With Instacart's preference picker, you can tell your shopper how you want your bananas, which matters, because your banana needs change. Monday you want smoothie ready. Wednesday you is stressing them straight from the peel between meetings. Friday you makes it into a banana split, because it's been a week and you deserve it.
So choose bananas that are ripe, almost ripe, or not ripe at all. And shop for every version of you. Want bananas just how you like? The preference picker is available at most retailers.
Download the Instacart app. Today I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch. Thank you very much. As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy.
The US Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and more. I'm Susan Matthews. In Slade's new season of Slowburn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick. We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment.
He is the most unpredictable vote on this court, including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him. Nobody saw the Gorsuch who would join the majority on this. He is the Justice, most likely to be a true wild card. This is judicial activity.
Slowburn, becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come. Out May 13, wherever you get your podcasts. The location stayed on maps into the 2000s.
And to this day, people show up in the Pine Barons looking for it. Onk's Hat, Hidden Village or whatever. We do have people occasionally pop in and just ask about it. Kim Hildick works for the Department of Environmental Protection at the Brandon T.
Burns State Forest in New Jersey, where Onk's Hat is located. There's nothing out there. It's nothing that anyone has ever been able to find that I know of. So it's 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 Barons, near Onk'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 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 moved 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 Onksat ashram, and you guys were kids, I know, but did you actually, basically see one of the travel devices known as an egg that supposedly was housed at the Onksat ashram?
I did, I didn't know. I knew the problem, flying out 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, that's the essence of the Onksat legend. And the Onksat 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 Barons, looking for Onksat.
So we're trying to find a band of town called Onksat, here in the Pine Barons, it's supposed to be a gateway to another dimension, is that what it says? That's a YouTube video from a user called That Handsome Devil. 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 Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm please see the critic Willa Pascam.
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 Onksat 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 crowd-sourced conspiracy theory. But there is still one man who is primarily responsible for Onksat, a mastermind who wasn't trying to burp a conspiracy theory, but who unleashed one nonetheless. Today on Decodering, what is Onksat?
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The way that most people first heard the story of Onksat was through a piece of writing called Onksat, 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, some-is-dot publications, Greg Pot, 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 barons.
But the brochure is not the only source for the story. Here's the coder and producer of Benjamin Fresh. There's a second document, a cryptic catalogue of books called In Canabula, a catalogue 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 an Amazon, like Quantum Reality, a book by the physicist Nick Herbert. Each entry in the catalogue is like a mini essay describing one book. But taken altogether, the entries reveal a larger story, and alternatives the 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 Aung's hat 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 catalogue, 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 In Canabula Papers. If you couldn't tell, then not really into this thing.
It felt a little bit like I was going crazy. It's hard to describe, but one example, and the first time I felt like I was really falling down a rabbit hole was when I was reading an interactive version of the book catalogue. The entry about Nick Herbert, the physicist, and it took me to the real website for this real physicist, but it was a whole page dedicated to something called Quantum Tantra, which ties into the egg and the Aung's hat story. And it was just like this experience where truth and fiction drop away and you feel very vulnerable.
It's weird. And Ben felt this way right now in 2018. For people coming across Aung's hat at the beginning of the Internet age, who were interested in the subjects it touched upon, but had no way to figure out what it was, it felt even stranger. I was like, is this for real?
That's Michael Kinsella, a professor at Central Michigan University, who'd go on to write a book about Aung's hat. Legend tripping online, supernatural folklore, and the search for Aung's hat. But who first came across the material in the late 1990s. Some of this stuff, you know, it's grounded in some really highly speculative material, and I came across the document related to Aung's hat.
And they, if memory service me, right, it was a photograph of like the last remaining survivors known to have actually been at Aung's hat, and it was a photo of the Brady Bunch. 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, and the Brady Bunch. Who made this thing? To answer that, we have to go back to the 1980s, not to the Pine Barons of New Jersey, but to San Francisco, California.
Most pressing of all my interest 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 incantabula papers, supposedly investigating whether or not the Aung'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 than less of us, 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 French culture.
He loved zines and Xerox tome mailers that address 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 all weeklies. All the UFO stuff and paranormal stuff that you see on the internet now was sitting in a PO box somewhere waiting for you to send two dollars in a stamp envelope. And if you did that, then they would send you back their information, which they'd probably published via Xerox.
It was not hard. You just had to know the right channels. Mothini was so fascinated by the narrative possibilities of this kind of information exchange that he placed an ad in an all-weekly. I said that I had copies of a lost epistle that was found in a drawer of the Vatican's secret library.
And in fact, it was a story that I wrote. It was called the Epistle of Joranda Jugler, and it was about the last years of Christ. So I had him running away with a Roman circus and learning all the tricks about how to turn water into wine and walking out water and all these kind of things. I responded to the ad.
You would then send me a copy of the story. I would send you the Xerox copy of the story, yeah. This piece of playful speculative fiction, posing, not all that convincingly, as a piece of nonfiction, was part of a decades-long reality-bending counterculture literary tradition. Part of what Jesse Walker calls the ironic school of conspiracy in his book, The United States of paranoia.
There's this theory, and it's sort of more broadly in quote-unquote weird ideas, not only to believe or debunk them, but to have fun with them and sort of create this mutant mythos. This sort of thing was exemplified by works like the Illuminati's trilogy, a set of novels that both revelate in and send up conspiracy theory. These books are part of a whole group of satirical conceptual art projects from the 1960s and 70s, projects that included made-up religions and even a concerted effort to get rumors circulating about the Illuminati's involvement in various national events that push people to ask themselves what's real and what to put on. The ultimate aim thing for themselves, but of course some people define it as being gullible.
In 1989, Mothini 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. And making 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. You have been searching for this. That's from an audiobook version of the Incunavula Papers.
This story, which was titled Aung's Hat, Gateway to the Dimensions, is a text of the original brochure about the Aung's Hat ashram. It wasn't a brochure just yet, though. It was laid out like a magazine piece. But upon reading it, Mothini was inspired.
To the way out this indestop publishing on it and then started remailing it 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, Mothini 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 already received 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 then they stamp and send these things out for you with a return address and the postage shipment mark from Hong Kong. So it looks like you're getting what 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 Mothini 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, Mothini 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 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. Here's a number. Mothini's interest in BBS and his interest in Aung's Hat had originally been separate.
But after sending the original Aung's Hat story around in the mail for a few years, he started to do the same with 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, both the public and private ones. Around 1993, all the guys involved in mailing Aung's Hat out as well as a number of other thinkers and characters involved in French culture, philosophy, anarchy, conspiracy, and speculative fiction gathered for a conference in San Francisco.
One night, when a bunch of them were hanging out at Mothini's house, he explained his new idea to them. And I said, look, there's this thing called the bulletin board system and the internet. This new way of distributing text and it's going to revolutionize the way that we read and what we read and how we read it. I really want to go the next level and I have this idea for this new form of literature.
I'm sure I sounded like a crazy man. Peter Wilson just looked at me and I could just see that computers are not something he's interested in. So he's like, if you're going to do that, you do that. I don't want to do that.
So I'm like, okay, I'm going to do this alone. And I did. Mothini began putting the documents on bulletin board systems. Around this time, he also wrote two new documents, the interviews between Joseph Mothini and other people with knowledge of Aung's Hat.
And he put them on BBS as well. So by the early mid 90s, the cool... Hello, it's Clayton from LF Mattress with my God, the fellow there, and he's touch base. Give me a call back with touch base and yeah, talk to you soon.
Thanks. Even on BBS though, the papers were still being circulated on a relatively small community of like-minded people. These people might not have known what was true and what was false in the Incanabula papers, 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 Incanabula 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 Aung's Hat, into the Lebanon State Forest, to the Ranger Station, and stuffed the brochure rack with these brochures from the Aung's Hat Institute. And I called the Ranger out there one day and I said, do you ever see this brochure bubble? He goes, oh God, yes. 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 contacts that had previously existed around them began to disappear. Instead of being something recognizable, it's the people encountering it. The Aung's Hat story turned into something alien.
It turned into something new. With Instacart's preference picker, you can tell your shopper how you want your bananas, which matters, because your banana needs change. Monday you want smoothie ready. Wednesday you is stressing them straight from the peel between meetings.
Friday you makes it into a banana split, because it's been a week and you deserve it. So choose bananas that are ripe, almost ripe, or not ripe at all, and shop for every version of you. Want bananas just how you like? The preference picker is available at most retailers.
Download the Instacart app. Today I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch, the president, thank you very much. As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy. The US Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and more.
I'm Susan Matthews. In Slate's new season of Slowburn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick. We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment. He is the most unpredictable vote on this court, including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him.
Nobody saw the Gorsuch would join the majority on this. He is the justice, most likely to be a true wild card. This is judicial activist. Slowburn, becoming Justice Gorsuch.
It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come. Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Aung's hat.
There were now hundreds of references to it on the internet, with Matheny seeing 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 any younger, who was 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, like, almost like art house website, where they would have these fractal images and, like, a little poetic saying below them. And you would 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 the very bottom of it.
The first bit of information that I found was kind of telling the tallest of tall tales about the Incunabula. 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 being the nexus point where people would compare and contrast the different things they had discovered or found out about the story.
There was lots of new stuff to discover. Methini 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. Methini, for example, dropped hints that Emery Cranston, the supposed publisher of Incunabula Catalog, had a Hotmail account.
If you took a chance and emailed Emery under score Cranston at Hotmail.com, you'd get a response from a bot that Methini 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 just 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 Aung's Hat, New Jersey, where Methini had buried some things.
One box had Buffalo Head, Nickel, an Eagle Feather, an old pharmacy bottle that you 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 Kajiano, 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, like, 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 Aung's Hat experience, or they were just a coincidence, or they even happened at all. But strange coincidences and synchronicities are something that people into the Incanavula Papers report experiencing, or maybe just noticing in unusually large numbers. Here's Denny Unger again.
And it really only happened at that period in 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. And this is a very common experience when you're digging into Aung's Hat stuff. I had a couple of these while working on this episode.
Umberto Echo, the novelist and semi-attition, 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 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 Aung's Hat, it gave them a little extra sizzle. Matheny says that Aung'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. I was reading the website and this really odd synchronicity happened. And a lot of that, I mean, a lot of emails. It's a personal spiritual that they had, an experience that they had.
Not anything I did, anything the story did, but what they did. To a certain extent, Matheny stoked this confusion. He was regularly on the boards in character as a lead investigator of Aung's Hat materials. A man who seemed to have a special connection to the papers.
He was any younger in 1999 or 2000 when he did a few web radio broadcasts about Aung's Hat, describing to his listeners how he believed Matheny fit into the picture. Joseph Matheny had himself has said that when he first received the documents, he didn't believe him, he thought it was a joke, but he did plan to see it 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 and so he kind of made it more. Matheny would also use the boards to stay abreast of the conversation. Often, planning 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 about was quirky individual websites. You know, physicists who made web pages for themselves and then made web pages 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, friendier kinds of science briefly seem more plausible? Like if the internet was possible?
If it 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's only apps that can already monitor your sleep and the quality of your sleep. 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 Drown, the founder of Alif Mattresses, one of our sponsors.
At its peak, around the year 2000, there were thousands of people actively engaged with Aung's Hat, discussing and analyzing it on message boards, looking for clues, trying to parse the real from the fake. The any undersight dark planet online had become a major hub for all of this inquiry. And the people using it came from many different backgrounds. There was accountants and housewives and artists and science, some people with science backgrounds.
If I didn't say this, I would be lying. In the mix of that, there was kind of like a quarter of that population that were just absolutely crazy, crazy people that were drawn to the material and took a super deep dive into it. Meanwhile, Matheny was doing everything he could to spread Aung'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.
Nobody would shoot us away for a second. It was very important for when I got the line out. They were supposed to be what I knew then. This 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 straight. And so I did. And lo and behold, coast of coast called me. And I thought to myself, 20 million listeners, can I do better than that?
No. Okay. So I played straight. I admit.
I'm gonna be a couple. I felt here we are back at it. But have you with us Mike Segal, we were talking with Joseph Mafini. And we were talking about ultimately leading up to dimensional travel life.
This is a major turning point for the Aung's 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 deep 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. In the beginning, I kind of felt it myself. And as time progressed and more and more things started to come forward, just the very fact that I started finding out that there was a scientific group in this area at all.
It 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 his 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, was a core part of the Aung'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 at the time, so I was way into it.
That's Vinny Kajano again. As Aung'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 hokster.
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 PT 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 synchronicity as mentioned earlier.
People were having synchronicistic 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 Kolsky started. From Matheny, who estimates he's been contacted by tens of thousands of people about Aung'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 it 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 to, 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 Aung's Hat completely, they started to ruin the experience from 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, and they don't make the environment pleasant, and they started to make the game unpleasant.
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Fees and in-store offer exclusions apply. Hey, I'm Anna Sale, the host of Death, Sex and Money, an interview show here at Slate. And I want to tell you about a very exciting event coming up in June. I am hosting a live episode taping at the Tribeca Festival featuring Peter Dinklage and his wife, Eric Eshmit.
Peter Dinklage, a game of thrones, my favorite film, The Station Agent, and Eric Eshmit, who is a director, screenwriter, playwright. They are married, and we're going to talk about making art separately in collaboration and how they've built their life around that. Join us. It should be a great event.
It's their first joint interview they've done ever together, and we are so glad at Death, Sex and Money to be back at the Tribeca Festival. The show is June 10th in New York City at the SVA Theater at 5.30 p.m. Get your tickets at TribecaFilm.com.com. See you there.
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Then I have a podcast for you. I'm Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio. Each week we hear from some of the most fascinating scholars and thinkers as we tackle big topics, like how whales became the face of environmental activism, how to succeed at failing, and whether public transportation should be free. Go ahead, listen to Freakonomics Radio wherever you get your podcasts.
I do not have the answer. There are no answers. There are only questions in this game. If you were to look up Aung'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, perfones, texts, chats, bots, real-life encounters, to engage players in a kind of boundary-less play, presenting them with puzzles and mysteries no one person could solve by him or herself. At the same time, the methini 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 Weismann from Microsoft as a tie-in to the Steven Spielberg movie AI. It's probably helpful to think of Aung's hat as a scruffy experimental prototype, and ARGs like the Beast as a more professionalized gamer-oriented final product. Both involved intricate mythologies of skier 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.
Aung's hat in comparison had no end. The clues didn't lead to anything but more mystery. The journey was the destination. Still, like Aung's hat, the Beast faithfully abided by one rule, that this is not a game.
This is not a game, 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 had the most insight into why Aung's hat fell apart. Why this is not a game ethos almost predicted the sour turn Aung's hat eventually took. It was a Beast co-creator, Elon Lee.
At one point for the Beast, he planned an event in Chicago at a bar, pushing higher in 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 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, so they followed him thinking, why is this corpse walking around? And he got on to 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 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 I had to bail these guys out of jail and we had to talk to the authorities and we had to clarify all this stuff. Lee, like Mafini 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 a foul 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. 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, even the case of Onksat, 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. In August of 2001, troubled by the fan response and seeing bigger and more corporate ARGs like the Beast, Mafini 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 Onksat 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. The idea that there's something to Onksat persists. Bits and pieces of the story have survived in other conspiracy theories.
And people still visit Onksat New Jersey looking for that interdimensional portal. Here's any younger again. It gave me a very different perspective on reality in a really positive way. It was an ARG.
It was a very noble cost. You think it might not be so? The way that the material tried to tease out certain personality types was interesting to me. It didn't feel like an ARG.
It felt like a recruitment tool. I mean, Joseph would hate me saying this because I think he just wants a damn thing. But I think that there's a possibility that the idea of a trabicle 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. Methini would really hate this. I'm so over it, man. You have no idea how over it.
It turns out that being known for creating one of the first ARGs is actually kind of complicated. For one thing, though Methini still makes games, he doesn't really make ARGs anymore. Very few people do. They become extremely hard to scale.
Players have gotten so savvy that the amount of resources one would need to mount a game is enormous. It can really only happen with the backing of a really lucrative marketing tie-in, which might undermine the strange and mysterious vibe of any game, and would certainly undermine Methini's non-commercial philosophy. The most common, contemporary equivalent of an ARG is actually not on a computer at all. When you and some friends pay to spend an hour in a room, seated with clues and puzzles you have to solve in order to be able to free yourself before your time is up.
Escape rooms, unlike ARGs, don't have to outsmart millions of internet users at once, and they have a built-in business model. Hey, Willow, Clay. I'm not kidding around here. Just give me a call back, alright?
Wars from Methini, and the fact that he moved past ARGs is the way that his work on Aung's Hat 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. For one thing, I've received an awful lot of email in the last six months accusing me of being the person behind QAnon. QAnon is a still ongoing, far-right conspiracy theory that supposes various politicians, Hollywood actors, and government officials are part of a child sex trafficking ring trying to bring down the Trump administration.
I know it's you! And that doesn't make me happy. 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 synchronousities into something meaningful.
Aung'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 Aung'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 went confronted with the truth, with an explanation, with an ending, wanted instead to keep suffering. 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, 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 Aung'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, when 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. Personally, I have to say, I don't find the story of the Aung's Hat story all that dark, because I can't get over how generous the whole thing is. It's like if you're smartest, weirdest friend, put echo and pinche in the book and bore his 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 Kajiano.
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 Aung's Hat, 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. Aung's Hat never literally transported anyone to another Earth, but also it did.
This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Passkin. Hi Clayton, this is Willa Passkin. Hey Willa, listen.
Something to do with Alif is something to do with mattresses or sleep. It's finished. We're happy with it. It's going up in a week.
We don't have time to crash another episode, not that we would. I actually don't quite understand the like why we're speaking. This is me telling you that the episode needs to be called. 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. I thought I was... I'm dead serious, Willa.
And we're concerned that if you err it, be concerned. We're airing the episode. I'm not, I am not threatening you, Willa, but I am telling you that if you do err this episode, you will regret it. Alright, now have a good night.
You can find me on Twitter at Willa Passkin. And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to code, you can email us at decoderangatslake.com. You haven't yet subscribed and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or ever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends.
This podcast was co-written and edited by Willa Passkin 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, Daniel Hewitt, Hayley Gavin, Matthew Desm, Dan Coist, 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 Aung's hat was an indispensable resource.
Thanks for listening. We'll see you next month. In a warning, if you keep listening to this episode... Hey, hey, hey.
Sorry, we have the time. What's going on? Did you just see those guys? The...
Sorry, what? No, I was... These guys in black, they just like walked in and then they took my computer. Who?
All my hard drives like 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.
Aung's hat or whatever it's called. We can't do that in a week. We don't have a chill... How about we can't get back?
There's like no thing or thinking about it. No, the only people that have it now is what they have. I guess it's probably on their website somewhere. That's totally useless to us.
I mean, unless somebody were 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.
What do we try? Because they're watching us while we sleep. Men in black just came and took all of my stuff. She took all of my stuff.