The Hat Man Project Project [Patreon Preview]

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This week, a bonus episode about a little project I got myself into recently, that's something that happens quite often to me getting pulled into weird little projects. I wasn't even sure that this would become an episode, but luckily here we are. Some of you who remember in the early days of the show, we had an episode called The Man of the Hat, one of my favorite episodes. It was actually two episodes about a pair of brothers who saw The Hat Man, which is probably one of the most well-known modern entities that people talk about these days. I can't even tell you how many submissions we've gotten about The Hat Man after those episodes came out. In fact, I've wanted to make a follow-up to those episodes, but I mean, we have seriously gotten so many submissions. Not just in email, I had family members reaching out to me after those episodes came out saying that they had seen that, and so I'd love to do a follow-up, but I guess it's just a matter of figuring out how to top those first episodes. Anyway, if you remember those episodes, you'll know that in them, I talked to a man named Tim who runs a website called The Hat Man Project. For around 18 years, this guy has been archiving people's experiences with The Hat Man on a very simple website. Tim is a pastor. In fact, I believe he became a pastor because of his own experiences with The Hat Man. Anyway, that episode was probably four years ago, but recently I started getting emails from people about The Website. People were telling me that The Hat Man Project website was down, which initially confused me. Websites go down all the time for short periods. It's pretty normal, and I wasn't sure why people were telling me. By the way, shout out to anyone who checks The Hat Man Project website frequently enough to notice that there is an outage, but anyway, eventually somebody sent me an email clarifying that not only was The Website down, the website was completely lost along with all the data, and that Tim had posted something on Facebook saying that it would not be coming back. Not only did he lose the website, he lost all of the submissions associated with it. 18 years of stories submitted by thousands of people. When I saw that email, I finally understood the situation. By the way, shout out to a listener named Lily for sending an end to me, and the idea of all those encounters being lost really bothered me. Not only just for his records, but also losing 18 years worth of work. That's horrible. I love a good side quest, and I realized that I had Tim's number still. So I figured I would just try giving him a call out of the blue to see if there was some way that I could help save this website. I wasn't sure if he would answer, or if I would even be able to fix it, but I thought I would at least try giving him a call and recording the process as I went. So that's what this episode is. I haven't really thought of a name for this one yet, but I think we'll just call it The Hat Man Project. This is just a short preview, but if you want to hear the whole episode, it's available now at patreon.com/otherworld, and you're listening to The Otherworld Patreon. Hello. Hey, is this Tim? This is Eddie Harkin Alpzer. My name is Jack Wagner. I actually interviewed you a few years ago for my show Otherworld. I don't know if you remember that. Hey, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm doing pretty good, man. I've been receiving a few emails from our listeners. I saw the news about the website, and I just wanted to give you a call and see what happened. Yeah, so long story short, any time brother over the last, I don't know how many years now, over 20 years that I've worked on. The project, it's always been the same kind of thing. I'll have one hiccup after another. Databases will get lost. I'll get hacked. And I had been contemplating shutting down the research anyway, because I had gotten done, and I was moving on to a different phase and time in my life. And we had another situation with GoDaddy, where the server went down. Mysteriously went down again. And so we worked with them, and I paid all the fees where to get the databases back, and it was gone. So we lost everything again. And this time around, I decided to go ahead and shut down the research. And GoDaddy, they just didn't have anything. Yeah, they didn't have anything. We even paid for their forensic service to go back and try to retrieve the databases, and everything was gone. So, you know, it's weird, I would say it has to do with the entity itself. My wife can attest any time I've ever tried to get deeply into it, and there's always been strange and serious things that have happened around it, so. But I'm ready to move on to a different stage of my life anyway, and I really would like to write the book, but I just don't know what I can. But yeah, this far is the research for that project. We've already closed everything down. The database, I mean, you said you've lost it a couple times. Was it mostly just text-based stories? Yes, you know, over the years when I started that thing back in 2006, 2008, somewhere around there, it was always just people sending us stories. So a lot of times early on, we had WordPress databases, and they would get corrupted, they would get hacked, and I had copies. Sometimes the copies would get messed up. There was one point where we lost everything and we had to start completely over. So we started collecting stories again. We had up to almost 10,000 stories on the first go, and then they got completely compromised when we started over. We started over back in like 10,000, 2010 rather than something like that. And, you know, I had another 2,000 stories that came in from there. I still had all my data points that I had researched on my end, but I didn't have the stories. And so after this latest attempt, whatever to retrieve everything, like I said, we decided we'd close it down. And you've, sorry, I've got so many questions, but, you know, the way back machine seems to back up. Most sections of websites have you looked on there to see? Yeah, there's there's there's several there. Yeah, the way that machine, if you want to dig, there is still has a lot of old snapshots of the website and several several stories, I think you used to like this from that website, yes. I mean, because yeah, when I saw your post part of me was wondering, I'm like, man, is he just kind of ready to move on from this for whatever reason? And like this is just a happy excuse, or is this something that you actually would love to get it back up? No, no, I am ready to move on from it. I have been thinking about it for a long time. And, you know, after I get a lot of my research and came up with, you know, my own conclusions, it was really always at the beginning. It was just trying to share, you know, what I was learning in my journey as I was trying to understand this thing. And, you know, help others along the way. And I can at the point where I finally came to my conclusions and my research was done and that was a long time ago. So on this latest thing happened, so you have decided to go ahead and show it down. Okay, interesting. I mean, part of what I was calling was I was like, if you needed help, I'd be happy to use the powers of the show to try to bring this back or you know, whatever you would need help with, I'm happy to help. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you. And I've had some others reach out too. I have a family member mine that's obsessed with that and she wanted to go ahead and try to get it back up and running. But like I said, I'm ready to move on. Yeah, I mean, it's been a very long project. So are you leaving the hat man behind entirely or you think you might do the book one day or? I may do the book one day. Again, I'm just in such a different phase of life right now. I'm almost 50 years old and I'm in a situation where I'm back in school and learning some new things and so I don't know anything anytime soon for that. So if the lawyer lets me do it, then I'll do it. Yeah, no, I trust me. I get it. I mean, even just four years into the show, I'm like, it kind of weighs on you after a while. So I don't blame you. I can't imagine if you haven't always come up with content. How often is your show as a weekly? Yep. But luckily, there's a lot of submissions. Well, that's good. That's good. And there's certainly no shortage of hat man stories, you know, they're not at all. But the one that I was talking to the other day that wanted to kind of restart it and get it going again. They were asking about the stories. And I said, there's more stories now than there ever has been. You know, when I quit, when we finally shut the website down, I don't even see an increase in stories over the last five years. So it's definitely a very kind of happening for my mom still. Hmm. One last question about the website, like, um, was, was it a word press database? Like what, what was the thing you were trying to rescue? Yeah, it was a word press database. And it just disappeared. Yeah, and I had a backup. People asked me about the backups. Yeah, I had a backup in the backup field. So it's weird stuff like that would always happen. Do you still have the backup? Step of the way. I still have the backup as of 2023, but it won't work. I have everything backed up from the beginning when we when we restarted it, uh, when we started recoding. Oh, yeah, I do need to go. Okay. Yeah, I still have that backup, but it doesn't work. Huh. Okay. Well, I'll think about this. I mean, it's too bad because I feel like I wish you could at least have your own copy just to have it, you know, but uh, well, somebody can get the backup to work, maybe. Maybe I'll find, maybe I'll be able to find somebody that could work on it for you. Well, yeah, if they want, if they want to take a stand, they can see that maybe the content's there. There should be quite a few stories. I mean, but, um, like I said, it would be as of 2023. Yeah. That's, um, when, is it a hard drive or something? I just have it on a zip file here on my computer, but I'm actually against a hard break. I've got to go to a meeting here. Yeah, go for it. Go for it. Send me the email. I can take a look. Yeah. All right. Uh, I'm glad you're doing good. Uh, sorry about the website. And I'll talk to you soon. Okay. Thanks for watching. See you later. Bye. Bye. Hi, this is PJ vote from the search engine podcast. So you're a great small business owner, but math was never your thing. Totally get it. Enter zero. That's XERO as an X marks the spot for the perfect platform that puts accounting payments payroll and analytics and one connected platform with visual dashboards. Zero makes it easy to understand your cash flow. You know exactly what's coming in and what's going out. Join five million customers worldwide who use zero to manage their finances. Learn more at zero dot com. That's XERO. Lately, I've been thinking about skincare a little differently. 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