Ong's Hat

Ong's Hat is one of the earliest Internet-based secret history conspiracy theories. It was created as a piece of collaborative fiction by four core individuals, dating back to the 1980s, although the membership propagating the tale changed over time. Ong's Hat is often cited as the first alternate reality game on many lists of ARGs. The characters were largely based in the ghost town of Ong's Hat, New Jersey, hence the name of the project... Joseph Matheny eventually concluded the project.[1][3] GamesTM magazine wrote that "Ong’s Hat was more of an experiment in transmedia storytelling than what we would now consider to be an ARG but its DNA – the concept of telling a story across various platforms and new media – is evident in every alternate reality game that came after... The Ong's Hat narrative is told in the form of conspiracy theories surrounding a group of renegade Princeton professors who had conducted quantum physics and chaos theory experiments to discover a new theory for dimensional travel using a device called "the egg", and were camped out in a parallel world.[3] Their story is introduced through two documents, Incunabula: A Catalog of Rare Books, Manuscripts & Curiosa, Conspiracy Theory, Frontier Science & Alternative Worlds and Ong's Hat: Gateway to the Dimensions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ong%27s_Hat

see https://josephmatheny.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/secret.pdf