In the 1990s, Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM was the radio’s answer to Unsolved Mysteries. The late-night talk show discussed aliens from outer space, Sasquatches, haunted houses, and cattle mutilations. He covered everything; it didn’t matter if it was true. In 1997, Mel Waters contacted Bell’s show. Waters, hailing from a remote town in Washington State, made outlandish claims about a large hole on his property that seemingly had no end.
“Mel’s Hole” became an extremely entertaining urban legend. While this story is not so much a mystery but rather a look at how far people are willing to go for attention (or simply to tell a good story), Mel’s Hole still has some believers.
A phone call
In September 1997, paranormal enthusiast Art Bell was at the height of his career as the Joe Rogan of the 1990s. His program boasted millions of listeners, and many callers shared their stories of the weird and unexplained. One listener was Mel Waters, who faxed in a story from his home in Ellensburg, Washington. Waters’ story led to an invitation onto the show for a live interview.
Art Bell at the studio. Photo: Radio Hall of Fame
Waters claimed he was a former soldier, fisherman, metalworker, and alternative medicine researcher. He claimed to own a piece of land just outside of Ellensburg on Manastash Ridge that featured a strange hole.
Waters supposedly inherited this hole from a previous owner who explained that the hole had been there as long as he could remember. The hole was the community’s dumping ground. Locals would come to the hole to dispose of anything they wanted, from old tires and refrigerators to dead animals. However, the hole never filled up, and there was no noise or other indication that objects had hit the bottom. Everything just vanished into the void.
Fascinated by the hole, Waters decided to investigate, hoping to determine its depth. Attaching a one-pound lead weight to the end of a fishing line, he lowered it into the hole. His lead weight never touched the bottom. He used another spool of line and kept repeating this process until he eventually gave up. There was no bottom. He claimed he used 24,000m worth of line. This meant the hole was several times deeper than Mount Everest was above sea level.
Other strange effects
Waters’ dogs refused to go near the hole. His radio would turn to static when he approached it, except for once when he managed to capture 1960s baseball commentary and vintage music. A neighbor claimed he tossed his dead dog into the hole, only for it to come strolling home days later.
Bell asked if local law enforcement or researchers had examined the hole, but Waters only said that his wife worked at the local university and was trying to persuade her colleagues to launch an investigation.
Mel’s Hole is somewhere in Manastash Ridge. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
A developing story
Waters’ story did not end there. Between 1997 to 2002, he made several calls to Bell with updates on the hole. According to Waters, the hole was stormed by government officials, who sealed off the area, claiming a plane had crashed. He said they tried to bribe him, offering $3 million a year to lease the land.
Waters dreamed of moving to Australia to research alternative medicine, and he claimed to have terminal cancer, so he accepted the money. However, he still wanted to find out the truth about his hole.
He claims he returned to the U.S. to check out his property but woke up in San Francisco with no back teeth and needle marks in his arms, missing 12 days from his memory. His hefty government payout vanished from his bank account. The hole also seemed to disappear, at least from satellite images.
From there, the story got even wilder: a Native American tribe reached out to Waters with news of another hole. He traveled to meet them, and they teamed up to conduct experiments. Their hole was metal-rimmed, electrically charged, and warm to the touch.
A supposed Google Earth image of Mel’s Hole. Photo: Google Earth
They lowered a bucket of ice into it, which didn’t melt but instead transformed into a weird salt-like substance. They also dropped a sheep into the pit in a crate, which came back up cooked from the inside with a wriggling black tumor inside. Waters claimed this was the fetus of an aquatic-human hybrid creature and that contact with it cured him of cancer.
After one last call in 2002, Waters stopped getting in touch.
A good prank
Of course, Waters’ story had more holes than the ones he encountered.
After listening to six hours of Waters’ calls, I noticed a few things. He started as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth man with a mysterious hole on his land, but as the calls went on, the more outlandish his claims became.
During one of his calls, he stated:
You know, I thought this might be like Guinness World Book of Records type hole here.
Did he just want publicity? Though he kept claiming he didn’t want attention, he kept calling in. He even spoke about starting a website, a relatively new idea in the 1900s.
Waters stuttered when pressed on specifics, and when Bell asked for contact details so people could get in touch with him or assist him, he demurred.
Then, there’s the obvious lack of evidence. There is no record of Mel Waters from the Ellensburg area. There was no record of his wife, either. No neighbors or locals emerged to corroborate the story. Bell claimed to have sent out a media crew to the town to investigate. They never met Waters, nor did they find the hole. However, they did note an increased military presence.
Suspending belief
Let us suspend belief for a moment. Is a bottomless pit leading to the center of the Earth even remotely possible?
Writer Ethan Siegel with Forbes Magazine explored this in an article. He said the further you go down:
The temperatures and pressures begin to increase fantastically. The Earth’s outer core becomes liquid and molten, and the inner core is highly radioactive, with temperatures in excess of 4,000°F [2,200°C]. This is so spectacularly hot that it would literally melt, boil, or sublimate practically any known materials…It’s only a matter of time (and, surprisingly, a few dozen kilometers) before you find that you’ve smashed into the wall of your cylindrical tube, since the Earth is still rotating.
Conclusion
Bell’s Coast to Coast AM show allowed all kinds of eccentric characters and storytellers to entertain audiences. Bell said that Coast to Coast was “purely entertainment,” and for a few years, Waters certainly entertained.
