Some do not believe even now.
Several years later, Ongs Hat was named the first ever ARG game in This Is Not a Game: A Guide to Augmented Reality Games.
… The world of conspiracy has always had a share of reactionaryism, says Matheny, but today it is dominated by political statements or propaganda with barely veiled "racism, sexism and fascism." What is QAnon, the conspiracy community of Donald Trump supporters (in short, they claim that a clique of pedophiles has infiltrated the government and the media; the only one who can stop and expose them is Trump himself). Matheny has a hard time watching this.
The discourse of online conspiracy has indeed become more toxic, and the Internet itself has changed. If earlier you had to look for conversations about how the government is hiding the technology of time travel, or the controversy about the shape of the Earth, today, thanks to social media, trending conspiracy theories automatically appear in users' news feeds. YouTube's algorithms instantly switch the unsuspecting user from video clips and official news to content promoting QAnon and other conspiracy theories. What can I say if the US president appears on InfoWars, a platform that tells the audience that the mass murder at the Sandy Hook School is fake, and the government controls the weather.
According to Brooke Binkowski, who edits Truth or Fiction and has debunked conspiracy theories for years, people today struggle to distinguish reality from fiction. “It would be unethical to conduct an experiment like 'Ongs Hat' today, unless the author had announced in advance that it was ARG. People don't know what to believe anyway."
… A few years after Matheny stopped playing in 2001, conspiracy theorists stopped pursuing him. But it took him much longer to really learn his lesson. For years, he refused to give serious answers to direct questions about Ongs Hat, not wanting to completely spoil the pleasure of those who might come across this story on the Web. He was thinking about the idea of an Ongs Hat movie. He made another augmented reality game and had a hand in other hoaxes on the Internet (for example, about John Tythor, the time traveler). Even people around him began to look askance: they were never completely sure that he was not playing them.
Now fifty-six, Matheny develops several apps and games and lives between Santa Cruz and the Pacific Northwest. He completely abandoned practical jokes and conspiracy theories. He does not even want to speak publicly about Ongs Hat: communication with us, as he said, will be his last interview on this topic. However, he admitted that he had already said so - what can you do, history lives its own life and does not want to let him go.
Even now, it continues to surface on the Internet. You can still stumble upon it by accident. True, over time, from a conspiracy theory, it turned into an urban legend, in which neither the listener nor the narrator any longer believes too much.