Ong’s Hat: how a real place acquired an invented portal

A story designed to travel

Joseph Matheny describes the Incunabula/Ong’s Hat project as a story distributed through many media between 1988 and 2001. Zines, bulletin-board systems, books, recordings, radio, telephone trees and faxes all carried parts of it. His account is a creator’s retrospective description, rather than independent verification of every distribution claim.

Instead of arriving as a single conventional novel, the material invited readers to follow apparent documents and references. That form helps explain how a wooded New Jersey place-name could acquire an elaborate second life among people who had never been there.

The fictional scientists

A 2021 essay in Princeton’s student writing journal Tortoise analyzes the project’s reception. It describes a brochure and an apparent physicist interview that gave the invented interdimensional-travel story the appearance of a research trail. The essay identifies Matheny as a fiction storyteller and discusses how some readers took the material literally. Its publication on a university website is literary analysis, not institutional confirmation of the fictional experiments.

Separate histories at one place-name

The settlement, a 1926 skull inquiry, the documented 1934 triple killing, and the later portal narrative have different evidence trails. The 1926 report did not identify the skull or establish a double murder. A real location and a genuine crime do not authenticate the fictional laboratory. The productive research question is how particular versions circulated: dated zines, archived websites and surviving recordings can show when a story element appeared. Matheny’s later editions are evidence of the project’s continuing publication, not a change in the physical history of the place.