The Incunabula Papers
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2018
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Ong's Hat, or The Incunabula Papers, is a conspiracy theory that arose on the early internet. Combining cutting edge science, mysticism, and obvious hokum, it intrigued thousands of people who tried to find out what it all meant. Today we uncover the secrets of Ong's Hat, the man behind it, and the new art form it inadvertently birthed. Check out our showpage at slate.com/culture/decoder-ring
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The pine barrens is a forest of over a million acres that sprawls across the southern part of New Jersey. |
| 0:11.4 | It's thick with pines, oaks, wildlife, and carnivorous plants, but it's called the barons because of its acidic, sandy soil, |
| 0:19.2 | which prevented early settlers from cultivating crops there. |
| 0:22.8 | And so the pine barons is barren in another sense, too. |
| 0:26.1 | There's almost no one there. |
| 0:30.1 | Starting in the late 1700s, a place in the northwest corner of the pines, a town called Aung's Hat, started appearing on maps. |
| 0:39.1 | Aung was the surname of a family that had lived in the area, but it's unlikely there was ever a real |
| 0:44.2 | settlement there, beyond just a building or two. Still, the location stayed on maps into the 2000s, |
| 0:50.2 | and to this day, people show up in the Pine Barons looking for it. |
| 0:54.2 | Ang's hat, hidden village or whatever. |
| 0:58.2 | We do have people occasionally pop in and just, you know, ask about it. |
| 1:03.5 | Kim Hildick works for the Department of Environmental Protection at the Brandon T. Burn State Forest in New Jersey, where Aung's Hat is located. |
| 1:11.9 | There's nothing out there. It's nothing that anyone has ever been able to find that I know of. |
| 1:17.2 | Let's put it that way. |
| 1:19.8 | These searchers aren't just looking for a hidden village, though. |
| 1:24.0 | 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. |
| 1:35.6 | It was for seekers interested in studying spirituality, radical politics, tantra, psychopharmacology, and other counterculture interests. |
| 1:49.0 | 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. |
| 1:58.0 | By the late 80s, they had developed a device called the egg to explore something called |
| 2:05.4 | cognitive chaos. It was a kind of modified sensory deprivation chamber. They were hoping |
| 2:11.6 | it would help them experience the point at which a wave becomes a particle. But during a test |
| 2:17.0 | of the egg, with a young man inside of it, the whole thing just disappeared. |
... |
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