Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Due to the nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of sexual assault and animal abuse. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. There's a good chance you've heard of Coast to Coast AM, the late-night radio program that's been airing for decades. According to the show's website, it still pulls in nearly 3 million listeners each week.
It's now hosted by George Norrie as well as George Knapp, but it was the legendary Art Bell, the show's first host and founder, who grew Coast to Coast from its humble beginnings into a nationally syndicated success. The program covered all manner of supernatural and conspiracy-driven subjects, and then, one day in 1997,
Along came a story that went on to capture listeners' imaginations for years. It was about a hole. Like, a hole in the ground. The story came from a man going by the name Mel Waters. If Mel was to be believed, there was a bottomless pit on his property that had supernatural abilities, making the hole, and Mel, targets for a government cover-up.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.
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Hi there, Carter Roy here. If you're interested in true crime, especially unsolved murders, serial killers, and cold cases, you'll love my brand new show, Murder True Crime Stories. Each episode covers a notorious murder or murders with a special focus on those who were impacted the most. We'll always leave with the knowledge of why these stories need to be heard. You can listen to Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts.
Mel Waters had been on his property near Ellensburg, Washington for about four years when something odd occurred to him. See, there was this deep pit on his land, only he couldn't tell just how deep it was. Neighbors told him the hole had been around for decades at least. As far as he knew, people had always used it as a giant trash can.
practically anything they didn't want anymore, from garbage bags to an old refrigerator to a dead cow, was thrown down the hole. Until one day, Mel had to wonder, if we've all been throwing stuff down there for so long, why hasn't it ever filled up? He'd never even heard anything hit bottom. Maybe, he thought, this is the deepest hole ever found. Perhaps it's even bottomless.
He reached out to Art Bell, host of Coast to Coast AM by fax. Art was immediately enticed. And on February 21st, 1997, the first episode of the story that came to be known as Mel's Hole was broadcast to millions of listeners. It began like every other episode, ushered in by electronic music composed by Giorgio Moroder,
Hart read the facts on air and his phone lines lit up immediately. Without further ado, he introduced his guest. "Mel, are you there?" Mel explained that the pit was located on his private property near Manastash Ridge in central Washington's Kittitas Valley. It measured about 9 feet 9 inches in diameter with a 3.5 foot retaining wall.
Why, now he'd already made a few attempts to determine the hole's depth. A high-powered flashlight's beam only disappeared into darkness. Yelling into the pit produced no echo. Mel even tried throwing old television picture tubes, aka cathode ray tubes, into the hole.
Side note, listeners: if you ever get your hands on one of these old TV tubes, do not throw them. They contain toxic materials like lead sealed with a vacuum. Breaking that vacuum can be extremely dangerous and can cause an implosion, which is probably why Mel thought it would be fun to throw them down a hole. If they had hit bottom, they'd presumably make a loud noise he could hear at the surface.
but he claimed he never heard the tubes implode, splash into water, or hit anything he considered a bottom. So one day Mel decided to draw on his experience with deep sea shark fishing. Turns out this niche skill set comes in handy when examining a mysterious hole. As luck would have it, Mel had a 1500 yard spool of fishing line lying around his home
He tied a pack of Lifesavers to one end and lowered it into the pit. His logic being, if the Lifesavers hit water, they dissolve. But after letting out the entire line and reeling it back up, the Lifesavers were still intact. And he didn't stop there.
Mel claimed he purchased more spools of fishing line, 5,000 yards each, and after tying them together with a weighted end, he still couldn't reach the bottom, which led him to believe the hole was at least 80,000 feet deep, if not bottomless.
In his first call with Art Bell, it seemed like Mel didn't know if such a deep hole was even feasible, but he was curious. He hoped that maybe he had a world record hole on his hands. Art opened up the phone lines to callers who were eager to suggest other methods of testing the depth of Mel's hole.
One mentioned radar. Another caller actually volunteered to be lowered inside a cage, of course. On the off chance something was down there eating the garbage. Yet another listener told Mel that the Mariana Trench, the deepest known part of the ocean, reached depths of about 36,000 feet. Well, Mel was pretty pleased to hear this, considering he believed his hole was more than twice that deep.
By the way, the deepest hole on Earth, made by humans, is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia. Beginning in 1970, Soviet scientists began drilling at a remote research station in the Arctic Circle.
Over the course of 19 years, the borehole reached more than 40,000 feet below the surface, just slightly deeper than the Mariana Trench. The main goal was to study the Earth's crust to get an idea of how it formed, but they also wanted to dig deeper than anybody else had before, kind of like a reverse space race. The project was eventually abandoned for a few different reasons, but mainly the heat
See, that far below the surface, temperatures can reach over 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Rocks become more like pliable plastic, and air pressure becomes dangerously intense. Even drill bits are no match for that environment. So it's probably a good thing Mel's volunteer never went through with being lowered into the abyss.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Cola Superdeep Borehole has inspired a host of creepy urban legends. Some say you can hear the screams of tortured souls rising up from the abyss, that it's actually a gateway to hell. As for Mel's hole, it seemed to attract a different kind of supernatural story. Mel told Art that dogs were afraid of it,
and one of his neighbors swore that he gave his deceased dog a burial by throwing it down the hole, and it came back alive. After hearing about the alleged miracle, Mel said, somewhat jokingly, but not really, that he wanted to be thrown down the hole when he died. In fact, he claimed the demand was written into his will. Mel added a few other interesting tidbits.
His wife worked at a nearby university, and he'd try to entice her colleagues from the geology department to help him measure the depth of the hole, but they didn't take him seriously. When Art suggested inviting a television crew out to investigate, Mel was hesitant. He didn't want that kind of publicity, but he swore to Art up and down that he was telling the truth. For the time being, Mel and Art left the story at that.
mysterious hole that could be the deepest in the world and might resurrect your beloved pet. Then, a few days later, Mel sent Art Bell a second fax in which he claimed there'd been a major development. Mel returned from running an errand a few towns over, only to find what he assumed were military personnel blocking the access road to his land where the hole was located. According to Mel,
The mysterious officials said there had been a plane crash, and they barred him from entering until the investigation was over. The presumed officer in charge threatened Mel that if he didn't play along, they could say they found a drug lab on his property and seize everything. When Art spoke to Mel off the air, he sounded completely freaked out.
Art figured if Mel really was worried about something bad happening, then the best insurance was to tell his story to the public. If Art's listeners knew what was going on, he thought, maybe that would protect Mel. So Mel agreed to return for this second installment in the saga of Mel's Hole. Mel told Art that after his first segment aired on Coast to Coast,
He noticed helicopters circling his property, and he was pretty suspicious of the guard's story about the plane crash. He'd seen no smoke or any other evidence of some kind of disaster. There hadn't been any news reports about a crash either. Plus, he'd done more research, and the hole was even stranger than he'd first thought. He claimed a neighbor saw some kind of beam shooting out of the hole, like a searchlight that was, quote,
blacker than black. Then Mel spoke with one of his older neighbors, who described a set of stone columns that once stood around the whole surface, 40 or 50 years ago. What he described sounded to Mel something like Stonehenge. Mel was incensed at being forced off his own property, but he felt he had no choice but to back down.
Especially because, as he admitted to Art, he actually did have a lab of sorts on his land. Mel was into alternative medicine and grew imported plants from Nevada. They supposedly had healing powers and could cure the flu. He insisted it was nothing illegal, but was still concerned he could wind up in jail if they really wanted to put him away.
He believed somebody wanted to get their hands on his land. His real estate agent had contacted him to let him know there was interest in buying his property for a lot of money, but Mel wasn't sure he wanted to sell. For now, he was holding off on releasing any more fishing line into the pit. He knew that the line was only designed to support 20 pounds and he worried that additional weight might snap the line.
But he insisted. He was certain he hadn't hit the bottom of the hole or snagged on anything. And that's pretty much where the story of Mel's hole ended. At least, for now. But Mel's story would have another update three years later. And it got much, much wilder before it was through.
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The story of Mel's Hole, a mysterious pit somewhere in central Washington, was already on its way to becoming a modern myth that would forever be associated with Washington state. So when I was a kid, my dad introduced Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell to me and my brothers. Like when we would go camping as kids, we'd listen to it on a little radio station.
That's Nick Johnson, our very own head of production on Conspiracy Theories. Over 20 years later, Nick still recalls the story with impressive accuracy. And I grew up in Washington state. And so where supposedly Mel's hole was, was not crazy far from where I grew up. So that made it even more interesting that it was like in my home state.
Even though Mel's story wasn't the show's usual fare, there was something inexplicably compelling about it. It's just a hole. So it's not aliens, like I don't think. It's not aliens. It doesn't have to do with cryptids, Bigfoot, things like that. It's just a hole. And it does have some paranormal properties to it, apparently, if it can bring back dead things.
But I think it was the combination of the time period, because like something like this could maybe go viral on TikTok now. But it was enough anticipation that you would like keep listening to Coast to Coast and hoping you're going to get an update. I really wonder today, like, what was it? Was he a liar? Was it a real thing?
Nick had already been listening to the show for a couple of years when he first listened to Mel's Hole, and that story was part of what made him a lifelong Art Bell fan. I was just very intrigued by not only the guests and stories that Art would tell, but then also the open lines where you'd have these people call in and just tell these crazy stories. And as a kid, obviously, like, it was very interesting and probably sometimes scary.
There's so many really cool stories that came out of Art Bell's radio program, and it's really cool to know that he was just living in the middle of nowhere in Nevada, broadcasting to literally the entire world. I might be wrong on this, but I think it was one of the most syndicated and widely listened to radio programs.
He's right. By 1997, Coast to Coast AM was the highest-ranking late-night radio show in the country and even remained the top-rated show in many cities for years afterward.
Art broadcast his show from his home base in Pahrump, Nevada. At one point, the show was syndicated on over 450 stations with 15 million listeners every night, despite the fact that it didn't exactly have a primetime slot. That's more than the average viewership of season one of American Idol. And Mel's Hole was originally broadcast right around the show's height in popularity.
Before Art got his next update from Mel Waters, his own life would become something of a nightmare. On October 13th, 1998, about a year and a half after he'd last spoken with Mel on the air, Art Bell suddenly, in the middle of an episode, told listeners this would be his final appearance on the show. He gave no more explanation than, quote, a threatening, terrible event had occurred.
Then he disappeared, leading some listeners to wonder if he'd been abducted by aliens, a popular subject on his show. The truth was no less frightening. As it turned out, his mysterious departure from coast to coast that night was due to a number of stressful situations and personal tragedies happening in quick succession. His son was kidnapped and sexually assaulted.
And the final straw, a host on another radio station suggested that Art was molesting children. A private investigator looked into these claims and found no evidence to support the accusations. After so many years of coast-to-coast dealing and conspiracy theories, Art himself had become a target.
Reportedly, some listeners wondered why the government never seemed to censor Art Bell when his show sought to expose its secrets, unless it was suggested he was paid off by some kind of black ops. But to suggest Art was capable of such a horrific crime, especially considering what his own son went through, was too much for Art. He filed a defamation suit, which was ultimately settled out of court.
But Art wasn't gone forever. He still felt a duty to the show he'd grown into a national phenomenon and returned a couple weeks later, hosting off and on again for a few more years. And he just so happened to be back on the mic the night Mel made his return to Coast to Coast in April 2000. Mel claimed that after they spoke back in 1997...
He was offered $250,000 per month to lease his land to the government. He was allowed to relocate to Perth, Australia, and even got to bring along his medicinal plants and his dogs without a fuss. Everything was taken care of.
So from March 1997 to late 1999, he'd been living the life down under, devoting a lot of time and money to a cause near and dear to his heart, wombat rescue. Unfortunately, things had drastically changed, and now Mel was living back in Washington, practically penniless. He'd lost his claim to the property where the hole sat. Apparently, the land was originally in his wife's name,
They'd since gotten divorced, and she leased the land to Mel as part of their settlement. But while Mel was in Australia, his tenants had made changes, like paving a road and installing a septic tank, that they weren't supposed to. Now, Mel was in violation of his own lease. Mel's hole was no longer Mel's. The monthly payment stopped, and the money he'd socked away suddenly disappeared from his account.
The wombat rescue he'd poured his heart and soul into was shut down. And that wasn't even the worst of it. Shortly after he came back to Washington in late 1999, Mel was on a bus headed to Olympia. The story goes that Mel witnessed some kind of altercation on board the bus, which pulled over so that passengers could give statements. Mel agreed to give a statement too and was assured a ride to Olympia afterward.
The next thing he knew, he woke up 12 days later in an alleyway in San Francisco wearing the same clothes. His wallet and ID were missing, his molars had been extracted, and there was tape residue on his arm. Mel thought maybe he'd been hooked up to an IV. As for why Mel was attacked, or who'd done it, he couldn't really say.
Just days earlier, Art had announced that Mel would be back on the show with updates. He conceded that this kidnapping could be some kind of warning. Watch what you say. Art expressed some disbelief, but as usual, he took his caller's story at face value. Here's Nick Johnson. Art was...
He was a good listener, especially with open lines when guests would call in. He would really listen to these stories these people were saying, and he would let them go through with it. But at the same time, you could tell when he would either start to get irritated or didn't believe what they were saying or thought they were crazy. Despite the incredible turn of events...
Art wasn't giving up on the story yet, perhaps because he'd finally been able to confirm part of Mel's wild tale. After Mel lost control of his property, he tried to look up satellite images using Microsoft's Terra server, which included a kind of precursor to Google Earth. Right near Manastash Ridge, two white squares blocked out an aerial photograph of the area. To Mel, it seemed deliberate.
It has been expunged, he told Art. It was a twist Mel couldn't have easily fabricated. And when Art checked TerraServer for himself, the general location of Mel's hole really was missing, blotted out in white. Listeners were able to see it for themselves, too, on the Coast2Coast website.
There was this like big black box that was put over the satellite imagery, which really added to the like suspense and intrigue of this saga was that like you could actually go and look on the internet and see something that he's saying is true. That was very exciting. Exciting, but bittersweet since Mel no longer had access to the land where the bottomless hole supposedly sat. But that didn't stop Mel from
from finding another ominous pit to investigate. In 2002, the saga of Mel's Hole came to a bizarre end. Nearly five years earlier, Mel's first episode had introduced the mysterious hole, the second, a government conspiracy, and the third toll of Mel losing 12 days worth of time in turning up in an alley in San Francisco.
Now, Mel was back with the strangest part of the story yet, about a trip he'd taken to the site of another mysterious hole. And to be totally clear, the following story all comes from Mel's own account. Mel had received a curious invitation from his friends in the alternative medicine community. They brought him to a remote pocket of the Nevada high desert, and he was
where he saw a hole with similar dimensions to the one in Washington, only this one was lined with metal as far down as the eye could see. Animals feared it, and locals had allegedly seen a black beam shoot out of it. Well,
It was all sounding pretty familiar to Mel, and the group decided to run an experiment. First, they got some ice from the convenience store and filled two buckets. They left one at ground level as a control and lowered the second bucket of ice 1,500 feet down the hole. While the ice outside the hole melted, as one would expect, the ice inside the hole didn't melt at all.
They tried holding the unmelted ice over a fire to see if that would do the trick, and instead, the ice seemed to ignite like fuel. The group's interest was piqued, and they decided to lower a live sheep into the hole. Mel watched, ashamed, as the terrified sheep was stunned and stuffed into a crate.
The poor animal sank into the abyss 1,500 feet before it was hoisted back up to the surface. Right away, Mel noted there was no movement coming from the crate. The sheep had died. For some reason, one of the men began to dissect the sheep. Inside was a gel-like substance and what appeared to be a large tumor in place of its organs. A tumor that was moving.
pulsing like a beating heart. Mel watched as the tumor opened to reveal a small creature he described as a fetal seal. When it trained its eerily human eyes on the men, Mel said he felt an overwhelming urge to help the creature go back to the hole. So he did, and he watched it disappear over the edge.
It was a lot to take in, to say the least. But that wasn't all. Mel added that he'd been diagnosed with late-stage esophageal cancer a month prior to visiting the hole in Nevada, and now he was cancer-free. His doctor had just cleared him, and Mel chalked it all up to the seal creature.
Mel would appear on the show again, but that was more or less the end of a story that seemed so simple on its surface, but which left so many questions unanswered. Like, where was Mel's hole, if it really existed? Mel never revealed the hole's exact location, not even to Art. The satellite image from TerraServer, the one that allegedly blocked out Mel's old property,
covered an area of about 32 square miles. There have been expeditions to find the hole, but none have succeeded. You can even get suggestions on the best hiking path to take if you're interested in searching for it, which we do not suggest, because if Mel's hole is real, it's on private property. Unable to see the hole for themselves, some have tried to corroborate other details of Mel's story.
but came up short there too. An article in the Tri-City Herald from March 1997 traced some of the dead ends reporters were met with. The Army, the Federal Aviation Administration, and an exasperated sheriff's detective all denied any knowledge of a mythical hole that had been taken over by a shadowy arm of the government. One theory, of course, is that the hole doesn't really exist.
Or maybe it's a regular hole that isn't particularly deep. Maybe Mel was just a great storyteller and made the whole thing up. Jack Powell was one skeptical listener who tuned into Coast to Coast during Mel's earliest appearances. Right away, he was sure the story was a hoax. He grew up in Kittitas Valley and remembered playing near a defunct gold mine shaft outside Ellensburg. It was deep.
but probably less than 100 feet. Still, he had a feeling this old mine could have given Mel the idea for his incredible story. Jack became a State Department of Natural Resources geologist. He knew it was physically impossible for a hole to reach 80,000 feet before collapsing into itself.
As with the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, you'd run into problems with high temperatures and pressure before reaching those extreme depths. In 2001, a group from Seattle was preparing to search for Mel's Hole and they reached out to Jack for help. He agreed to coach them on the area's geological makeup and even took them to the gold mine he'd seen as a kid.
Still, the group couldn't be swayed. They carried on with their search. And they're not the only ones who want to believe Mel's story.
I remember like listeners that would call in to ask him questions would say that, oh, well, the fishing line, as you're putting it down, the farther it goes, the heavier the amount of line is you have. So technically it'll just keep pulling itself down for eternity as long as you keep putting more. But I at the time, I really wanted to believe that it was going who knows where, maybe to a different dimension.
This idea that one or both holes Mel talked about are portals to a parallel universe is a popular notion. When Mel found some dimes near the hole on his property, same kind we use today with President Roosevelt's face on them, they were dated 1943. So they were really old, but other than that, he didn't think there was anything special about them. Until he realized sometime later,
that FDR dimes were not minted until 1946, suggesting the dimes he found came from an alternate dimension. Perhaps that's why the government wanted to get its hooks into Mel's hole. Or maybe it's just another 10 cent conspiracy theory. As for what happened to Mel Waters, we don't know because his true identity has never been revealed.
Shortly after the initial segments ran in 1997, local reporters began digging around and discovered there was no trace of any man named Mel Waters near Ellensburg, Washington. There was no record of anybody by that name living in the county or who owned land there or who had a wife working at a nearby university. Mel might have been a pseudonym. After all, he told Art he was worried about publicity.
And he intentionally made himself difficult to find after everything that allegedly happened to him. Here's what we know about Mel, based on clues he mentioned throughout his appearances on Coast to Coast.
He was already retired in 1997, he had no criminal record, he had a beard, and by his own estimation, he looked like Willie Nelson, and he once, without irony, described himself as a guy who was, quote, determined to get to the bottom of things. It doesn't exactly conjure a detailed picture, and yet it didn't stop the fans from loving Mel's story, which perhaps begs the question,
Why do we find a hole so intriguing? Just as humans have always aspired to travel upwards beyond the exosphere and into outer space, we've also had a similar fascination with exploring the depths of the Earth. The mysteries of the Mariana Trench can be just as thrilling and frightening as what lies beyond our solar system.
Even now, other countries like China and Japan reportedly may try to beat Russia's record for digging the deepest hole. Although it seems like this is just a story about a hole in the ground, I get the fascination. There's more beneath the surface.
Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. And be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. For more information on Mel's Hole, you can listen to the entire saga cataloged at Mel'sHole.org.
Do you have a personal relationship to the stories we tell? Send a short audio recording telling your story to conspiracystoriesatspotify.com. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth.
Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Nikki Taylor, edited by Connor Sampson, researched by Chelsea Wood, fact-checked by Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button.
Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, who was also our special guest on this episode. Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor, and I'm your host, Carter Roy. This episode is brought to you by Hills Pet Nutrition.
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