Ong’s Hat
As legend has it, Ong’s Hat is an isolated ghost town in the New Jersey pine barrens, almost completely uninhabited since the 1930s. Now it consists of just a road, a few houses, and a cafe.
The village was said to be a swinging place at one time, full of saloons and rowdy characters. It supposedly earned its name after a young man snubbed an admirer at the dance hall, and in retaliation she stomped on his shiny silk hat. The man, Jacob (sometimes John) Ong, tossed the trampled hat into a tree where it dangled for many months.
The only person known to have researched and written about Ong’s Hat is Henry Charles Beck. He was a mystery novelist, newspaper reporter, and Episcopal priest with a keen interest in the obscure lore of southern New Jersey’s villages and ghost towns. He chronicled urban legends like New Jersey’s “bottomless” Blue Hole. At first, having found some rubble at the site, Beck believed Ong’s Hat had been a tiny but thriving village at some point in the nineteenth century. Later, he realized the stories of moonshiners and bar brawlers were probably just that – stories. Ong’s Hat was apparently never a township. Rather, it was a stop along the market route for area farmers who called the place Ong’s Hut, after a single crude shack constructed there. The only resident of the area that Beck could find was a septuagenarian farmer.
Ong’s Hat was forgotten until the earliest days of the Internet, when someone began posting a series of extremely weird documents called the Incunabula Papers.
According to the Incunabula, one Joseph Matheny was an occult scholar and an expert on the Elizabethan mage John Dee, well-schooled in a vast range of esoteric subjects. In 1987 a physicist friend gave him a list of very rare texts about parallel worlds, quantum mechanics, and such. This photocopied catalog was titled “Incunabula”. Matheny already had most of these texts in his personal library, but an unfamiliar one snagged his attention: Ong’s Hat: A Color Brochure of the Institute of Chaos Studies. He somehow managed to obtain a copy of the pamphlet, and it launched him on an investigation that led to the following story:
In the 1930s, a clique of physicists from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study began using the Ong’s Hat Rod and Gun Club as a pretext for gathering in secret. There, they met up with members of a strange commune or ashram (some would say a cult) that had evolved from an heretical Islamic sect founded in the early 1900s by a circus magician, Noble Drew Ali. These people practiced ancient tantric sex magic, but were also centuries ahead of their time technologically. They had in their possession an egg-shaped device, looking not unlike a Faberge egg, which enabled them to travel through a gateway into other dimensions and parallel worlds. One world they explored was identical to the New Jersey pine barrens, minus any inhabitants. They established a small settlement there. On another world they encountered a benevolent race of humanoids descended from Javanese lemurs, who had mastered dimensional travel sans machinery and had been traveling to other worlds for thousands of years.
The scientists and a few other unconventional people continued to frequent the Ong’s Hat ashram right through the ’60s, a time when their eclectic blend of mysticism and time travel would have been extremely popular – if anyone else had known about it.
Matheny was able to locate and interview the surviving members of the commune. They even allowed him to examine the Egg. Sadly, the ashram itself no longer existed; sometime in the ’70s or ’80s, the area was bombarded by black Delta Force helicopters, and at least seven of the commune members were reportedly gunned down. The commune itself was burned to the ground. The survivors apparently dispersed and have remained underground.
Matheny himself recounted his experiences in a book, Ong’s Hat: The Beginning (1999). Later, Peter Moon (co-author of a seminal work on the Montauk Project) updated and republished the book. He claimed that a friend had been in contact with members of the commune prior to its destruction.
What resulted from the Incunabula and Ong’s Hat was an enduring mystery, and a fascinating one. It had absolutely everything a conspiracist could want: a secret society, mind-blowing technology, occultism, mad scientists, and even a little sex.
But did any of it actually happen?
The short answer is no. Matheny has long since set the record straight on Ong’s Hat (kind of) – see, for instance, this interview by New World Order Disorder magazine.
The longer answer is that while Ong’s Hat didn’t actually harbor a cult of time-tripping sex magicians, the entire project was a hugely successful act of culture-jamming. The creators of the Incunabula (there were four of them, according to Matheny) set out to inject a story that had all the elements of pop esoterica into the intellectual ether just to find out if it would take on its own reality. And it did, much as the confabulated conspiracy in Foucault’s Pendulum developed flesh and bones without its authors’ agency.
Matheny didn’t stop there. He has been a shadowy hand behind any number of conspiracy theories, alternate reality games, and alternative histories – each derived from an actual urban legend or conspiracy meme. These may include (but are probably not limited to): The resurrection of the murderous Four Pi cult to which Charles Manson and David Berkowitz supposedly belonged, the Montauk Project experiments in mind control and interdimensional travel (more on that in another post in this series), and a deeply weird uber-conspiracy known as El Centro. No synopsis can do them justice, so I encourage you to explore for yourself…
Some links of interest:
Incunabula.org
El Centro.net
Joseph Matheny’s blog
Alexandra Bruce’s article on Ong’s Hat @ disinfo
Wikipedia entry for Ong’s Hat, New Jersey
An account of a visit to Ong’s Hat by Ben Ruset @ NJ Pine Barrens.com
Amazon.com: Henry Charles Beck’s 1936 book Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey
Ong’s Hat: The Beginning (2002) by Joseph Matheny
The Inculabula Papers CD-ROM (1999) by Joseph Matheny
The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time (1992) by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon (first book of the Montauk trilogy)
Swallowing The Camel 
Great series! This is the first I've heard of these stories, can't wait to hear more!
Kind of makes me think. I am too honest for it, but.. given how easy it is to make up, and have believed, this sort of thing, could one undermine one set of conspiracy theories with another? For example, Lazar's claims could be recast not as a real expert whose identity was erased, but you could dig up some initials some place in some "other" projects, claim he was brainwashed, while he worked as janitor, to *believe* that he had expertise in the field, and the other elements of his story, thereby distracting people, for decades, away from the *real* project being run. Things like his 115 are simple to explain in such context. They didn't know how unstable or radioactive it was, or even that it *could* exist, so there was no reason at the time to come up with a more plausible material.In other words, you could point out cases of people that supposedly disappeared, or really where killed, imply, very clearly, that there is no way the government would have simply let him walk away, and worse, publish, unless they *wanted* him to. It would have been so much easier to just arrange an accident and removed the problem entirely. So, something else must be going on, and the obvious explanation is, "He is a patsy, specifically created to draw people in the wrong direction, and… he doesn't even know it himself."Sadly, this would take a lot of work to pull off, but it would be almost worth it, just so I could show a few of the wackos I know personally the "detailed" evidence that Lazar was a plant in the UFO community, and not its great hero. Would be funnier than hell to watch the gears chip and cease up in their heads. lolAnd, maybe it could be done cleverly enough to suggest a "real" thing, like stealth research, and nothing at all to do with UFOs, and a few people would start looking for real secrets, not bullshit ones. Ah, who am I kidding…
Crazily enough, Kagehi, everything you've suggested is actually one theory that's been put forward to explain Bob Lazar (and other people with equally weird tales). Some view his story as pure disinfo, whether or not he's aware of it, cooked up by the military. And there may be a (small) kernel of truth here. In the Paul Bennewitz affair, another resident of New Mexico was allegedly the target of a military disinfo campaign after he intercepted some electronic signals that he interpreted as alien messages – they were really Army or Air Force communications, secret ones. So to make sure that his information wasn't believed even if he did leak it to the public, somebody allegedly decided to discredit the guy by having other members of the UFO community tell him ultra-bizarre stories about UFOs, alien abductions, etc. A scenario like this could, just possibly, be behind the Lazar story. That could explain why he stopped behaving quite like other UFO hoaxers. He never wrote a book, didn't go on the lecture circuit, etc.There's also the (slim) possibility that someone staged an elaborate hoax on Lazar, either as disinfo or as some kind of experiment. That theory would go something like this: He was approached by someone in the military about working on a top secret project, then taken to a facility where experimental craft were stored and given lots of bogus info about them. Jacques Vallee referred to the job Lazar supposedly had as "pure theatre", implying that he believed Lazar may have been duped into believing he was part of a secret project. But IMO the likeliest explanation is that Lazar and/or his buddies concocted a story they figured would bring in some money and/or lend some "credibility" to the weird UFO claims they were making at that time. John Lear, for one, wasn't above a hoax now and then. Some of the stories he was telling in the '80s were so absurd that I don't see how he could have believed them. He's a reasonably intelligent guy, and reasonably intelligent people don't believe that cattle mutilations are being conducted so that aliens can have a blood supply with which to transfuse themselves, or that the government destroys all the civilian records of a source who (as you pointed out) they could easily have killed but didn't. Lear and another guy also invented the Krill story around the same time that Lazar surfaced. Why some ufologists insist on hoaxing each other in this way I don't understand, but it seems to be part of their nature.
Crazily enough, Kagehi, everything you've suggested is actually one theory that's been put forward to explain Bob Lazar (and other people with equally weird tales). Some view his story as pure disinfo, whether or not he's aware of it, cooked up by the military. And there may be a (small) kernel of truth here. In the Paul Bennewitz affair, another resident of New Mexico was allegedly the target of a military disinfo campaign after he intercepted some electronic signals that he interpreted as alien messages – they were really Army or Air Force communications, secret ones. So to make sure that his information wasn't believed even if he did leak it to the public, somebody allegedly decided to discredit the guy by having other members of the UFO community tell him ultra-bizarre stories about UFOs, alien abductions, etc. A scenario like this could, just possibly, be behind the Lazar story. That could explain why he stopped behaving quite like other UFO hoaxers. He never wrote a book, didn't go on the lecture circuit, etc.There's also the (slim) possibility that someone staged an elaborate hoax on Lazar, either as disinfo or as some kind of experiment. That theory would go something like this: He was approached by someone in the military about working on a top secret project, then taken to a facility where experimental craft were stored and given lots of bogus info about them. Jacques Vallee referred to the job Lazar supposedly had as "pure theatre", implying that he believed Lazar may have been duped into believing he was part of a secret project. But IMO the likeliest explanation is that Lazar and/or his buddies concocted a story they figured would bring in some money and/or lend some "credibility" to the weird UFO claims they were making at that time. John Lear, for one, wasn't above a hoax now and then. Some of the stories he was telling in the '80s were so absurd that I don't see how he could have believed them. He's a reasonably intelligent guy, and reasonably intelligent people don't believe that cattle mutilations are being conducted so that aliens can have a blood supply with which to transfuse themselves, or that the government destroys all the civilian records of a source who (as you pointed out) they could easily have killed but didn't. Lear and another guy also invented the Krill story around the same time that Lazar surfaced. Why some ufologists insist on hoaxing each other in this way I don't understand, but it seems to be part of their nature.
You may also be interested in plumbing the depths of "Proofs of My Return" by John Palifox Key. Or maybe not. 🙂
Thanx for the tip, cc. I'll definitely add something about that.
[url=http://vonmertoes.net/][img]http://bariossetos.net/img-add/euro2.jpg[/img][/url][b]free academic software, [url=http://bariossetos.net/]order management software[/url][url=http://bariossetos.net/][/url] macromedia flash 5 software collect data electronically with adobe acrobat 9software for retail shop [url=http://vonmertoes.net/]softwares canada[/url] discount software australia[url=http://hopresovees.net/]mcafee free download for windows xp[/url] top educational software[url=http://vonmertoes.net/]kaspersky virus[/url] buy adobe photoshop 5sales in software [url=http://vonmertoes.net/]store finder software[/b]
in this moment there's a video about a women in 1940 walking and talking with a cell phone, hoax or true? please analyze the video and tell me your version to make a comparision with 2R2D version.
Thanks for this post, I think I've found my new favorite hoax busting website. I came across the Ong's Hat story about fifteen years ago, when I was a lot more gullable and thought a lot more about conspiracy theories. As an experiment in culture jamming, this clearly worked – maybe too well, looking at some of the other responses. Listen, folks – if it sounds too good to be true, so on and so forth…
For whatever reason, a few weeks ago I remembered reading these original stories way-back-when in the early days of the internet (for me it was BBS’ing back in ’92 or ’93). I could not for the life of me remember enough of the details to get anything meaningful out of Google. Until today — ‘interdimensional travel lemur’ — and this was on the second page of search results.
It was great to get an update on this story. Not that I really believed it ever initially — I was an excitable teenager and these stories were just what a scifi geek would love.