Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is a well, yeah, an episode of Stuff You Should.
Be I have to say I'm fairly excited about this one.
Oh good, I'm so glad. I couldn't tell because sometimes you're just like, this is so stupid when it's oh, it is okay, but I'm well, yeah, but you're not excited about how stupid it is. So I'm glad. I'm really glad to hear that, because I am too.
No, I mean, I'm excited in that it is completely preposterous and silly, but in the fun tinfoil hat paranormal sort of way that those are fun.
So I maybe we should start over again, because I feel like we've really like released a spoiler here that this is probably just a story a yarn. I was gonna save that for that. Well, we're talking about actually, the way that we're approaching it is one of the most interesting stories legends modern urban legends to come out of a show, a radio show that was well known for producing all sorts of urban legends and amazing Stories Coast to Coast AM.
That's right. Its host was Art Bell. He himself, along with his wife, claimed that they had their own UFO encounter in the mid nineties. And the show started out in the eighties, was syndicated ninety three and it was not you know, it sounds like sort of a very niche thing, but it actually became very popular and Art Bell became a very famous radio host.
Yeah, he was in ratings for a while there. I'm guessing the early to mid nineties. He was just behind Rush Limbaugh and doctor Loris Schlessinger. That is up there as far as radio hosts go. And he started to retire in two thousand. He finally did host his last episode in twenty ten, but the show continues on. Host George Newery took over full time in two thousand and two. He's still doing it. And the whole premise of the show was that you would fax Art Bell or now
George Newry. I don't know if he still has the facts, but definitely Art Bud. You would send him a fax and basically say, hey, I've got this crazy story. And if it was, you know, interesting to Himry thought he wanted to know more about it or his audience would he would give you a call and you, guys, would have a conversation. He would interview you on the phone live on air, and then eventually people could call in and ask you questions. That was pretty much the format of the show.
Yeah, and in this case of Mel Mel Waters and his hole and don't worry, it's not going to be anything like that.
No. Jerry was like, Oh, this can go so many different ways, guys.
This was five conversations on this show over the span of five years. Again, the guy's name was Mel Waters and he lived in Ellensburg, Washington, kind of right smack dab in the middle of Washington State. And he said, I have a hole on my property. This property I don't live at right now because there's some snow damage to the house there. So I live in town in
an apartment or something. But on this property that I own, which is nine miles outside of Ellensburg, which is also a rural you know, in and of itself, he said, it's up on the Manitash Ridge and it's a very strange hole.
Yeah, it's not your average hole for sure, and we're talking about on the ground we should Yes, thank you, for saying that, because there's some people out there who are so twisted they still didn't understand what kind of hole we're talking about. We're talking about a hole in the ground. It's like a well, sure, but way more different than a well. But yes, you could like in it to a well, because it's about nine feet in diameter. The first fifteen or so feet down it was stone, right,
so it was lined with stone. That's very well like. Then there was soil then to turn into rock, and it had about a three and a half foot barrier wall around it to keep people from just walking right into it.
Yeah, very welly.
Yeah, and Mel hadn't built that wall. The previous owner had. But one of the things that makes the story so interesting it caught the attention and imagination of so many people. It's super out there. But if you listen to Mel, he comes off as essentially as perplexed as you do. You know, He's like, this hole has been here since the dawn of time apparently, and he's you know, just kind of learned about it since he bought the property,
and he has lots of questions about it. He's just reporting the stuff that he's learned.
Yeah, exactly. He doesn't come across as the usual sort of tinfoil hat type, not at all.
No, not at all.
And I'm sure you know you listen to the stuff as well, so we can both verify that he comes across this credible even to our sort of skeptical ears for sure. But like you said, he said it had been there a long time. The previous owners said it was there when he got there. Supposedly it had been around since maybe the dawn of time. The European settlers apparently knew about it. The local indigenous people avoided it. They said it was cursed. Locals called it the devil's hole.
And that's all well and good, well and good. But here's where it gets interesting, in that the properties of the hole and the things that surround the hole are really interesting according to this story. First of which is he's like, hey, people have been dumping stuff in this hole for as long as I know. There's probably like twenty people that come around. They dump in dead livestock, they dump in appliances that don't work. There's a weekly truckload of old tires that get dumped in there. And
this thing has never ever filled up. And when you drop stuff in it, you can't hear anything.
Yeah, Okay, it's pretty strange. I mean, but you could also chalk it up to just an exceptionally deep hole in the ground. Agreed. The thing is, there's even stranger properties to this hole. One of them is actually kind
of hard to wrap your head around. A neighbor saw a black beam shooting out of the hole skyward, and I think it might have even been at night, but it was so black and absorbed so much of the light around it that it stood out at night A beam of blackness, not a beam of light, A beam of a basically avoid shooting out of the hole. And I mean, if you ask your average hole expert, they're going to tell you that is unusual behavior for any hole.
Yeah, as spinal tap would say, it was none more black. I pictured the smoke monster from Lost.
Personally, I hadn't started Lost, But thanks for that. You were going to get around to it any day now. I'll be on the lookout for the smoke Monster.
We also meant it should have mentioned that apparently nothing echoed when you screamed into it. But those previous things you could explain, I guess by it just being so deep, you know, because an echo's created by hitting a bottom and bouncing back. So I don't really know if every deep, deep hole will echo back, but all that can kind of be explained. That the black beam coming out is very very strange and cannot be explained, and that's where it starts to go kind of truly weird.
Yeah. So he also he was reporting information that he gathered from neighbors, you know, as this hole started to pique his interest, he wanted to learn more about it. And one neighbor said that there used to be stones lined up around the edge of it, and I guess that reminded Mel of Stonehenge, and he showed his neighbor a picture of Stone Hedge. He said, Yep, it was exactly like that, except it didn't have the stones, the
lintels going across the top laid down on top. And it's exactly that kind of detail that added credibility to Mel's story. None of it was whole hog like. Yes, it looked exactly like stonehets chew on that it didn't have the stones at top like just little alterations like that that he would concede were just just kept it from from just being totally unbelievable and eye rolly, I think, is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, unless you just attached this to it, said his elderly neighbor.
Yes, right, or his nephew comes up later he mentions his nephew, but his nephew never gains a name. It is very much like that, for sure.
I think I would have been much more intrigued if there had been a photograph of any of this, but anyway, there wasn't. There was. Also, it gets a little stranger. There was a gun, oh, a World War Two era Walter P thirty eight, which was a German gun intended to replace the German Luger pistol. And he, as we'll learn, Mel was a gardener and worked in like medicinal herbs. And so while he was digging around, he found this gun buried and when he went to shoot it, and
this is where I have a few questions. Apparently the gun shot silently. I wonder what that means. I wonder if it didn't make any sound at all, or if it just sounded like it was had a suppressor on it, or if it just you know, the actual movement of the physical movement of the gun didn't even make a noise.
As I took it. It didn't make any noise whatsoever. But as bizarre as that sounds, it had even stranger properties too.
That's right. If you put this gun down by radio, it becomes a time travel machine, because the radio would all of a sudden start playing just random radio broadcasts from different places in different times. Apparently, if you moved your hand away from the gun, the station would change, and you had to hold very still to stay on the station. And if you stayed still for long enough and stayed on a station long enough, it would produce a sound that was quote out of time.
Okay, now let's just bear this in mind too. If you haven't listened to Mel's fall, I encourage you to go listen. There's like it's all it's five hours long, all like all of this unfolded over five years with across five calls. Like Mel is not aware of what questions he's going to be asked by Art Bell. He's not aware of what questions the callers are going to ask him, as far as we know. And if you listen to him like this does not sound rehearsed or
scripted or anything like that. So even setting aside like the idea that this is possibly real and just taking it like a story. This guy was one of the best storytellers in the history of the world. If he's just making all this up as he goes along, basically.
Yeah, which made me think it was perhaps set up in shady art.
No, ur Bell wouldn't have been involved in that. Now, how do you know he does?
Art Bell?
He he was a credible host, Okay for sure. Okay, I think that's why people loved him so much, Like he wasn't gonna get caught up in something like that. People might call up and pull his leg even asked Smell once, like are you pulling my leg? I I really don't think he was the kind of person who would who would set something like that up. He didn't need to. People would call in and he could just be the credible guy asking questions and they like, he
didn't need to set it up. People would just do it anyway.
No, I know. I'm just saying, if it was unearthed, like the greatest hoax, art Bell ever pulled this this funny trick, like you would say like, well, that's not possible, because Art Bell would never do something like, no.
I mean if there were irrefutable evidence that he had done and or he admitted to doing it, of course, I mean I'm not insane, Okay, That's.
What I'm saying. Is that just you just never know.
You never know whether I'm insane or not.
I always know that you're you're not. Thanks, man, I'm just catching casting a skeptics eye on this, I understand.
Yeah, I don't mean to berat you for that. I was just arguing in favor of.
Right now, Arbe would never do.
I had no idea. I felt this passionately about Art Bell and his intention.
All right, So moving on the whole apparently, and these were stories that even Mel said could be apocryphal, but he said a neighbor said that they threw their dead dog into the hole, and that same dog, with the same collar and tags was alive in the woods later on. So it brought this dog back to life.
Yes, very pet cemetery ish.
Yeah, but other dogs wouldn't go near the hole. Yeah, he's scared of it.
He said his own dogs wouldn't go anywhere near the damn thing. Was his quote. Yeah, and Art Bell jumped on this, He's like, well, wait a minute. If this thing is able to resurrect things, have you ever considered, you know, being thrown in there? Or I think he said, if you're ever diagnosed with a terminal disease, would you jump in yourself? And already ten steps ahead of a Mel said, it's actually in my will that I'd be thrown into the hole after I'd die.
Of good why not give it a shot? You know?
Yeah, so Chuck, I say, we take a break here and we'll come back and talk about some of the tests that Mel applied to the whole to try to get to the bottom of it.
Ah. Nice pun, Thank you, We'll be right back. Stucks stuck, you know it. Stucks.
It's a great name.
That's the name of it.
It's a great name. All right, stucks net with with an X.
Did you mean that pun?
Uh? Yeah I did. Can I feel ashamed?
You shouldn't? That was a good that's quality pun. And neither one of them are super into pun. But that was a really good one. Oh, very clever.
Well. I actually did the whole like arching point too, as I said it, which really punctuates upun.
It sure does, it punctuates it.
That was good too, Thanks, So I think I said before the break that Mel started figuring out ways to investigate this. First of all, he wanted to know how deep it was. Yeah, And it turns out that Mel was what he calls pretty close to a professional shark fisherman, or at least he used to be.
Yeah.
So that means that he had on the property a lot of really heavy, sturdy shark fishing reels. Anyone who's seen Jaws knows that those are sturdy reels.
Yeah.
He also had a ton of line, like a lot of wine. And so he tied a one pound triangular or pyramidal weight to the end of a line. Uh, and he started slowly paying it out, And we should we should back up a little bit because he used
the line differently the first time. He tied a roll of life savers to the end of it once and then paid it out fifteen hundred yards and when he brought it back up, the lifesavers were intact, indicating to him that even fifteen hundred yards down, he hadn't hit the water table.
Yeah. I would have used a sponge, but that's just me.
Oh that's a good one. That's a great one.
Thanks.
So back to the line, he's after the Lifesavers thing. He started just paying out line using his shark reel.
Right, yes, and he goes down over fifteen miles about eighty thousand feet into the hole, allegedly not hitting the bottom, and art Bell noted trusted radio hosts said yeah, you know, you might want to call a university or something like they would probably want to look into this and research this. And Mel was like, hey, that's funny. My wife works for a local university here what he don't think? He said the school, but didn't. People surmise online it was
probably what would it have been, Central Washington? Is that a university?
Yeah, Central Washington.
Yeah, And so anyway, he said, I've been talking to my wife and she's been talking to the university and apparently they're pretty interested. And then callers started calling in saying things like, hey, you should use a sponge. Well they didn't say that, but they should have, but they said, hey, we have ideas on how to find out how deep this is. And also, if this is as deep as you say, it's like twice as deep as the Marianas Trench.
And even though this wasn't in the show, it's also twice as deep as the deepest hole, which is Russia's Cola super deep borehole, which is just a little over forty thousand feet, so this is double that.
Yeah, it was cute. So we're talking. I don't know if we even said this or not. This whole thing started in nineteen ninety seven. So when that caller calls up with the information about the Marianna's trench, she says that he went and consulted his encyclopedia.
Very cute.
Yeah, it is super cute. So, yes, this is a This would very like far and away be the world's deepest hole, and it's an impossible hole in that sense. We'll get a little more into that, but that essentially was the first call, and we've peppered in some stuff from other calls, but that's the basics of the hole and what Mel said he had done so far. Some of the listeners that called in were like, you should put temperature sensors and lower those down and maybe a
video camera. Yeah, sure, radar can come into this somehow, and radar was like, leave me out of this. And essentially, like I was saying, that's the first call. So the first call happens, and then a week later, Mel Waters appears again on Coast to Coast am and he has like very distressing news this time.
That's right, he said, all right, I went back to the property and I couldn't get back on. It was blocked off by military personnel and they said you can't come on your own property. He said, there was a plane crash and you can't come on. And Mel was like, there wasn't any plane crash. Like I would have known about this. I don't live too far away. It would have made noise, I would have seen smoke. There was nothing indicating that there was a plane crash. Give me
the person in charge. And they trotted out somebody not in military fatigues, which is very X filesy. Anytime there's somebody in charge wearing a suit with the military, it's very X files. He had very bad news.
Yeah, Mel turned into a bit of a care in there.
Yeah.
So this person whoever it was that wasn't in military guard was in an X file suit smoking a cigarette bro probably, He says, So what's the problem. And Mel says, this is my property. I want to get onto my properties. The guy in the suit, So that's not going to happen, and this isn't necessarily your property, and if you want to go ahead, that's fine. But I'll bet we could very easily find a drug lab on your land and then there'd be a whole bunch of problems for you
that you don't need if you'll just turn around and leave. Yeah, that really got to mel for sure. He was spooked, to say the least.
Yeah, as he should have been, because he did have a lab on the property. He was not cooking drugs, but like I mentioned earlier, he was into medicinal herbs and plants and things like that that he would source from northern Nevada that, you know, traditional herbs and things that have been used by Native Americans for you know, eons. And he said, I do have a lab here, and they could probably frame me pretty easily, so I'm not
sure what to do. He also learned around the same time that the predecessor to I guess Google Earth was something called Terra Server, where they had just satellite aerial satellite images of the Earth. He was like, my property's blocked out on that thing. Now.
Yeah, and Art Bell he did his research because he's very reliable and trustworthy, and he found a server a Terra server image and found like this is yeah, you can't see his property. I think it's on Google MAMPs today. Laura doctor Claw helps us out with us, and she points out that there's a nearby military installation. It's called the Yakama Training Center. It's an army training center, but it also includes a NSA listening station. And that's not
conspiracy theory. That's the Seattle Post intelligence are reporting that there's an NSA listening station there that in and of itself could block out a large segment of the central Washington I think on Terror Server. Yeah.
I also saw and this is Unreddit and since this is all bunk anyway, we might as well just mention stuff like this. But there were dudes on Reddit that were like, you can see where Google Earth has cloned images and overlaid them over the spot where the hole should be.
Yeah, I mean that's not the most incredible part of all this, is it?
Oh no, that's coming through. Yeah, I mean, I hope we are in agreement on the most incredible part. And it's not a silent gun or a silent hole.
We'll see. I'm not exactly what you're talking about.
I'm so I'm on. You know, all right, we'll get there, okay.
So there's a couple other things that Mels had happened since he was first on and had caught the attention to the government who had now taken over his land. He had a buddy who was a trucker, and his buddy told him that he delivered a huge quantity of fiber optic cable to a warehouse in Ellensburg. And in the late nineties, fiber optic cable had no business whatsoever
being anywhere near Ellensburg, Washington. Another friend told him he delivered a truckload of instruments from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, one of the national labs. In and of itself is spooky, especially pre millennium when everything the government did was super spooky, and that those were delivered to that same warehouse in Ellenburg, Ellensburg.
So fiber optic cables and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory instruments suddenly amassing in Ellensburg a little coincidental with the government taking over his land.
That's right. And you know how he found this out. His trucker buddy told him so, right. A couple of other details there apparently the workers at the warehouse were all of them were Israeli. According to this trucker unnamed trucker And if you're just wondering, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is responsible basic generally responsible for the safety and security of America's nuclear arsenal.
Okay, yep, great, that's what they did. Sure, so there was a bit of like an upside to all this. And like again, Mel was really distressed that he wasn't allowed on his land and that he had been threatened and intimidated, But he also was like, you know, this is my private property. My rights are being trampled on. So he was quite happy to find that shortly after the government took over his land they did write by him, and then some his real estate agent contacted him apparently
used the type to have a real estate agent and retainer. Yeah, and they said, Mel, I've got great news for you. You have an anonymou us offer to lease your land indefinitely for a quarter of a million dollars a month.
Yeah.
How do you feel about that?
I mean that's incredible. Uh, he said, you know this is on the third call by now. He was like, yeah, I took the deal because I'm in Australia right now, buddy, and I'm getting rich here off the US government or you know whatever unnamed le c or Lis or which one would that be.
So he would be the less or they would be the least. See, let's see, they would be the leasing as far as car commercials have taught me.
Yeah, so Art Bell and we believe everything he says. He said that, hey, Mel is definitely in Australia. I've gotten emails. I guess that we're dot au or something, but he was somehow he was able to verify that Mel was from in Australia. Yeah, and Mel also is like and here's the other thing is like the government took care of all this. They did all the paperwork. They got my dogs over here. The Australian government was
cooperating and they were in on it. And I'm in Australia now and I'm doing my medicinal herb growing here to great effect.
Yeah. And we should say also, we've been to Australia for tour and it is not an easy country to come into. They make you jump through lots of hoops. So it's another suspicious thing too. I just want to point out but.
We didn't have the government doing all the legwork.
Well exactly, that's what I'm saying. Like he did, like so that's not Australia's normal, mo is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, that's not nothing, as they say.
One other thing that he tossed out there is that so he was using his medicinal herbs secure people. He also did some gratifying work rescuing wombats. Just through that out there as an aside. I thought that was a
nice touch. And then there's one other thing too. Remember the magical gun that made no sound and then played radio broadcasts from other times and erows I do he took that to Australia with him, probably also another hard thing to do for the average person, and he used it as a security deposit for his place that he rented. He gave it to his landlord his security deposit. I don't know why he would have needed to do that if he was getting maybe he hadn't gotten the first least payment yet.
Maybe that's the weird all. That's not the weirdest part obviously, but that's the part that makes the least just logical sense. Was what would he'd be like uh here, just you like old World War two guns. Maybe the guy did, maybe that was it.
Well supposedly, whether he did or not, the man's son got in touch with Mel and was like, I don't know where my father is. He disappeared, and he took that weird gun with him, and before they disappeared, he had become obsessed with the thing.
Yeah, and they never heard from him again as.
Far as I know. And also the man's son was never named, nor was the man the landlord.
The story right, all right, So Mel goes back to the States to visit some family. He did not show for a appearance on Coast to Coast in late nineteen ninety nine, and he was like, yeah, you know why, Buddy Art, He said, because I was questioned after an altercation on a bus and I was transported back to Olympia, Washington, or I was told I was going to be transported back to Olympia, Washington, but instead I woke up almost
two weeks later, twelve days later. I just awoke with no memory of anything that happened in a rough part of San Francisco.
And no, I just call that San Francisco.
No wallet, no ID. I had adhesive on my arm like residue from like where I clearly probably had an iv U and brother, my back teeth are gone.
That would be so distressing to be like, I'm missing teeth and I have no recollection of them being taken out.
It's distressing when you know it's coming and it happens.
Yeah, good, I can voucher for that. Oh yeah, well, I mean did you get knocked out? I guess when you had yours room.
Oh sure, that's the best part.
Okay, okay, yeah, but I can imagine knowing it's coming would be more distressing that Usually, as they say, anticipation is the worst part of just about any experience, right.
I don't know, that's what I heard.
Okay, So what Regardless, male's now missing a couple of teeth. He's also down, in addition to missing his ID and wallet, his belt buckle, which sounds kind of what's the word I'm looking for, innocuous, Yes, Chuck, that's exactly the word I was looking for. Sounds innocuous as far as details go. But this belt buckle was a special belt buckle that
he had made himself. He's also craftsman in addition to a grower and maker of medicinal herbal tinctures, and this belt buckle contained a dime, a very special dime, a nineteen forty three dime with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's bust on the side, just like the dimes we had today. The problem is that dime should have existed.
Yeah, the Roosevelt dimes that didn't start till nineteen forty six, after FDR died. He was still alive in nineteen forty three, so those don't exist. They even did some searching on the internet. The only thing I could find was apparently they're nineteen forty nine dimes that people have sort of etched the nine to look like a three. Because I saw a picture of one. I was like, that looks like a nineteen forty three Roosevelt to me, But other people said, like, no, that's been made. It was a
nine made to look like a three. But at any rate, those dimes don't exist. I mean, I guess it's possible that it could have been some kind of a counterfeit thing. But he said that a couple more things about this dime that it could not be photographed, so it clearly wasn't the dime I saw on the internet. And also if you walk fifteen feet away, it goes invisible, and it's not just my eyesight because I know what you're thinking.
Yeah. So he also took one of those dimes to a coin dealer, and I guess while I was in the coin dealer's possession, the Treasury Department showed up and confiscated.
It just like that they were there.
Yeah, and he was using these dimes like pretty innocently. I saw the belt buckles were World War Two themes, so one was a like he had three coins. One had a bust of Churchill, one had a bust of FDR, and I think the other one was a bust of Stalin and he's like, oh, this FDR dime will work perfectly. Like apparently he hadn't realized that they were special dimes.
He just dug them up on his property, which I think should have raised the red flag right away that they were special dimes if they were something he dug up on his property.
Yeah, he said he found him in a red envelope on his property, these impossible coins. So I say we take another break, because when we come back, we are definitely going to get to the craziest part of this whole story.
Stuck Stucks.
I don't know that you know what stuck stuck that. It's a great name, that's the name of it.
It's a great name. All right, Stucks met with with an X.
All Right, So we're back. Uh, and this is when we start to talk about a second hole. Yeah. Because uh. And on a subsequent call into AM Coast to Coast, Mel said, because I've been on your radio show and people are like familiar with with me in this whole this hole, now, this whole hole, he said, I've now been made aware of a second hole thanks to the
native people there in Nevada. They got in touch with members of the Basque community there, and apparently there is still a robust Basque community because she heard hers from the peer moved there in the late nineteenth century and they're still there today, so which is great. But this bass hole, as it's called, was very similar to Mel's hole. It was nine feet diameter. This one had an actual metal collar around it, starting a couple of feet off the ground and had a metal lining the hole as
far as you could see down into it. And local Basque people was like, yeah, that hole has been around since the nineteenth century, and dogs won't go near it. They're scared of it. And we've seen a black beam come out of this thing.
He's like another black beam. That's nuts.
Yeah, And that's not the craziest part. We're getting there.
Just what Yeah, No, I know what you're talking about. The I mean, come on, so I think it's what I'm about to say. That that metal collar around around the hole somehow was never hot to the touch, but the local basks had figured out that if you put your tent against it, it would heat your tent in the winter. Okay, is that what the weirdest part was that you were talking about?
Are you being coy? Okay? I can't tell if you just are are blanking or if you're just messing around with No.
I really couldn't think of it earlier, But I know just what you mean.
The closer we get to it, I love this. We never have this kind of true suspense on this show.
I feel like I feel like I should be doing like a finger drum roll for the next minute.
So it's keeping your sleeping bag warm, it's keeping your tent warm. Melt. He did a few things. He dropped a wrench in it or I guess he dropped it on the metal. It didn't make any sound like the last one. Then they got some ice because they were like, this thing has weird heat properties, so let's drop some ice done in there in a pot and see what happens, because if it gets hotter or something, then we'll know it has some weird or some I guess legitimate heat properties.
And the ice came back it was unmelted. And when they put this potted ice over a fire to melt it, that ice eventually caught on fire.
Yeah, put out its own heat too.
Yeah, via the fire.
Right. So one of the basque people who was involved in all this is like, hey, this eternal hot ice is probably a pretty good idea. I'm going to take it home and put it in my wood stove.
Yeah, good idea.
Yeah, it's a great idea. The problem is, one of the strange properties of this eternal heat ice was that it dried everything around it so much so it sucked all the moisture out of everything that this poor basque man's cabin crumbled into basically dust because the eternal ice just being in his wood stove had sucked all of the moisture out of the wood so that it just couldn't stand up as wood any longer.
Yeah, that stove collapsed along with the rest of the cabin. So that's not the weirdest part.
Well, the stove actually kept it basically burned a hole and now it's like five feet into the ground. That's made it that far. Yeah, pretty nuts.
But that's not the craziest part. You ready, Yeah, dear listener. So this part is also a little awful because it involves killing an animal. We should mention that people at some point suggested, like, why don't you throw a cat down that hole, Mel's hole, Bengalie, see if you can hear it crying and stand up. Guy art Bell was like, no, we're not doing anything like that.
That's what I'm saying.
I know, that's why exactly. So they did have a sheep though, at the bass hole, and they try to bring the sheep around it. The sheep freaked out, so they said, all right, you're getting in the crate and we're doing this a hard way. They lowered the sheep down fifteen hundred feet. They had stopped making any sounds. They brought the sheep up and it was dead. So they dissected it and it was cooked from the inside out evidently, so they had a nice button dinner and gained immortality.
Yeah.
No, I'm going to let you take this, buddy. Oh really the craziest part here we go.
So while they're dissecting it, they quickly found out that the sheep was missing its internal organs. They just weren't there anymore. But in the internal organs place was a giant tumor. They're like, well, we've already come this far with dissecting, we might as well dissect the tumor. And when they cut the tumor open, they found that there was what looked to be what you could describe closest would be a fetal seal, but the fetal seal had
human eyes. And even crazier than that, the fetal seal like opened its eyes and started looking around at all of the Basque people and mel who were there standing over it agog and amazement.
Yeah. So this thing was eighteen inches long. It was connected by an umbilical cord. And we should also say that stuff you find on the internet now, some of that stuff maybe has been added since nineteen ninety seven, because there's a lot of you know, bunk out there. But I saw it was connected by an umbilical cord, detached itself, and like you said, just kind of walking around hanging out with people. Apparently they thought this thing was like, I want to go back into the hole.
So they put it on the metal collar. It looked at them, gave him a nod and took the dive. Yeah, the fetle seal with humanlike eyes.
Yeah. And so later on Mel's here witnessing all this stuff, and he's in contact obviously with his basque friends from that point on, and he said that later on they told him like the fetal seal had come back up several times and they'd learned that if a boom box was near, they could communicate with the fetal seal. When somebody grabbed an old two Live Crew cassette and tried to record over it, nothing was recorded.
Okay, they better had some basking taper over those square holes.
You know, I forgot about that part. Yeah, absolutely, But what about Mel's cancer?
It went away, buddy, thanks to the BASQ hole. I guess. He had apparently pretty aggressive terminal esphageal cancer and it was just gone. And so they started started calling this thing the tumor seal because of that.
Yeah, which is a horrible name for any organism, but yeah, there you go. So that's if you if you come across something called the tomor seal on the Internet, that's what they're talking about, this strange seal like creature with human eyes that healed Mel's esophageal cancer.
That's right. So since the beginning of the Internet, and this was I mean seemingly coincidentally kind of around the birth of the Internet, the story grew and grew and grew. Of course, just like a little fetal seal will one day become a sea lion.
Oh is that right? Seals and sea lions aren't aren't different, are small.
But this is a magical story. So that's oh god, that's what happens in this case. Okay, especially as human like eyes. So mel Waters apparently doesn't exist. They have looked there, apparently, or they're no records of the mel Waters in the county of which he supposedly resided. There was no wife that worked at Central Washington University. Go Wildcats, by the way, Go Wildcats. It was obviously somebody from around there, because they had a lot of knowledge of
the area. So whoever was pulling off this hoax was clearly a local. But there was no Mel Waters as far as anyone can tell.
No. But one of the interesting things is that in the real world, in the Ellensburg area, apparently there is a local rumor superstition about a bottomless hole somewhere in the area.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that's was the leaping point for this story had to be.
But Mel really took it and Ranwick and so I mean this caught coast to coast am listener's attention and enough that they went out and actually looked for the hole. There was an expedition that was mounted in two thousand and two thirty people makes it an official expedition. Yeah, it was led or it included a guy named Gerald Osbourne. Gerald Osbourne went by red Elk. He didn't he very wisely didn't claim ancestry or heritage to any particular indigenous
tribe in the area. Instead, he said he was an intertribal shaman, which means he was white. Yeah, and he's not to be confused. He's not to be confused with Gerald red Elk, who's a legitimate Navajo who was a Navajo code talker in World War Two from.
Thanks for stealing that name exactly.
So he was the reason he was on this expedition is he said, I've been to this whole numerous times. My father took me there for the first time, all the way back in nineteen sixty one. I'm a huge asset to your group. As a matter of fact, why don't you guys just carry me around? I'm that much of an asset to this expedition. Did he really say that, No, but I could kind of see it.
Nothing in this story would surprise me, So you can literally doup me with anything at this point.
And by the way, Rip Gerald Osborne aka Red Elk, he did pass and I think twenty seventeen maybe.
Yeah, okay, all right. P He claimed that a huge base craft would appear and hover over that hole, and that the government had a very small underground base there obviously underground. There's legit geologist named Jack Powell from Washington State Department of Natural Resources who seems like the Loan or maybe one of the Loan skeptics aside for me,
apparently saying like, hey, this hole is not possible. Josh Clark is even going to say this one day on a very popular podcast, This wole would collapse on itself because of all the pressure and heat from the area around it. It's just you just can't have a hole that deep. It's impossible. Yeah.
They were like, stop saying impossible. He's like, fine, but you get my point, right, he.
Said, And that fishing line wouldn't have made it, or your life savers or anything else wouldn't have survived that depth.
No, And he did concede, like, this is this area was carved out by volcanic activity eons ago, so it is possible that there are like a lot of really really deep holes that may even be, for all intents and purposes, as far as human scale is concerned, bottomless. Yeah, but what this guy's describing could not possibly exists. And this area is also just riddled with gold mine shafts.
In fact, I think I might know the particular gold mine shaft outside of Ellensburg that inspired this guy this mel waters.
Yeah, not you. You're playing the role of Jack Powell.
Yeah, that was me doing my Jack Powell impression. He and I sound just like just like me and Mark Ruffalo.
Right.
Oh, people said that, Yeah, I get that. A lot.
Oh, I've ever thought about that. I think it's said you talk like someone the other day Mike Berbiglia.
Yeah, I think I get that a little. They might be the first person to say that I've heard that. Yeah, and then I think, yeah, I think that's it for voice lookalikes or sound.
Alikes, same Muppet, each inner.
I love that. I will never ever forget that. I hold that do it in my heart.
You should, all right, so Powell said, as Josh play acted, Let's go to this gold mine shaft that I know about, Like, I bet this is it. It's near the Manustache Ridge. I think it said Manitash earlier. It's Manustache.
I think it's Monastash.
Oh, well, I mean it depends on which side do you live on.
Yeah, Nevada, Nevada, Yeah, exactly, Tomato, Tamata.
But he took them there, the group of whole you know, Mel'shole enthusiasts, and they were like, nah, there, you duped this. This. There's no way this is Mel's Hole. It's too normal. Basically, it's not doing anything weird.
You lying geologists.
Yeah, exactly, that's funny.
So these people, they were undeterred, they were like we are, so we're gonna balk so hard at your suggestion that this pitting thing is Mel's Hole that just despite you, we're going to go on and form the Seattle Paranormal Society. So there.
Yeah, like we're all here together, right, we should call ourselves something.
Yeah.
So they did. Yeah, and here's another just little addendum in twenty twelve, apparently like local library historians said, you know, the files on Mel's Hole are not in my library anymore. They disappeared and there's no way some crackpot stole.
Them, right, They're definitely not under a placement at my house where I forgot them.
Yeah.
So there were again like there are people out in the real world who are trying to track down Mel's Hole for one reason or another. And Mel, yes, exactly. And one of the places that became like a clearinghouse online for continued information about Mel's Hole was the Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore. They actually claimed to still be getting email updates from Mel and Mel's nephew, so you know that they were like that was an arcane
reference right there, Mel's nephew. I think it legitimized everything. And they actually may have been receiving information from somebody claiming to be Mel's nephew. Eventually, though, even they the Northwest Museum of Legends and lower were like nuts to this, and based on the date of their last posts, they seem to have given up the ghost in two thousand and three.
Yeah, it may have had something to do with they said, Hey, Mel's nephew, he's coming to our hang. He's coming to the Northwest UFO conference on Memorial Day. And then they said, oh, well, it turns out he didn't make it. He got in a car.
Wreck, but he'll keep us posted about whether he's going to make it to the conference after exactly. So, you said that there's so much croud on the Internet now about this that it's just kind of to me. It took like a really interesting, cool, self contained thing that didn't need to be expounded upon it. Yeah, just twenty twenties Internet eyed it, which means it just got dumb.
And so there's tons of Like I read one article where somebody was like, this may be a Lazarus pit, and I looked up Lazaru's Pit and it only exists in the DC Comic universe. Yeah, so that probably is not a very credible website. And then also there's this YouTube video from just this March, and this is what's amazing about the Internet. Somebody made a YouTube video that claimed that Elon Musk, because he's like the head of technology in the world, apparently sent a special drone, a
special high tech drone made for tough places. They said, down into Mel's hole and we'll get to to what he came up within a second. But if you go and search that, there are offshoot videos videos about that that are treating it like news. So there's tons of YouTube videos talking about this drone footage that Elon Musk found and essentially he found what was at the bottom of it, and he did not like what he found. According to this YouTube video.
Yeah, oh, legend has it it was a cave painting of a cybertruck.
I think he would have been gratified with that, or he would have been like, wow, those things really are ugly. Yeah. So no, they quoted him in this video there's something down there, something we don't get, we aren't ready for what's at the bottom.
And that tracks so, I.
Mean, it still just keeps going on and on. Some people of a twenty seventeen video went to a location that someone on read it said was Mel's Hole. They're like, it's not really Mel's hole. So there are people still looking for Mel's Hole out there. But to me, you don't really need to go much beyond the actual original story. It's it's perfect as is.
Yeah, it's a fun radio theater. Yep.
Uh yeah, and that's our assessment that it is theater. Chuck, I think that's where we both land, right.
I mean, that's where I am. I hope you're there. If not, we got to end the show.
I'm solidly right there with you. Okay, good, Well, since we're standing right next to another shoulders shoulder, cheek to jowl and all that stuff, I think that means it's time for a listener. Mayw.
I thought so relieved. I thought you're about to say we have to jump into that hole together.
No, never, never, We like our lives.
That's true. But maybe it would be like Joe versus Volcano and it would just spit us right back out like Tom and Meg.
That was such a good movie.
Loved it all right. Here is a follow up to Project one hundred thousand. Hey, guys, just listened to the episode was impressed with your coverage like always and the topic of the lack of men for Vietnam. For the Vietnam War, my mind is flooded with thoughts of the secret war. My people, the Mong people, were recruited as gorilla troops to assist the US and the Jungles of Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Many of the troops were children, including
my great uncle Lord. Very few spoke English and agreed to participate on the premise that they would be brought to live the American dream after the war was over, but very few made it over. Most were stranded and then hunted as traders to their countries. In fact, my mom was born in a concentration camp in Laus and she's only forty two years old right now.
Coo On.
Most of us live in Minnesota, California, and Wisconsin now, but many of us still have family living back home, where the conflict is seemingly fizzled out. I've always wondered what happened overseas to the ones who didn't make it out of the camps, and how or if my people have restored their villages, but the topic is still raw. I think it'd be a great topic to look into for an episode, a short stuff or just for your
brain bank. And that is warmly from Melody, who apparently listens to us from the long drives between Chicago and Minneapolis.
Nice. Thanks a lot, Melody. I definitely not heard about that, and I think that's a great corollary to Project one hundred thousand huh toats. Yeah. I think that might even deserve its own episode too. We'll have to dig into it if you want to be like Melody and blow our minds and depress us simultaneously. We love that kind of thing in a weird way. You can send it via email to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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