Why Did the Scientists in This Remote Cabin Disappear?

hey 42 here if you walk the long and winding betona trail through the dense new jersey pine barrens you'll eventually stumble upon a small abandoned hamlet well i say hamlet it's more of a hut called aung's hat countless random hikers still show up there every year entranced and obsessed by the stories about this place and searching for a mysterious gateway to another dimension yes you heard me right today nestled amongst a 1.1 million acre forest aung's hat is little more than the abandoned ruins of a shed but in the 1860s this was a lively village with a reputation for bootleg alcohol and prize fighting so it was a lovely place to spend your evenings if you wanted to get punched in your liver or poison it ong's hats nomenclature is just as much an enigma as its dark and unsettling history which don't worry i'm about to tell you in just a moment according to local legends the name comes from an early settler in the pine barrens jacob ung ung was a bit of a a strutting peacock of a man he would go out of his way to impress the local ladies with his fabulous clothes ong's most prized possession was a silk hat off displayed proudly on his fopish head the story goes that a jealous lover took exception to him being flirtatious at a local dance one night so she yanked the glorious hat right off his exquisitely cuff your head threw it onto the floor and stamped all over it like a spider in the bath distressed at seeing his baby abused aung threw a paddy then lobbed his hat into a nearby tree where it remained lodged in the branches for many years and ultimately became a marker for the village itself by the late 1980s however ong's hat had left its best days behind the descendants of those early settlers had long since moved to greener pastures and all that remained was a single decaying shed but this old place hides an old secret rumors began circulating after a mysterious photocopied pamphlet popped up in various locations all around new jersey in the late 80s plastered on the pamphlet was a title that seized the attention of local residents ong's hat gateway to the dimensions it was supposedly published by the institute of chaos studies and moorish science ashram and opened with a sentence that would make any conspiracy buff go weak at the knees you would not be reading this article if you had not already penetrated halfway to the institute of chaos studies you have been searching for us without knowing it wow whose curiosity wouldn't be peaked by that mine is and i already know it's probably a load of bollocks according to the pamphlets the pine barrens were home to the moorish science ashram a commune set up in 1978 by seeker of spiritual enlightenment and international carpet salesman wally fard he'd been traveling all around the east india persia afghanistan dipping his toes into all sorts of spiritual practices from indian tantric to the islamic practice of sufism doing his very best to flug a few turkish rugs along the way and he must have been a pretty good salesman because when he returned to america he'd made enough money to purchase 200 acres of land in the pine barrens it was here he founded the aforementioned moorish science ashram where fard and his converts would spend their days indulging in all kinds of bizarre pseudo-scientific nonsense apparently the spiritual rhythms in the place were ideal for that kind of thing and spiritual rhythms are something you should always ask your estate agent about when by england whilst the inhabitants of the ashram were trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe by jumping up and down cross-legged on a mattress it just so happened a couple of real scientists twins frank and althea dobbs showed up in nearby aung's hat well i say real scientists frank and alfie had been kicked out of princeton university under charges of seditious nonsense i should not for experimenting in chaos studies so they took their chaotic curiosities into their own hands by building a secret lab at ung's hat before long fard and the dubs twins combined their nut job research programmes morris science ashram and the institute of chaos studies respectively and began working together mixing their knowledge of things like classical physics meditation quantum mechanics and alchemy into one big stew of insanity after a few months and after their membership numbers had swelled significantly they had garnered enough knowledge and followers to build a mysterious device called the egg yeah it was roughly the size of a small car and was described as a modified sensory deprivation chamber it had a computer terminal electrodes which could be taped to the body to collect data and a helmet which could sonically stimulate brain cells the original purpose of the egg was for the researcher to be shrunk to atomic size and descend to the quantum level like sci-fi micro naughts as the pamphlets described with the goal of discovering the point at which a wave becomes a particle known as the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics and thus solve schrodinger's famously unsolvable dead cat in box but the first time the egg was fired up something unexpected happened it didn't shrink because you know that would be totally expected and normal but it disappeared into thin air and then as the pamphlet so eloquently puts it for about seven minutes the entire ics lost its collective cool at that point however the egg reappeared with its passenger intact and beaming like alice's cheshire cat rather than schrodinger's poor victim the man explained he traveled to an alternate dimension in a forest very much like the pine barrens everything was exactly the same the earth was lush with nature but with one crucial difference in this dimension human life had never developed he was alone after this discovery things started to go really wrong for the ashram and ics there was a nuclear accident at a nearby military base which threatens the residents with radiation poisoning and government agents carried out a violent raid on the compound in order to destroy the egg things were all getting a little too chaotic for them and this is a group that called itself the institute of chaos studies i mean sure they were doing their best to rip apart the fabric of space and time but was a bit of peace and quiet too much to ask faced with the possibility of more inconsiderate interruptions they unanimously decided it was time to emigrate not to another forest but another world remember they had just conveniently created a device the egg that traveled through a gateway to another dimension so sure enough they transported everything to this other world trailers huts laboratories you name it leaving behind only a small building to obscure the gateway from praying guys and presumably they're still up to building egg-shaped tardises and other weird in this alternative dimension to this day and all we have now is their story fully divulged in the aforementioned pamphlet the pamphlet also reveals that these universe hoppers still travel back to our world every now and then to pick up vital supplies specifically books computers and coffee now books and computers fair enough but you must have a pretty extreme caffeine addiction if you're willing to travel between universes just to pick up a jar of nest cafe no unfortunately i have a rather large confession to make no not that and this may come as somewhat of a shock if you're mental all of what i just told you is completely made up aung's heart is a real place and there is an abandoned hut there but the rest of the story secret science camps in the forest eggs and a gateway to another dimension that's all fake i know it all seems so utterly believable but bear with me i'm not just telling made-up campfire stories for the sake of it well perhaps a little the fictional story of what happened at ung's hat is unlike other fables because it has a really interesting backstory of its own you see the story of aung's hat just so happens to be the internet's very first viral hoax the story of aung's hat and the egg was first published in 1988 in a magazine called edge detector it was credited to writer peter wilson a friend of one joseph muffini who would later turn out to be the story's primary creator mafini is a writer from chicago who is fascinated by alternate reality games and aung's hat was his masterpiece thought to be the first alternate reality game that spread via the early internet and captivated the minds of millions if you're unsure what an alternate reality game is you may have heard of a creepypasta which is essentially the same thing a creepy often paranormal story copied and pasted around the internet and elsewhere and modified by random individuals along the way who add to and expand on its backstory so much so that it can reach the point where it's difficult to differentiate if the story did actually take place in the real world or not particularly as they often blend facts with fiction so in 1989 mufini and friends were leaving photocopies of the un's hat pamphlet in places like coffee shops magazine racks in stores along the pine barrens hiking trails and anywhere else curious minds dissatisfied with their real lives might stumble across it soon enough they were offering the brochure through mail order and advertising it in places like ufo newsletters and paranormal magazines and then in 1990 it was published at a popular book catalogue called incunabula a collection of descriptions of books and papers on alternative worlds and alternative science mafini's idea was to get the story of aung's hat published in his many different publications and locations as possible to give the story he'd made up veracity so if any intrepid conspiracist went down the rabbit hole of research he would find a slew of source material and references and it worked to a certain extent by the mid to late 90s the mystery of aung's hat and the egg had piqued the interest of countless travelers and conspiracists but just when it seems the story of aung's hat had spread as far as 20th century technology would allow something called the internet came along and miffini suddenly realized this new technology could transform his story from local curiosity to global conspiracy so he started posting the ung's hat story on every primitive web page he could find bulletin boards forums anything was fair game it spread fast and aung's hat obsessives started referring to themselves as eggheads filling forums and blogs with their own theories and findings and by the late 90s early 2000s people started to believe that just reading about aung's hat was doing weird things to them strange dreams were reported along with unusual visual perceptions to be fair i've had the very same side effects after visiting that weird corner of youtube you know the one mafini always claims the entire aung's hat thing was carried out in good fun and to be fair there were interviews available at the time where he clearly described it as a game in fact a photo of the aung's hat survivors in one of their many brochures and pamphlets is quite clearly a photo of american sitcom family the brady bunch it soon became obvious however that half of the so-called eggheads were failing to bite the bread crumbs mafini was leaving behind they were so invested in ung's hat mythology they refused to reconcile the reality in 1999 muffini published his book ong's hat the beginning then he spoke about aung's hat on a popular paranormal radio show coast to coast am and from here things started to get weird well more weird even though miffini had left many clues behind even in the original pamphlet that the uns hat story was made up just a game eggheads all around the world started taking it far too seriously and were demanding answers from him conspiracy theorists ufo obsessives and the genuinely mentally ill were hounding mafini for more information they sent him threatening emails phone calls letters and then they started showing up at his house by the year 2000 mafini was finding conspiracy theorists camped out on his lawn he was forced to march one intruder off his property at gunpoint one of these cracked eggheads even contacted muffini's employers claiming he was a dangerous liability which is a bit rich coming from people who genuinely believe in a new jersey vortex and so in 2001 he finally came clean he posted an open letter online to the effect that he no longer wanted anything to do with the whole aung's hat thing and concluded by saying i am glad to finally be myself again it was signed the real joe mafini but you can't keep a good tinfoil hat owner down for long and the conspiracy theorists weren't about to be satisfied by something as flimsy as the creator of the hoax coming out and saying the hoax is definitely a hoax so conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theory started to spread had the government got to miffini had they threatened him had someone bought his silence mafini's confession ultimately brought the harassment from strangers to an end well mostly but he still couldn't seem to help himself he clearly enjoyed playing with the egghead's paranoia giving vague answers to their questions and constantly keeping them guessing in 2001 he even worked as a consultant on an entirely new internet hoax based around the character of john teeter a time traveler from 2036 who made worrying predictions about nuclear war and other catastrophic events which turned out to be the creation of florida lawyer larry haber ultimately the story of aung's hat may not be real but its legacy is some say it's the first alternate reality game in history at least the first that went viral and there are still plenty of people out there today desperate to believe in the mythical egg and the presence of an interdimensional vortex somewhere around the ominous hut at aung's hat there are plenty of youtube videos of people hiking around the new jersey pine barrens searching for wrong's hat desperately hoping to uncover a gateway to another world and go for a ride in the egg and here are we to crush their hopes and dreams even if they are mental after all in this day and age where the internet is consumed by yet more args vr headsets and video games that enable you to shout violent profanity at people from all over the world the line between fiction and reality is blurrier than ever before thanks for watching you can get your hands on my book stick a flag in it over on amazon or on audible links to both in the description below thank you

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 1,604,724

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Id: NIG3x3kVtos

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021