Interview with Emory Cranston, the enigmatic character of the first underground web neo-mythology of the Incunabula Papers and Ong's Hat
(2/1/2002)
Jonathan Bright: First of all, allow me to congratulate you for your contribution to -whatever length this may extend- the project Incunabula! …Then, of course, I have to make clear that I will be looking for lots of answers. "Emory Cranston" is a character who, in the story of Incunabula, appears rather like "Morpheus" in "the Matrix". Since the first generation Incunabula site had been out on the web much earlier, do you believe that the writers of the movie were actually influenced by the site?...
Emory Cranston: The Incunabula catalogue went on the first BBS systems worldwide in 1989, and into the Internet proper in 1992. The writers of "the Matrix" have admitted to a Hollywood agent friend of ours, that they indeed were partially influenced by the Incunabula. The Matrix scenario, in which we are trapped within an artificial reality from which we can awake and become empowered, is a part of what we are talking about. You will notice that we include it in the new Frequency Catalog.
J.B: I certainly would appreciate an official view from the inside, in regards to the value of the stories of Incunabula and the Ong's Hat. They could easily be refuted as a hoax, but it doesn't seem to me that everything just popped out of Emory Cranston or Joseph Matheny's head. ...Where does the truth stop?
E.C: That's an interesting question and one I ask myself quite often. You see, even people who are neck deep in I/OH can't quite answer that. As "Emory Cranston", a name I 've used since 1986, of course I should know. Where did this all come from?… Well, there are 3 books coming out that will explain just that. That it will take 3 books to explain it all says something in and of itself. The curious thing is that there are several people running about that claim to be "in the know" on this, yet they are people that we have not worked with in the past, nor are we have working with them at present. All I can surmise is that they are disinformation agents in the employ of some 3 letter Amerikkkan intelligence agency, or worse one of those "no letter" agencies that transcend even the Amerikkan shadow government circles. Nonetheless, we push on…
Here are the facts, straight from the horses mouth. This story goes back to the beginning of the second world war. During the early post Pearl Harbor days of WW2, Amerikkka suddenly found itself in the position of having it's eastern seaboard invaded by German U-Boats (look up the story of the one that actually beached itself in ) and it's western seaboard invaded by Japanese submarines. Feeling behind in the race, so to speak, the military industrial complex was born and given carte blanche to proceed with any means necessary, to get ahead in the war. From this came many projects, including the Ong's Hat project, the Montauk project, and more. The military got it's brain power for a lot of these programs from Princeton University, which in fact is located very near Ong's Hat. See the current Hollywood movie, 'A Beautiful Mind' for a mainstream look into that group of minds. Also, read the opening chapters to Neal Stephenson's 'Crytponomicon'. Looking at a 11 April 1984 interview with Princeton mathematician, John Tukey from one of those groups, we see this strange admission:
Tucker: Moulton, the editor of the Monthly at that time, wrote to me saying that he had this paper and the envelope was postmarked Princeton and he assumed that it was done by some people in math at Princeton. He said he would very much like to publish the paper, but there was a firm policy against publishing anything anonymous. He asked if I, or somebody else that he knew and could depend on, would tell him that the authorship would be revealed if for any reason it became legally necessary. I did not know precisely who they were, but I knew that John [Tukey] was one of them. He seemed to be in the thick of such things. John agreed that I could accept Moulton's terms. I sent a letter with this assurance to Moulton and he went ahead and published it. Which I thought was very flexible on...
Tukey: Somebody with a high principle. Pondiczery's official residence was in Ong's Hat, New Jersey, which is a wide place in the road going southeast from Pemberton, but it does appear on some road maps. There is a gas station that has a sign out about Ong's Hat
Aspray: But no sign for Pondiczery?
Tukey: No sign for Pondiczery. Spelled c-z-e-r-y, by the way. Not like the area of India,
Pondicherry, which is spelled c-h. Anyway, this was a good group, and I enjoyed its existence. I learned a lot from dinner table conversations.
(E.C:) To continue, further research into this area shows that the area of Ong's Hat was a popular weekend spot for the Princeton groups and has been used in a histiographic metafictional sense in this very context, by Neal Stephenson, in his seminal work, Cryptonomicon.
J.B: I have read the article about Pondiczery while researching the trustworthiness of the Incunabula story, and I must admit I had found very positive the fact that at least one secret scientific group had indeed been established in the very same area of Ong's Hat.
E.C: All these are described in detail in the book 'Ong's Hat: the beginning'. There you will read about Ong's Hat, 'Rod and Gun Club'. I think you will be able to put together the connection between a 'Rod and Gun' club in Ong's Hat with the Princeton 'weekender' phenomena and Tukey's 'dinner club' reference above for yourself.
Now, the Princeton connection alone is interesting, but I site this quote as well, from Preston Nichols, famous as the person who broke the silence and secrecy on the Montauk Project (from the Spring 2001 edition of The Montauk Pulse)
"In January of 1994, I was driving with Preston Nichols through the state of New Jersey and I told him a much abbreviated version of the story of Ong's Hat. He looked at me and said that he had worked there for a short period. Apparently, he had been sent to do something there from his employer on Long Island. The secret government was involved in some capacity. He also said that Duncan Cameron had worked there extensively, in an activity known as "Project Dreamsleep". This has now been popularized in a movie called "Dreamscape". Much of what Duncan was doing had to do with targeting the President Jimmy Carter (who was considered an enemy by at least one faction of the CIA, since he wanted to cut its budget, reduce its staff, and make it more honest…)".
(E.C:) So what does this mean? Well, it would seem to indicate that a group of scientists that were working on many secret projects wrote papers under pseudonyms and used the now deserted New Jersey Pine Barren Town of Ong's Hat as a 'residence' address for this endeavor. Why would they do such a thing? In an interview I did with a man who claimed to have been a young technical writer for one of these teams (name withheld by request), it was disclosed that some of the projects that the budding U.S. Military Industrial Complex were sponsoring may have, in the mind of the scientists, gotten into ethical 'gray areas'. Torn between duty to country and responsibility to the future of humankind, they 'leaked' certain information to the general populace using the 'fictional' character method. That they chose Ong's Hat for the residence of their fictional characters the deeper we progress in the research, the more suspicious it seems. Also, it is important to note that these teams showed a lot of concern regarding cryptography and the cracking of the "" codes, through which they were passing messages into the populace.
J.B: All these certainly are very important clues that may lead to the confirmation that something has indeed happened at Ong's Hat. But, exactly how do all these tie into you, the book catalog, and the ICS brochure?
E.C: I came across the brochure in the early 80s, and had heard the rumors of a para-military raid on a alternative settlement in the nearby Pine Barrens. I began to track down the clues and put the book catalog together as a roadmap for anyone who wished to follow the trail themselves. So, look at the book catalog as more of a roadmap for seekers than an actual book catalog. Some have been aware enough to recognize that. Others have fallen into the trap of "literalism" with this, and still others have decided to try and use this story as a vehicle to build their own personal "cult" of personality. The latter of are among the most despicable and usually the most mentally unstable. They are the ones directly responsible for hacking our server recently and for numerous physical attacks on several of our group recently. It is an unfortunate side effect that some people go completely insane if they come to this material with psychological baggage intact.
J.B: It is made clear that the Incunabula list was made to work as a map. The question is, does one have to read all these books (well, at least the existing ones) in order to see where the map is leading? Or the brief descriptions accompanying the titles in the list itself are providing sufficient clues?
E.C: To fully get what is being described on the Meta-levels you have to read the books described in the catalog. However, you can get a rough idea of what's being described by simply reading the catalog and brochure. You cannot fully resonate with the complete information field that is being transmitted. The circuit is "completed", so to speak, by integration into the human morphogenetic resonance field. This is similar to what the Gnostics described as the Gnosis process. Literally, to have intercourse with. Heinlein described this state of knowledge as "groking". It's almost ineffable, indescribable in words. It is the process of knowing intellectually (left brain) coupled with the process of intuitive knowing (right brain). That of course is a simplified Aristotelian or binary way of describing it, but our spoken language is insufficient.
J.B: I think I get what you mean, the process of enlightment through which we reach to a higher level of conscience (Another word sometimes used to describe this is "epiphany").
E.C: Ancient Hebrew notaricons could get closer to describing it properly, but again, the reader would have to be steeped in the mutli-dimensional visualizations in order to "grok" it.
J.B: I was wondering how deep Nick Herbert is involved in this?
E.C: He has gone renegade and started his own travel cult in the mountains of Santa Cruz, Ca. We've "lost him", so to speak. He has wandered back and forth between admitting he wrote the "lost book" attributed to him in the catalog, to denial, to confusion, to claiming a Nick from a alternate universe wrote it. All in all, Mr. Herbert has either caved in under the tremendous pressure of government mind control or he has been replaced with a "doppelganger".
J.B: Speaking of doppelgangers, …any chance of him and JM being the same person?
E.C: Since I've seen them together in the same room at the same time, the answer is still, "maybe".
J.B: Ok. J. Matheny and N. Herbert are probably two different persons. But what about Matheny and Cranston, then?… There certainly is a feeling that they, well, you, are the same person.
E.C: No. We are different people.
J.B: I understand Joe Matheny has been reported to have "vanished" into some other side, since last November. Any messages from there?
E.C: None. The strange thing is several people have reported seeing him in places like Peru, Costa Rica, Nepal, and even Pakistan. I'm told that his publisher has received a communique from someone claiming to be Joe and that he is trying to verify that now. Joe opened a entire can of worms with his MetaMachine experiments, which will be fully outlined in the book he left behind, Game Over?. In a nutshell, what he was attempting to do was build a device that could download "meta-books", or Akashic records, and commit them to print. A friend of mine, who was recently reading over the GO? manuscript commented that Joe was attempting to "hack heaven". That's one way to put. Another would be that he was attempting to build a Akashic Record player. The long and short of it is that several groups began to compete for access to the device and what it had recorded. Failing to achive that what happened next is anyone's guess.
J.B: Since there still exists this a conflict/war between the two camps (the ICS and the 3 letter agencies, as you put it), how has this developed lately?
E.C: Same old shit different day. We did notice that the pressure from the 3 letter groups seemed to ease up during the last US Presidential administration, and with the coup that occurred here in the US in 2001, it has picked back up to pre-Slick Willy levels. With the advent of the 09-11 events, even more pressure has been exerted. It's as if the 3 letters no longer fear having their actions identified. I'd call it "bravado and arrogance", if I had to put words to it.
J.B: I presume that after so many years and experiences in the genre, you must have discovered a lot more works (many of which will have been written recently), that would fit in the list. Are we then to expect an "Incunabula II" catalogue?.
E.C: The most recent "addition" is the Frequency addition, which is still being constructed. The most recent version is at http://www.incunabula.org/frequency/ Here's the newest problem that we are working on. The original catalog was structured in a way to dissuade monolithic thinking as much as possible. That goes for the distribution models as well. However, no matter how hard we have tried to keep it from becoming yet another "religion", there are those that just can't get past their own need for static answers and therefore we fell into a pattern of trying to defend the work from the new age goosestepping hive thinkers. We found that we were spending all our time trying to keep certain elements from "canonizing" the work and not enough time "progressing" it. Therefore, we have started all over again, taking some lessons learned along the way, and starting from scratch to introduce an new model of entrainment models. First things first. We need a new way to think. Therefore, we are spending more energy using new methods to introduce a new thinking pattern first, then the cypher models are introduced later. As we've often seen in the past, new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new reality models are usually met with fear and hostility in the beginning. To get a better idea of why that is, I'd recommend reading the works of Robert Anton Wilson and Antero Ali.
J.B: Ok. I'll be checking the Frequency page from time to time for the addition of the new catalogue.
E.C: You missed what I said in my last reply. For the record: The Frequency Edition IS the new catalog. It just isn't in a static, "perma-structure", sort of format. There are actually 74 different pieces of media listed in the Frequency. There's a linear flow listing here, although, we prefer that people use the interface at http://www.incunabula.org/frequency/ because that interface is designed to give the user a media pointer randomly, therefore removing the monolithic structure that a static document creates. This way, each reader encounters their own, unique form of the catalog. Also, this means that readers encounter a different catalog each time, synchronistically. This is part of the entrainment into "new thinking" that we feel we did not achieve with the last catalog.
I hope I have answered all your questions sufficiently.
J.B: Before you go, there are a couple of questions more. Speak to me of Hurqalya. The descriptions provided (ruins of ancient cities of an peculiar architecture, etc...) remind me of H. P. Lovecraft (himself a multi-dimensional traveller). Any body you know, who has been there?
E.C: More resonance legend, maybe roots of the same stories. You really need to keep your Jungian and Cultural Anthropologist's hats on at all times with this subject matter. I know people claim to have been there. Having traveled across dimensions myself, I can't say I "disbelieve" them. I think Lovecraft was working with the same strange resonance fields that emanate out of the New Jersey Pine Barrens area. See this website for a taste: http://www.wierdnj.com/
J.B: How does the "egg" work?
E.C: Considering the current political climate I will not answer that other than to say, all the clues are there in the catalog and the brochure.
J.B: Ok then, here's another one… How does the... "eggless" travel work?
E.C: Again, this is one of the questions that would compromise our current operations. The answer is in the catalog and the brochure.
J.B: Any communication with the "Others"? While on Earth-x, have you made any contact with those other beings mentioned?
E.C: Yes, we've made contact with those and a host of others. It seems that many different entities exist not only in other dimensions, but within our own, except we are usually unaware of them due to their frequencies being different. From time to time we can catch glimpses of them, or even attune ourselves to a frequency where contact can be made. Study the work of Sir John Dee for one method of entrainment and contact.
J.B: This reminds me of something that I read at the "Shadowers" site, linked to tetra.bot, Those "shadow people", mentioned in there (the shadows sometimes cought at the tip of our eye), could it be that they are just "others" travelling to Earth-our, or human travellers, in a dimension which is very close (at that time, almost touching) our own world?
E.C: Correct in a sense. The Shadower phenomena is usually the result of other entities being tuned in to by accident on the part of the receiver. In some cases the Shadowers are attempting to exert "subtle influences" in this Universe. Read Nick Herbert's description of "finesse" versus "force" in the skin science article. There you can gain some clues of how a unified group could subtlety have an effect in this Universe. Think about the long-term effect of water on rock or even the lifting of a boulder by many people placing a single finger on it. Subtle forces are the most effective, in the long term. They are not the most dramatic, but they are the most effective. In the Astrological sense, I would call this the Capricornian effect.
J.B: Then, of course they may also have to do with the "voladores", or the "guardian"/watchman angels, who do move in this level very fast (thus the Greek word for "nephilim" is "egrigoroi", which means "they who move rapidly")
E.C: Very astute observation. As an Angel once said to me during a Watchtower ritual, "We are that, and more."
~NOTICE~
I will be on vacation and unavailable till mid-spring from Feb 5th till about mid March …possibly April.
J.B: Thanks for your answers.
E.C: Thank you for listening.
J.B: I wish you a nice vacation at the Earth-wherever. The next time I catch an elusive shadow at the edge of my sight, …if it's you, well… don't vanish! Ah! And… please give my regards to the Great Old Ones!…
First published in Greek, "Strange/egnarts" issue 43, April 2002, also included in the compilation "The war against the Matrix", by Archetypo publications
Also featured in the Incunabula/Ong's Hat webpage... http://www.incunabula.org/index.html
