Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
On February 21, 1997, a man who called himself "Mel Waters" phoned in to the American paranormal-themed radio show Coast to Coast AM with host Art Bell and began an urban legend that still haunts the Internet to this day.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.According to the caller, when he had been living around 14 kilometers (9 miles) west of Ellensburg, Washington, his property had an unusual feature: a hole with its own strange properties. "Waters" explained that locals to the area knew that they could toss their garbage into the hole, and no matter how much garbage they tossed down there, the hole would seemingly never fill up.
That's not what you'd expect of a hole, and if you should find something like this, we would advise contacting a scientist rather than merely enjoying simple garbage disposal. According to Waters, science in this town had developed beyond the old garbage test, and one day he headed down there to dangle some fishing line into the hole to see how far it goes.
"As usual, I brought the dogs with me. They wouldn't go anywhere near the damn thing," he told the show, "and if I try to bring them there on a leash, they'll just dig their feet in; they do not want to go anywhere near the hole."
According to Waters, he dangled the line over 24,000 meters (80,000 feet) into the hole without reaching the bottom.
Now, not to treat what is clearly a very silly and implausible hoax with too much seriousness, but that should have sent up a few red flags early on.
First, the longest fishing lines, used for deep-sea fishing, top out at around 500 meters, so unless he tied 48 fishing lines together, he didn't dangle a line 24,000 meters down.
If it really went as deep into the Earth as Mel claimed, the hole would be the deepest hole known on Earth. The closest rival, which has the advantage that it's actually real, is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. That project spanned from May 24, 1970, to just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the deepest branch reaching an impressive 12,263 meters (40,230 feet) below the surface of the Earth.
Given the amount of work that went into creating the Kola Superdeep Borehole, it seems unlikely that there was another, deeper hole just lying there, patiently eating up everyone's garbage.
"Geologically and physically, it’s not possible for a hole to be that deep," Jack Powell, a geologist with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, who had been asked about the hole by local filmmakers, told Daily Record News back in 2014.
"It would collapse into itself under the tremendous pressure and heat from the surrounding strata."
But there were far bigger clues that the whole thing was a bit of (enjoyable) nonsense. For example, Waters claimed that if you placed a radio near the hole's entrance, it would play music and shows from years gone by. Meanwhile, placing metals near the hole would morph them into other substances, making it some sort of alchemy hole if it existed. Others supposedly saw a black beam firing out of there.
A particularly weird claim regarded dogs. According to Waters, one local resident had at some point hurled a dead pet dog into the bottomless abyss, only for the dog to show up months later, though uninterested in its former owner.
Needless to say, nothing about the story adds up. Fun though the internet myth/urban legend is, there is no evidence any of it ever took place, and it would go against quite a lot of how we think the world works if there's a hole out there that brings dogs back to life but makes them indifferent to their former owners. Waters later supposedly claimed that his land was seized by the US government, and he was moved to Australia.
Of course, people have since attempted to find the hole. Some have sensibly done so on the Internet and have certainly found a hole, if not Mel's hole.
Others, like those on a trip in 2002 covered by the Seattle Times, went out there in person to fail to find the legendary Mel's hole. Reporters looking into the story have found no record of a Mel Waters ever living in the town or owning a property in the whole county. But maybe that's because [cue spooky music] the records all fell down the hole.
