The Great Mystery of Mel’s Hole: 80,000 Feet Deep?

During the winter of 2002, a group of around thirty amateur explorers embarked upon a baffling expedition to find nothing at all. But that’s not quite as barmy as it sounds. Well, no, I would hazard a guess that nearly everyone involved in the expedition was as bonkers as a pogo stick in a minefield. But at least they were trying to find a very specific type of nothing.

The group were wandering around a particular spot in Kittitas County, Washington, in the hope of finding a hole which had become something of a sensation over the past few years, on account of it being a bottomless pit.

This never-ending hole had been known by many names since it was first discovered by Native Americans, but it was now commonly referred to as “Mel’s Hole”, named after the man who had recently acquired the land upon which it was located, and who had publicly exposed the long-held secret for the first time on a late-night syndicated radio call-in show. The army of intrepid explorers included filmmakers, members of a paranormal investigation team, a physicist, a shaman, a resident sceptic, and in all likelihood, a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker. And there was a tense mood simmering within the group as recent events had indicated that shadowy forces may well try and put an end to their search by any means necessary.

But what exactly would they find if they did manage to stumble across Mel’s Hole? It had been suggested that the hole might be an entrance to the underworld, a portal to another dimension, or maybe just a quite remarkably deep hole which led all the way down to the Earth’s core. There certainly appeared to be very weird activity connected with the hole, ranging from the slightly odd to the bat-shit crazy.

The story that unfolded involved a hole that animals dare not go near, an aggressive intervention from a higher authority, the resurrection of a four-legged friend, the alarming disappearance of Mel, the discovery of a new form of burning ice which might spell the end of the world, and a final encounter with a seal born from a sheep which had a stark warning for humanity. And if you’re already beginning to brew a few doubts about the credibility of this tale, then I should advise you not to be too quick to jump to any scornful dismissals because… No, I got nothing at all. But then again, seeing as ‘nothing at all’ is exactly what we’re trying to find in our search for an infinite hole, maybe we could really be onto something big here…

Near a Tree by a River…

The hole appears to have been something of a local secret in the city of Ellensburg in Kittitas County, Washington, although not everyone was utterly convinced that it existed. When ‘The Seattle Times’ went poking around the area in 2002 to interrogate the natives, they came across a guy called Jay Nickell who grew up close to the alleged location of the hole near Manastash Ridge. He claims that he and his mates used to ride dirt bikes around the area when they were teenagers, and they were more than familiar with the unfathomably deep hole. They used to throw big rocks down it but never heard the faintest sound to indicate that they might have landed at some point.

Meanwhile, a guy called Rodney who worked at the local snowmobile dealership reckoned that the hole had been reasonably common knowledge in the town for the last few decades, although he’d never actually seen it himself. Still, he told reporters: “Lots of people talk about it. Could be something out there.” Other locals claimed to have been told stories by their grandparents about a mysterious hole in the mountain ridge that never filled up, but some residents snorted that the whole thing was clearly just a heap of hollow hogwash.

The reason that The Seattle Times were on the scene asking questions in the first place is because the local secret had finally been let out into the wild a few years ago when a newcomer by the name of Mel Waters had spilled the beans on late-night radio. ‘Coast to Coast AM’ is a syndicated phone-in show founded by the late Art Bell who also hosted the show from its inception in 1988 right through to his final appearance in 2003. The show was driven by weird tales of the paranormal and the unexplained delivered by callers who clearly had nothing better to do with their time than call Art Bell to talk about sightings of Bigfoot, UFOs, occult activity, and people they’d met the down the pub who claimed that they used to hand out the coffee and biscuits down at Area 51.

It may all sound a bit kooky and niche, but ‘Coast to Coast AM’ is considered to be one of the most popular late-night radio shows of all time, and regularly pulled in over ten million enthralled listeners during its peak. And for the most part, it was all just innocent harmless fun. This was before the days when every intriguing enigma or unsolved riddle automatically led to conclusions of a high-level conspiracy orchestrated by the Illuminati.

This was just an entertaining radio broadcast in which viewers called in to share their stories and pose their questions in the company of a relaxed and patient host who treated his callers with respect whilst clearly not trying to force too many ridiculous narratives onto his audience. I mean, yes, he was a paranormal enthusiast and a seeker of the unknown, but he never got too pushy with it. Think of the presentation style of Alex Jones.

And then remove that mental image from your brain because Art Bell was nothing remotely like him.

In fact, Art Bell was something of a legend. He was a one-time holder of the world record for ‘The Longest Continuous Radio Broadcast’ in the 1970s, clocking up 115 hours and 16 minutes without sleep for an epic charity broadcast. This had enabled him to charter a plane to Vietnam to evacuate 130 children who had been orphaned during the war, and bring them back with him to the States for adoption.

He also claimed to hold the world record for ‘The Longest Continuous Radio Broadcast Whilst Seesawing’, which lasted for 57 hours. But I don’t think that this was independently ratified, and it’s a bit of an odd thing to do on a non-visual medium.

Anyway, on February 22nd 1997, Art Bell received a fax from a regular listener by the name of Mel Waters who had a curious story to share. Art was so fascinated by the story that he called up Mel on the very same day and asked him to participate on that night’s episode of ‘Coast to Coast AM’.

The Man with the Hole

Mel Waters never revealed an awful lot about himself. We gathered over the course of several radio appearances that he used to be a fisherman of sorts, he had a wife, he grew “medicinal herbs” on his property, and he had a side-hobby of crafting unusual belt buckles which he sold at local markets. But the most important thing happening in Mel’s life at the time was the fact that he’d recently acquired a big hole in the ground.

Mel had bought rural property near Manastash Ridge, around 9 miles or 14.5 kilometres west of the city of Ellensburg, and within fairly close proximity to the Yakima Training Centre – a huge area used by the U.S. Army for shooting range exercises, manoeuvre training, and various other military operations. This hole sat just within the boundaries of Mel’s land and resembled a well, stretching around nine feet across and walled with stone that rose around four feet high. But it was the depth of the hole that had Mel scratching his head in puzzlement.

It appeared to have no bottom at all.

According to Mel’s own research, the hole had been known about for generations stretching back to the earliest settlers and even the Native Americans before them who believed that the hole was cursed, referring to it as “The Devil’s Hole.” The Native Americans apparently steered well clear of it, but in more recent years, Mel noted that the hole had evolved into a free utility for the locals. I mean, what would you do with a bottomless pit at the bottom of your garden? My first thought was that it would make an excellent place to dispose of dead bodies.

However, the locals had a much simpler and less messy use for it. They used it as a handy trash dump.

Over the years, they threw all sorts of shit down there including household waste, sofas, televisions, washing machines, and pretty much anything you can think of. And whilst I was only joking about the dead bodies, it seems that the locals weren’t averse to throwing animal carcasses down there too. Farmers had been known to lob dead cattle down the hole, whilst at least one neighbour used it as a final resting place for his deceased pet dog.

All in all, Mel reckoned that about twenty people used the hole on a regular basis to get rid of their rubbish. And that’s all fine and dandy, but if I’d been in Mel’s position and owned the land, I would probably have started charging everyone a reasonable fee. He could even have erected a booth on the scene and plonked an attendant in there.

You may already be thinking that Mel’s elevator doesn’t quite reach the top floor, and not just because of his lack of business acumen. The first thing I would say is that you haven’t yet heard what comes later on in the story. But to be fair to Mel, he rarely played on the concept of a genuinely bottomless pit. He just figured that it was a hole which was currently “of unknown depth.”

And he’d already decided that the best way of getting to the very bottom of this particular mystery was to try and measure the depth of the hole himself.

So he called upon his fisherman skills to dangle a heavy fishing line down the hole with a one-pound weight attached to the end to keep it steady. He was gonna need to tie together an awful lot of fishing line though. In the end, he calculated from his mechanical counter that his spools of line had plummeted down to a depth of around 80,000 feet, equivalent to around 24,000 metres or just over 15 miles. But it had still not touched the bottom.

I was initially a bit confused by this measuring method. Let’s say the hole had a depth of 70,000 feet. How would Mel have known if his ridiculously long line had touched the bottom or not? It’s not like he was going to feel an encouraging tug at the end of it to signal that he’d got a bite.

Well, I assume Mel must have known what he was doing. Working on the assumption that there was likely to be water at the bottom of the hole, he also attached a roll of Life Savers candy to the end of the fishing line, as this would dissolve when it hit the water. But the candy was always completely intact when he reeled the line back in. Conclusive proof, I think you’ll agree, that whilst the hole might not necessarily be infinite, or lead all the way down to the other end of the planet, we do now know that it’s at least 80,000 feet deep.

Strange Phenomena

As well as being a potential portal into the bowels of Hell, there were several other mystifying elements to the mystery of Mel’s Hole. Nobody had ever heard the slightest sound emanating from the hole after dumping their garbage down it, not even the faintest hint of an echo after throwing an old-fashioned chunky TV set down there. Animals clearly didn’t care for the hole, and not just the dead ones that were getting hurled right down it. Birds wouldn’t rest anywhere near it, whilst Mel’s own dogs point-blank refused to step within around a hundred feet of it.

Mel’s dogs were usually fiercely loyal and would follow him everywhere he went, but whenever he tried to approach the hole with the dogs on a leash, they would stick their paws into the ground and stubbornly refuse to play ball. And it wasn’t just Mel’s dogs. The other locals reported similar problems with their own pets.

Mel also recalled a peculiar incident in which his portable radio started behaving erratically around the hole. It tuned itself out of his favourite radio station and began playing incredibly old songs from the past, occasionally accompanied by strange voices that he couldn’t understand. It could just have been that he’d unwittingly tuned into the ‘Golden Oldies’ show on Real Radio Yorkshire as that also tends to be full of incredibly old songs from the past and strange voices that you can’t understand.

And then there’s the story of the dog that came back from the dead. This is not something that Mel personally witnessed, but he recalled a story from a neighbour who had recently disposed of his dead pet dog down the hole. I’m really not sure about the ethics of this one, as I’m pretty sure that a half-decent pet owner would have either buried a beloved pet in their garden or gone for the cremation option.

But no, this guy appeared content to just lob his dead dog down the big hole. Several days later, the neighbour was wandering around the woods and swore blind that he saw the very same dog wearing the very same collar, now accompanied by a hunter. The neighbour apparently tried calling out to the dog, but the dog just completely blanked him, perhaps still feeling a bit miffed that he had been tossed down a hole instead of having his ashes scattered along the Manastash Lake Trail as he had clearly requested.

Of course, it could just have been a similar looking dog with a similar looking collar, rather than a dog that had somehow been reincarnated after tumbling down Mel’s Hole. And it’s worth pointing out that even Mel didn’t seem entirely convinced by this story, although he later admitted that he had made instructions in his will for his own body to be thrown down the hole, presumably in the hope that he might get reincarnated in the same neighbourhood but with no memory of his former life or friends.

But despite the odd descent into lunacy, the interesting thing about Mel Waters is just how calm and measured he was in his telling of the story. There was no hint of a frothing madman trying to convince everyone that he definitely owned an infinite pit with magical properties, and that anyone who didn’t believe him was an idiot. Mel appeared to be intelligent and well-spoken and even quite doubtful of his own findings.

And this led to a long and captivating conversation between Art Bell and Mel Waters in which the latter genuinely came across as an inquisitive soul in search of answers and the opinions of other listeners. However, things were to take a more sinister turn when Mel Waters made a follow-up appearance on ‘Coast to Coast AM’ just a few days later.

Cloak and Dagger

Shortly after Mel had become something of a late-night radio hit and finally put his hole on the map – albeit in a pretty vague position – he was to stumble into trouble on his very next visit to the yawning void of eternity. He claims that he was aggressively stopped from poking around his own hole by a group of men in yellow hazard suits who claimed to be working for the government in some capacity. The men had cordoned off the whole area and told Mel that he was no longer allowed access to the hole.

The official reason given was that there had been a plane crash near the site, but Mel wasn’t buying into that as he hadn’t seen or heard anything. All he could see now in the distance were some kind of heavy-duty military vehicles approaching the area, but he couldn’t get close enough to them to figure out what they were doing. Mel became quite agitated about the whole thing and threatened to call the press, at which point the men in yellow hazard suits were joined by three other men, one of whom was in plain clothes whilst the other two were wearing military uniforms. They told Mel in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t move along quietly, it would be very easy for them to find a ‘drugs lab’ on his property and get him banged up in prison.

This may have been some reference to the fact that Mel Waters grew “medicinal herbs” on his property. He never went into explicit detail about what kind of medicinal herbs he was growing although he did once stress that they were not illegal. But even if his medicinal herb operation was considered to be above board, he was now given the impression that it would be no problem at all for the government agents to plant something in there that would land him in serious trouble.

After everyone had calmed down a bit and stopped angrily stamping their boots into the ground, Mel was given what sounds like a pretty generous offer. In return for leasing his land to the U.S government in perpetuity, Mel would be paid an annual sum of $250,000, but only if he buggered off to Australia and never returned to the U.S and never spoke of the hole ever again. This was likely an offer that he would be a fool to refuse in more ways than one, as the threat of finding a drugs lab on his property still hung heavy over the tense negotiations.

Art Bell seemed quite incensed by all this, and much of the second radio conversation consists of both Art and Mel ranting about how the government shouldn’t be telling you where you can and can’t walk on your own land. But by the end of the call, Mel admitted that he was seriously considering taking up the offer but hadn’t yet fully decided, and presumably needed to talk it over with his wife. It would be quite some time before we learned whether or not Mel decided to move to Australia or go to prison, as he fell worryingly silent after the second call. He had promised to make a third appearance the following week but he never made it onto the air, and he failed to respond to any further attempts by Art Bell to get him back on the show for an update.

Art was so concerned that he sent out a broadcast team to investigate the area where he believed the hole might be located. This was always going to be a bit tricky as Mel had never revealed the precise location of either the hole or his property. Yes, this might ring a few alarm bells, but you can’t blame him in any way.

Divulging your private address to the nation is never a good idea at the best of times. But when you’re the owner of a magic trash dump, you really want to avoid encouraging thousands of strangers descending onto your property to dispose of their washing machines, furniture, dead pets, and dead grannies.

Whilst Art’s team had no luck in finding the hole itself, they did find disturbing evidence of fresh military activity, rows of boot prints, and tire tracks from seriously heavy-duty vehicles. And perhaps Art Bell had every reason to be a little worried about his star guest. I mean, the guy had just been warned by government agents never to talk about the hole again, an encounter which he was now blabbing about on one of the most popular late-night radio talk shows of all time.

Surely any kind of deal to set up a new life in Australia was now off the table? Let’s hope that he didn’t end up taking an unfortunate tumble down his own hole.

Historical Precedents

Whilst we leave Mel Waters dangling precariously on a rope for a while, I suspect that some of you might already have started to harbour a few misgivings about the authenticity of this story. But in the hopefully highly improbable scenario that the story of Mel’s Hole turns out to be a load of old hokum, it wouldn’t be the first time in history that rumours of a big hole have been greatly exaggerated.

Back in ancient times, you could barely walk to the nearest tavern without stumbling into a supposed portal into the underworld. Some of the more famous examples included Lake Avernus in Italy, a network of caves in Southern Mexico known as “The Backdoor to Hell”, and The Ploutonion at Hierapolis in modern-day Turkey – a shrine which emitted toxic gases believed have been sent by Pluto, god of the Underworld. In reality, the toxic gases were more likely to have been a result of volcanic activity beneath the site which released high concentrations of carbon dioxide.

Moving forward in time, it’s believed by some that Houska Castle just outside of Prague was built with the very specific purpose of blocking off a bottomless hole in the ground which led directly to Hell. Before the castle was constructed between 1253 and 1278, legends swirled around the region of demonic creatures and winged beasties emerging from the hole after sunset and terrorising local villages whilst making “Woo! Woo!”

noises. Even today, visitors still reckon that they can hear a chorus of screams and furious scratching sounds when they walk through the Chapel which is believed to have been built directly over the hole to Hades.

It’s no wonder that the Nazis were reported to have used Houska Castle as a base for conducting occult experiments and harnessing the forces of evil when they occupied it in 1945. And in fact, there are quite a few genuinely odd things about the construction which make you speculate about the true original purpose. Quite aside from all the typically gothic architecture, the castle sits in a pretty remote area of the Czech Republic well out of the way of any trading routes or water supply.

Most of the windows aren’t real, and the majority of the defences appear to face inwards rather than outwards, as if the occupants weren’t too worried about keeping out intruders but were far more interested in containing something inside. Not that there have been too many human occupants anyway – for long stretches of history, Houska Castle has stood completely empty.

The inwards-facing configuration is a bit strange but was more likely to serve practical purposes in preserving warmth and light in confined spaces rather than keeping the minions of Satan at bay. A bottomless pit has never been found at the location, and it’s believed that the castle was constructed in a relatively isolated area to serve as a low-key administrative centre for the estates of the Bohemian ruler Ottokar II.

A more recent story based on a tiny kernel of truth first emerged in 1989 and concerned a Russian borehole drilling project in Siberia which became known as ‘The Well to Hell’. The Russian engineers were said to have bored a hole so deep – around 14.4 kilometres or 9 miles in depth – that they had to abandon the project in fright after hearing the harrowing screams of tormented souls who were burning in an eternity of flames. An audio recording of the sounds of Hell was leaked into the public domain and even made it onto a certain late-night radio talk show called ‘Coast to Coast AM’ hosted by Art Bell. And the director of the project, a Dr Azzacov, was quoted in the media as saying: “The information we are gathering is so surprising, that we are sincerely afraid of what we might find down there.”

The tiny kernel of truth here is that the Russians had indeed drilled down to Hell, and then ran away crying like little girls. British engineers would have just stopped for an extended tea break, and then carried on regardless. No, that can’t be right.

In fact, the story appears to be based on a genuine borehole project conducted earlier by the Soviets in the 1970s, but in the Kola Peninsula rather than Siberia. The Kola Superdeep Borehole extended down to 40,230 feet or 7.6 miles before the project was eventually abandoned – not due to any concerns about bothering Beelzebub, but more to do with financial constraints and the dangerously high temperatures which were making everyone a bit hot and bothered.

The whole ‘Well to Hell’ narrative appears to have been first pushed forward in a newsletter published by Messianic Jews in California, although the tale became more and more embellished by others over the years. The quote from Dr Azzacov was entirely fictional, and the supposed recording of the soundtrack to Hell was largely made up of looped noises and effects lifted from the 1972 horror movie ‘Red Baron’. But whilst The Kola Superdeep Borehole might not quite be an entrance to the underworld, it’s still a staggeringly impressive feat of engineering and is officially the deepest hole on Earth today.

But that’s only officially. As we’ve already discovered, Mel’s Hole is at least twice as deep as the titchy Kola Superdeep Borehole, and that’s only as much as Mel could measure before he either ran out of fishing line or ran out of patience. If only we could be a bit more certain about its existence.

The Wind Will Blow

Whilst it would be easy to just dismiss the whole idea as a crackpot story from a late-night radio fan who couldn’t get to sleep that night, we have to remember that he wasn’t the only person in the world to believe in the hole. We already know that ‘The Seattle Times’ later tracked down several locals from Ellensburg who claimed to have been aware of the hole, with many of them revealing that it had been known about for years before Mel Waters went shooting his mouth off on syndicated radio.

One local guy who had a lot more to say than most went by the name of Red Elk. It’s widely reported that Red Elk first publicly popped his head out of the ground in around 2008 when he started talking to the press and appearing on radio talk shows, long after the true fate of Mel Waters had been revealed. In fact, after Mel and Art, Red Elk is probably one of the names most commonly associated with the hole. Red Elk claimed to be an intertribal medicine man who was of Native American descent.

But his real name was Gerald. And the exact heritage of Gerald Osborne was never made explicitly clear. From the photographs and video footage, you could be forgiven for thinking that he was a regular guy from Kittitas Valley who just happened to wear a big fur coat and a funny necklace.

But the thing about Gerald – ok, let’s call him Red Elk if he likes it – is that he claimed to be something of a frequent visitor to the hole after his father had first taken him there way back in 1961 when he was a very young boy. And Red Elk seemed quite well-informed about the hole, much more so than Mel Waters had ever been. The medicine man confirmed that the hole – which he still secretly visited regularly – isn’t bottomless, but he reckoned that it’s somewhere between 24 and 28 miles deep, which suggests that Mel should perhaps have just kept on going for a bit longer before his roll of Life Savers candy got soggy.

Red Elk said a lot of other stuff, too. He claimed to have witnessed military activity around the hole at around the same time of Mel’s disappearance. He believed that the government was using it as a top-secret base, and that he had once seen a UFO hovering over the hole. He believed that the hole was protected by spiritual guardians and that its true purpose would be revealed to humankind one day in the far future.

This revelation would reshape our understanding of the universe. Incidentally, he also believed that Reptoids roamed beneath the surface of the Earth. And that funny necklace that he wore wasn’t just picked up from a flea market. It contained a fragment of an alien spacecraft that he’d found on his travels, although to the naked eye, it just looked like a small misshapen lump of pewter.

But ever since the original radio revelations on ‘Coast to Coast AM’, the speculation had drifted well beyond the confines of Kittitas County, as believers from all around the world began coming up with their own theories. The Ellensburg Public Library reportedly became inundated with calls from people desperate to find out more information and clues, leading the library to put together an extensive file on this local news sensation, containing press clippings, magazines, and locally sourced materials, in an effort to create the ultimate reference work on Mel’s Hole. It might have been interesting to have a good flick through that file right now, but sadly this is not possible.

The library’s historian Milton Wagy told the TV station KEPR in 2012 that the whole file had mysteriously gone missing from the cabinet in which it had been locked. You can make your own mind up on whether that was an administrative error, a bizarre theft, or an intervention from men in yellow hazard suits who were threatening to find a drugs lab in the Periodicals section.

But the speculation was still given a wider global platform on the dedicated website MelsHole.com which is sadly no longer operational, but generated over 8,000 posts during its brief lifespan. It was here that hole enthusiasts put forward their theories on how it could potentially be a gateway to Hell, a portal to another dimension, a secret military operation protected by the power of depth, a pathway to an underground kingdom of dinosaurs, a figment of our imagination, or perhaps just a particularly deep hole which leads down into a system of caves.

Gone to Pieces

Whilst we ponder over the most likely candidate, it’s surely time to catch up with Mel Waters to see if he’d made any progress of his own. Over three years after we last heard from him, Mel eventually made a return appearance to ‘Coast to Coast AM’ for a catch-up with his old pal Art Bell. And he certainly had a lot to say. Unfortunately, since we last heard from him, it seems as if he hadn’t just dropped the map; he’d set it on fire and started following the smoke.

It was good to hear that he was at least still alive as I was beginning to have my doubts. And it sounded as if life had been pretty kind to Mel Waters after he had eventually agreed to accept the government’s offer to relocate to Australia and accept $250,000 a year in return for keeping his mouth shut. He’d used the money to set up a wombat preserve in Australia which apparently had always been his dream, although he still made funky belt buckles and grew medicinal plants on the side.

I already find this a bit odd, and I’m not just talking about the wombats. I would have thought that Mel had cocked up his side of the deal by talking to Art Bell immediately after the offer was first made, and now he was publicly breaking his paid silence again.

Perhaps that’s partly what led to the unfortunate set of circumstances in which he found himself towards the end of the year 2000 when he dropped by on ‘Coast to Coast AM’ again with a slightly less warm and cuddly update. Mel had taken it upon himself to violate his agreement with the government yet again by secretly returning to the U.S in 2000 when he should have stayed put in Australia attending to his wombats and his medicinal plants. It was a bad idea.

Shortly after landing back in the U.S and catching a bus heading to Olympia, Washington, he was escorted off the bus by police officers and bundled into a van. He then woke up twelve days later in San Francisco with no memory of what had happened since then. The only clues he had were a missing wallet, several missing teeth, a couple of black eyes, and IV marks on his arm which suggested that he’d been attached to a drip at some point. I’m sure we’ve all woken up from parties like that with no memory of the last two weeks, but we’d normally blame ourselves rather than immediately assume that the U.S government had planted tracking devices in our teeth, which is the conclusion that Mel appeared to have reached.

That wasn’t to be the end of his troubles, though. Shortly after this, his wife left him, he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and he later learned that his assets had been frozen, the annual payments from the government had stopped, the land he was leasing to the government near Manastash Ridge had been seized on some trumped-up building violation, whilst his wombat facility back in Australia had been dismantled. The first few points sound rough, but I’m not entirely surprised by the latter points, even if it seems a bit harsh to take it out on the wombats.

It was around this time that a now homeless Mel Waters also realised that his old land on which the hole was located had been suspiciously blurred out on TerraServer – an early forerunner of Google Earth specialising in satellite and public domain aerial imagery. An interesting point here is that during the commercial break that followed Mel’s latest on-air disclosures, several listeners called in to confirm that this was absolutely true – a whole patch of satellite imagery near Manastash Ridge had indeed been greyed out.

Still, it wasn’t all bad news for Mel Waters. Well, it was mostly bad news, yes, but on the plus side, he only went and found himself a new bottomless hole in 2001, this time on public land in Nevada which was apparently being used by both Native Americans and members of the Basque community for grazing sheep. The land, that is, not the hole. You might think the chances of the same man finding not one but two bottomless pits in his lifetime must be astronomical, but apparently it was the first hole that led directly to him finding the second one.

The ‘Coast to Coast AM’ show was popular all over the States, including that spot of public land in Nevada where some of the resident members of the Basque community – a small ethnic group originally hailing from adjacent areas of Spain and France – had become quite engrossed in Mel’s story. And that’s mainly because it sounded very similar to a hole of their own. One of the Basque people managed to somehow obtain Mel’s email address and invited him over for a look. It turned out that they grew medicinal plants too, so they had plenty to talk about when Mel graciously accepted the offer, although it sounds as if he didn’t have too many other places to be at this point.

Mel found the hole to be of an identical diameter to his own hole, but instead of being surrounded by a four-foot high stone wall, this one came with a metal lining or collar which stretched two feet high and descended down as far as the eye could see. The collar had notches on it which led Mel to speculate that something could be lowered down onto it and locked into place. According to the eldest member of the Basque community, the hole had been there for as long as he had been alive since the 1930s, and may possibly have been there when the Basques first settled in the area in the 19th century.

And just like Mel’s Hole, not a trace of an echo could be heard when you dropped something down it, as Mel found out for himself when he accidentally dropped his toolbox down there. This might not have gone down very well with the Basque people.

Unlike Mel’s old neighbours in Kittitas County, they didn’t like the idea of treating the hole as a giant all-you-can-eat garbage disposal unit, and never purposefully dropped anything down there as they considered the hole to be sacred. It often felt instead as if this particular hole deposited gifts instead of receiving them. For example, Mel picked up several 1943 Roosevelt dimes from the ground close to the hole, all of which came with a ‘B’ mint mark to indicate the first letter of the city in which it was produced.

This was peculiar for a number of reasons, besides the obvious one involving a bottomless pit in 2001 spewing out coins from 1943. The likeness of Roosevelt didn’t appear on a dime until the year after his death in 1946, and the letter ‘B’ has never represented any U.S city responsible for minting coins. So these could be considered something of a collector’s item, particularly as Mel had come to the conclusion that they had arrived from a parallel Earth in which President Roosevelt had died a few years earlier, after the Axis Powers had won the Second World War.

He reckoned that the ‘B’ stood for Berlin, although I can’t see why a victorious Berlin would have been minting coins that featured the likeness of Roosevelt. I’m pretty sure that the Allied Forces didn’t start minting novelty Hitler coins after the war.

Mel incorporated one of the coins into a new belt buckle design but these were all later confiscated by agents of the U.S Treasury. It may have been nice if we could have at least seen a picture of one of these 1943 Roosevelt dimes but sadly they did not show up on photographs and became invisible from a distance of more than fifteen feet. Ah well, that’s always the story, isn’t it? What can you do?

The Burning Ice and the Seal Creature

Over time, Mel became increasingly fascinated by some of this new hole’s properties which he had not come across before, and this compelled him to conduct fresh experiments after gaining the permission and co-operation of the Basque people. And this time, he wasn’t just messing about with 15 miles worth of fishing line and a roll of Life Savers candy. The locals had told him that the hole was quite a cosy and snug place to sit around as it appeared to generate some kind of heat, even though the metal collar was never warm to the touch. Mel decided that it might be fun to test just how hot it gets down in Hell, and so he roped in his new Basque friends to help him lower a big bucket of ice about 1500 feet down the hole, whilst keeping another bucket of ice near the top to use as a control.

When the ice in the bucket on the surface had largely melted, they hoisted the other bucket up from the hole and were surprised to find that the ice had not so much melted but turned into a warm gooey flammable substance which, it later transpired, could keep on burning for at least several months, possibly forever. One of the locals took a lump of it back to his hut to use as a free never-ending heat driver for his wood stove, although he did later notice that the burning ice appeared to be sucking all the moisture out of the cabin. And the situation gradually got worse from there, as he returned home to his hut one day to find that the wood stove had suddenly sunk five feet into the ground. By the end of Winter, the entire hut had dissolved into dust.

If that all sounds a bit fishy, it melts into insignificance when compared to the utterly loopy results of the other experiment that Mel and his mates were conducting on the side. A few of the Basque people had volunteered to actually lower themselves down the pit, which is clearly the sensible thing to do when you’ve already discovered that it turns ice into flammable lumps of highly destructive goo. Mel persuaded them out of it, but suggested that they instead try lowering a live sheep down there for shits and giggles.

Naturally, the selected sheep didn’t get a say in this, and clearly wasn’t too taken with the idea. It shrieked and kicked and made various other gestures of disapproval before it was eventually stunned between the eyes and lowered down into the hole.

After hitting around 1500 feet, Mel’s team of amateur scientists pulled the crate back up to find to nobody’s real surprise that the poor sheep was dead. A slightly more surprising element was that the sheep looked like it had been cooked from the inside. But an even more surprising discovery was made when they decided to cut open the sheep during a brisk post-mortem on their victim.

They found what initially looked like a massive tumorous growth which appeared to be moving of its own accord as if something was trapped inside. After cutting open the strangely throbbing growth, out popped a living creature which Mel described as resembling a cross between a foetus and a seal.

This creature - still attached to an umbilical cord – was your garden variety hybrid of foetus and seal, complete with flippers, snout, and strangely piercing human-like eyes which appeared to convey a world-weary sadness. One of the Basque people suggested killing it, but Mel instead popped it onto a nearby table and stared silently into the creature’s hypnotic eyes for over two hours – an emotional experience which he described as feeling like he was in the presence of a miracle. He then felt the urge to lift it off the table and place it back near the top of the hole, at which point the seal-foetus hybrid apparently nodded at his new-found friends before hopping back down the bottomless hole. After a stunned silence, one of the Basque people then shrugged, picked up the carcass of the sheep, and tossed that down the hole too.

During his very last phone call to Art Bell in 2002, Mel revealed that he had been cured of cancer despite previously being told that he had just six months to live - a blessing which he put down to the healing powers of the seal creature which had been grateful for Mel’s kindness in saving it from death. He also revealed that the creature had since returned to the village several times and was now capable of communicating with the Basque people via the medium of Boombox, but sadly any attempts to record the conversations just resulted in the frustrating hiss of static. If you’re interested in what the creature had to say though, I can reveal that he apparently delivered a stark warning that the greedy and undisciplined use of the burning ice could potentially destroy the world, and that there are other beings in the universe who are patiently waiting for the human race to destroy itself through nuclear war before they come down and plant their own markers on planet Earth.

As for Mel himself, he believed that he was being tracked by government agents, and in the interests of protecting the hole and his Basque friends, he left the community behind to seek out a new life in an undisclosed location. With a bit of luck, he might find another bottomless hole on his travels. And that final update on ‘Coast to Coast AM’ in 2002 was the very last time that anyone ever heard a peep from Mel Waters.

Investigating the Legend

I’m pretty sure we don’t even have to bother decoding anything Mel was gassing on about his later phone calls to Art, as it just sounds as if he might have been growing just a few too many medicinal plants by that point. But does that necessarily mean that we have to completely rule out every element of his original story which, resurrected dogs aside, was told in a far more rational manner and backed up by other people from Kittitas County? Even though the existence of a bottomless pit is unlikely by any stretch of a blitzed imagination, could Mel’s Hole still be based on a shred of reality?

It might have been useful if anybody had ever managed to find Mel’s Hole. And this got me thinking about the blurred out image on TerraServer. If several of Art Bell’s listeners had telephoned in to confirm that an entire section of land near Manastash Ridge had been censored by TerraServer, then surely this provided us all with a pretty handy and precise map reference for Mel’s Hole.

So why did nobody take advantage of it? Well, that’s probably because the missing section of the aerial imagery is more likely to have been the nearby Yakima Training Center, and TerraServer was acting on a government request to restrict the visibility of a military installation, even if this particular installation didn’t have too much going on apart from a cool firing range. Whilst nothing in that region appears to be blotted out on Google Maps today, this apparently wasn’t always the case, and the Yakima Training Centre has occasionally been obscured from Google’s view in the past.

Incidentally, when Art Bell sent a broadcast team over to the region following Mel’s first vanishing act, you’d have thought that at least one of them would have figured out that the sinister evidence of fresh military activity, rows of boot prints, and tire tracks from heavy-duty vehicles might just have something to do with the nearby military training centre. When questioned about it by the Tri-City Herald in 1997, Ken Cooper – a spokesman for the Yakima Training Center – patiently explained: “What I understand is, this Ellensburg guy said he had some property on Manastash Ridge, and he was going up there to visit it and was stopped by soldiers. The Army’s not hiding an aviation accident, nor an 80,000-foot-deep pit.

We’re just training, just like we always do.” Yeah…he was unlikely to expose the true Earth-shattering story to the Tri-City Herald though, was he?

But maybe that expedition that we talked about right at the beginning of the video had better luck in locating the hole in 2002, shortly after Mel Waters disappeared forever. They were all certainly well-equipped with maps and metal detectors and flasks of weak lemon drink, although they later regretted not remembering to pack a Geiger counter or a mass spectrometer, the latter of which may have been quite tricky to source at short notice. Certain members of that party were convinced that their quest was of critical importance.

Search coordinator Charlette LeFevre told the press: “Every geologist in the world should be here! They need to pay attention to this!” Other members of the expedition weren’t quite so enthusiastic.

Tim Withee, who described himself as the resident sceptic of the group, complained: “I don’t think I’d call this search very scientific. It’s like adult cartoons, that’s what it is.”

As you may have already guessed, the 2002 expedition had no luck whatsoever in finding the never-ending abyss. But here’s a funny thing about the expedition that rarely gets picked up on in more recent intense explorations of Mel’s Hole. You might remember from the very beginning of the video that I mentioned the team of explorers included filmmakers, members of a paranormal investigation team, a physicist, and a shaman. And what was the name of the shaman?

Well, rattle my healing crystals, it was only Red Elk, known to his mum and dad as Gerald Osborne. Perhaps we didn’t need another reason to doubt the word of Red Elk, but this puts a strange new slant on his connection with the saga.

It’s usually reported that Red Elk didn’t emerge on the scene until 2008, and this is certainly when he began doing the media rounds and yammering on about how he had been a frequent and knowledgeable visitor to the hole since 1961. And yet his knowledge didn’t seem to extend to the location of the hole as here he was, six years earlier, attempting and failing to find it with 29 other explorers. I suppose he could just have a spectacularly bad memory. But this now gives me serious doubts whether he was being entirely honest about the UFO sightings and the Reptoids.

The Geological Reality

This now leaves us with very few reliable witnesses to testify to the hole’s existence, and when I say very few reliable witnesses, I mean none at all. I know that ‘The Seattle Times’ interviewed several locals who claimed to have known about the hole for decades, but it’s curious that nobody could remember exactly where it was. I’m sure some of them were just playing along with the story that had propelled Ellensburg into the spotlight. If a TV crew ever descended on my Cornish village after a story broke about rumoured sightings of a sasquatch on a surfboard, I’m pretty sure I’d be telling them all about how my grandfather sometimes used to help it climb into a wetsuit.

However, it’s also possible that some of those interviewees might just have been remembering a very real and very deep hole in the area. One guy who knows something about that is a geologist by the name of Jack Powell. Jack had actually tuned into the original conversation between Art Bell and Mel Waters in 1997, and had found the whole thing intriguing and amusing in equal measure.

He certainly believed that Mel made a cracking storyteller, and was genuinely impressed by the tale that he spun. But Jack Powell – a geologist with the state Department of Natural Resources who grew up in the same area – also realised very quickly that Mel Waters was talking out of a very different kind of hole.

Jack knew that the main problem with the hole as described by Mel is that it would be impossible. If the hole was at least 80,000 feet deep then it would have reached about a quarter of the way through the Earth’s crust at its thickest, and would have collapsed into itself under the tremendous pressure and heat. As Jack puts it: “Geologically and physically, it’s not possible for a hole to be that deep.” It’s a point backed up by Stepehen Reidel, a retired geology professor at Washington State University, who observes: “The earth’s pressure would have sealed it off in no time at all.”

Whilst we’re at it, Mel’s method of measuring the hole with fishing line was, as I initially suspected, utterly preposterous. Aside from his weird assumption that the roll of Life Savers candy must surely hit a nice big puddle at the bottom of this journey through the crust of the Earth, geologist Pat Pringle also points out that the fishing line would have melted and snapped in the heat long before it reached anywhere near 80,000 feet at which the temperatures are likely to have reached around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit or about 715 degrees Celsius. I’m pretty sure his roll of Life Savers candy wouldn’t have survived such heat either, considering that it’s approaching the same temperatures as molten lava.

There was something else that intrigued Jack Powell about this hole, though. He reckoned he knew of a real hole which may have given birth to the myth. Jack recalled that during his childhood growing up in Kittitas Valley, he often used to play around an old goldmine shaft in a field northwest of Ellensburg.

The shaft went into the ground at an angle, and Jack claims that it was probably about 90 feet or 27 metres deep, and may even have been around 300 feet or 91 metres deep when the gold mine was active. I’m a little concerned about little kids playing around a 90-foot deep hole, but I guess parenting was a very different kettle of broken ankles back in those days, and I’m relieved that Jack Powell survived to tell the tale.

These days, the mine shaft apparently sits on private property fenced with barbed wire. And whilst Jack doesn’t appear to have ever publicly disclosed the exact location, he did once take members of a Seattle-based online chat group on a guided tour of the area where the shaft could be glimpsed in the distance. The members of this group were actually searching for Mel’s Magical Bottomless Hole, and they had contacted Jack to see if he could help with providing any clues.

Jack obligingly took them on the guided tour, and even threw in a free lecture about why the hole they were seeking cannot possibly exist, but he didn’t feel as if he’d really convinced the group. He was probably right. Shortly afterwards, the group went on to form the Seattle Paranormal Society, and are no doubt still looking for Mel’s Hole today.

But Jack Powell is confident that the old goldmine shaft is the real Mel’s Hole, or at least the hole that inspired Mel Waters to start digging his own.

Unmasking Mel Waters

So why on Earth would Mel want to make up such an outlandish tale, and who exactly was this dirty rotten fibber? Well, by the looks of it, Mel Waters never actually existed. Various different local reporters have looked deep into the matter and found that there has been no trace of anyone by the name of Mel Waters living or owning property anywhere in Kittitas County. Of course, that could just mean that Mel was using a pseudonym to protect his identity and his hole, which would have been fair enough.

But there are quite a few other things about Mel Waters that don’t quite add up.

There were no property transfers of any kind that fitted in with the time at which he claimed to have bought the land. He couldn’t seem to make his mind up about how long he’d been married, originally suggesting that he’d been married for quite a long time, before later indicating that he’d just returned from his honeymoon. And he couldn’t make his mind up about how money he was given every year by the government to relocate to Australia and keep schtum.

Whilst the most widely quoted figure is $250,000, there were other times live on air when he suggested that it was closer to $3 million. In short, there were quite a few holes in his background story, and a few occasions where he appeared to slip up and forget what he’d laid out in the previous chapter.

But that’s not to say that there wasn’t some degree of fundamental truth buried in this fictional character. Mel Waters clearly displayed extensive knowledge of the area, so it’s widely believed that he genuinely lived somewhere in Kittitas County, or at least grew up somewhere in the region. This perhaps adds even more weight to Jack Powell’s theory that Mel may have been inspired by childhood memories of playing near the deep gold mine shaft northwest of Ellensburg, back in the days of innocence when most accidents down mine shafts were swiftly sorted by Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. But we’ll probably never know for sure who exactly was behind the voice of Mel Waters, and what exactly they were playing at.

A popular theory suggests that Mel Waters and Red Elk are one and the same person, and that Gerald Osborne took on the persona of Red Elk to drive the story forward after abandoning the character of Mel somewhere in Nevada. I’m not entirely convinced by that, unless Gerald Osborne is a remarkably talented character actor. We’ve never seen a photograph of Mel Waters so we only have his voice to go on, but I have found video footage of interviews with Red Elk, and the pair of them come across as two completely separate individuals with entirely different voices, mannerisms, views, and mindsets. I think it’s more likely that Red Elk is just one of the many listeners who became hooked on the story and decided to pursue it for himself.

A more credible but rarely discussed theory is that Mel Waters is none other than Michael W. Hall, otherwise known as The Paranormal Attorney. This guy has led a pretty eclectic life – at various points in his career, he’s been a practising attorney, a substitute judge, a certified mediator, an author, a public speaker, and even an actor.

He has also been known to combine his law career with his passion for the paranormal, offering legal counsel and consulting services to a whole gaggle of UFO witnesses, although he doesn’t appear to have been directly involved in any high-profile court cases involving aliens. The names Mel Waters and Michael W. Hall aren’t entirely dissimilar, and the Paranormal Attorney is reported to live reasonably close to Ellensburg and so may well have had the local knowledge – and even the acting the skills – to pull off a long-running radio stunt under a cloak of anonymity which would protect his reputation and his career, whatever his career was on that day.

It’s only a theory, and the paranormal jury is still out on whether the real Mel Waters was a deluded fantasist, a conspiracy theorist who had lost the plot, or just some wacky prankster engaging in a long-winded hoax. Perhaps the bigger question is how on Earth did one guy – admittedly with a big helping hand from Art Bell - manage to attract so much attention and speculation from a story in which he presented absolutely nothing in the way of supporting evidence. Revealing the location of the hole would naturally have been quite useful. But right from the start, none of his claims were ever really backed up by anything.

He reckoned that he’d conducted extensive research into how the Native Americans had known about “The Devil’s Hole” but didn’t even seem to know which Native Americans might have been living on the land at the time. He could never produce any photographic evidence of the Roosevelt dimes or produce audio recordings of the seal foetus creature communicating on a boombox, because everything had a deeply unfortunate habit of turning invisible or silent or both. He could never produce any credible witnesses to corroborate his anecdotes, aside from a intertribal medicine man called Gerald who wore bits of alien spacecraft around his neck. In short, his entire story amounted to little more than a vast empty hole.

The Enduring Legacy

And yet this was enough to inspire people to undertake expeditions in which they fruitlessly searched for a bottomless void, whilst thousands of believers clogged up internet groups with their wild speculations, and the press descended onto Ellensburg to interrogate the locals. Even today, people out there are still sharing potential coordinates online and attempting to organise fresh searches. Just a few years ago, one Reddit user felt that he’d made a fresh breakthrough when he stumbled across a site which he believed to be the exact location of Mel’s land.

The interesting point here is that the user took photographs of a hole on the site which almost entirely matched Mel’s description – it resembled a well, stretching around nine feet across and walled with stone that rose around four feet high. I say almost entirely, because it turned out to be a perfectly regular well with a perfectly regular bottom. But this could prove to be a relatively new contender for the original inspiration for Mel’s Hole, alongside Jack Powell’s goldmine shaft.

On the plus side, the story has also inspired enchanting art exhibitions, including an event held in California in 2008 which went by the name of “Aspects of Mel’s Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace.” And far more importantly than that, it has also inspired an Indian Pale Ale concocted by the Iron Horse Brewery in Ellensburg which is still on sale today. The tagline for “Mel’s Magic Hole” reads: “Big on hops, full in flavour, Mel’s Magic is a well deep in character. This unclear beer matches the myth that precedes it.”

Perhaps it all just came down to a matter of presentation. The whole story I mean, not the Indian Pale Ale. During that original radio broadcast at least, Mel Waters came across as a genuinely befuddled guy who was weaving together a relatively small and quirky story that fired up the imaginations of millions of late-night listeners who really tended to dig this kind of material.

Some have suggested that Art Bell himself may have been in on the gag on some level, but I don’t think that’s his style at all. If anything, Art was gently but repeatedly trying to encourage the caller to take photographs and make audio recordings and provide something a bit more solid, and this is what led into the lame excuses involving invisible coins and radio static. Whilst Art played a significant role in gently nudging the story in the right direction, most of the credit must go to a man who doesn’t exist for pulling off a quite extraordinary slice of radio history.

I do think he may have dropped a bollock down the hole by simply taking the gag too far. I reckon that there would still be a lot more widespread interest in the story today if he’d just walked away after that very first radio broadcast. He could perhaps have signed off by suggesting to Art Bell that he intended to lower himself down the bottomless pit the very next day, and then fallen into permanent radio silence, leaving listeners to speculate about his ultimate fate.

Instead, he kind of over-egged the pudding by returning to the airwaves to make increasingly ludicrous claims about government conspiracies and burning ice and Roosevelt dimes from another dimension and seals born from a sheep. And I suspect it was at that point that most rational people gave up on the story, as it became clear that Mel Waters had gotten a bit too carried away and disappeared up his own rear hole. Sometimes you just have to know when it’s time to stop.

Of course, it could be the case that both the hole and Mel Waters were in fact very real. Whilst it’s all very well having geologists come along to tell us that such a hole would be physically and geologically impossible, that seems to be totally missing the point when we’re discussing a magic creature-spawning dimension-hopping hole which surely isn’t likely to be restrained to be such trivialities as scientific fact. And whilst no documents have ever been found to confirm the existence of Mel Waters, it could be that every trace of his history was wiped away by men in yellow hazard suits, just like that missing file from the Ellensburg Public Library.

Red Elk passed away in 2015, but he believed in the hole right until the very end. He provided a grave and slightly grumpy warning to the world during one of his final interviews to the media in which he said: “Don’t look for the hole. Stay away. I have to say I’ve been burned by you guys, the media and all, many times with this Mel’s Hole.

They make me out to be a liar. They say one thing and do something else. The hole isn’t important. Just stay away from trying to find it.

The government has it. It’s totally off limits.” Well, at least Gerald said one fairly sensible thing during his lifetime: “Don’t look for the hole.” I’m ready to wager that if you go looking for Mel’s Hole, you’re not going to find nothing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mel’s Hole?

Mel’s Hole is a mysterious hole located in Kittitas County, Washington, known for its alleged depth of 80,000 feet. It was named after Mel Waters, who publicly exposed the hole on a late-night radio show.

Who is Mel Waters?

Mel Waters is the man who claimed to own the land where Mel’s Hole is located. He first revealed the existence of the hole on the late-night radio show ‘Coast to Coast AM’ in 1997.

What did Mel Waters claim about the depth of Mel’s Hole?

Mel Waters claimed that Mel’s Hole was at least 80,000 feet deep, based on his measurements using fishing line and a roll of Life Savers candy.

What unusual activities were reported around Mel’s Hole?

Various unusual activities were reported, including animals refusing to go near the hole, a dog supposedly coming back from the dead, and a portable radio behaving erratically.

What happened to Mel Waters after his initial radio appearances?

Mel Waters faced interference from government agents who threatened him and offered him a deal to move to Australia in exchange for silence. He later disappeared and was reported to have faced various misfortunes.

What is the significance of the Yakima Training Center in relation to Mel’s Hole?

The Yakima Training Center is a military installation near the alleged location of Mel’s Hole. Some believe that the military may have been involved in covering up or investigating the hole.

What did local residents of Ellensburg say about Mel’s Hole?

Some local residents of Ellensburg claimed to have known about the hole for decades, while others were skeptical of its existence. They described it as a deep hole used for disposing of trash.

What is the theory about the old goldmine shaft being the real Mel’s Hole?

Geologist Jack Powell suggested that the myth of Mel’s Hole might have been inspired by an old goldmine shaft in the area, which was deep but not bottomless.

What is the theory about Mel Waters’ true identity?

Some theories suggest that Mel Waters might have been a pseudonym used by someone with local knowledge, possibly inspired by childhood memories of a deep goldmine shaft. One theory proposes that Mel Waters could be Michael W. Hall, known as The Paranormal Attorney.

What is the significance of Red Elk in the story of Mel’s Hole?

Red Elk, whose real name was Gerald Osborne, claimed to be a frequent visitor to Mel’s Hole and had extensive knowledge about it. He appeared in the media and participated in expeditions to find the hole.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Great Mystery of Mel’s Hole: 80,000 Feet Deep?
• Hero image source by Pi.1415926535 / openverse, by-sa.