Mels Hole

Radio-age folklore, told as exactly that

On 21 February 1997 a caller who gave his name as Mel Waters came on Art Bell's late-night radio show, Coast to Coast AM, and described a hole on his rural land about nine miles west of Ellensburg. Neighbours had used it for years as a dump for trash, old appliances and dead cattle, and it never filled. He said he had lowered weighted fishing line, reel after reel, and run out at more than 80,000 feet without touching bottom. The opening was nine feet across. A neighbour, he said, had thrown a dead dog in and later seen it alive with a hunter, and the dog would not come to him. Others had seen a black beam rising from the hole; portable radios held near its mouth played programmes from the past; metal held close turned into other substances.

Then, by his account, the government arrived. Federal agents seized the land and forced him to lease it to them, and the payments let him move to Australia. He returned to the show in 1997, 2000 and 2002, and rebroadcasts turned the story into what has been called a modern, rural myth. The show was the talk of Ellensburg for weeks.

Listeners traded clues online and placed the hole on Manastash Ridge, nine or ten miles southwest of town. In 2002 about 30 searchers gathered at the Copper Kettle restaurant on Eighth Street: a physicist, three amateur filmmakers from Los Angeles, a paranormal team from Vancouver, B.C., and a self-described intertribal medicine man called Red Elk, who said he had seen the hole in 1961. They carried maps, metal detectors and a GPS receiver. They found clear-cuts and slash piles, and the search turned into a social outing.

Reporters found no public record of anyone named Mel Waters living or owning property in Kittitas County. Pat Pringle, a state geologist, said the heat of the Earth would snap a fishing line long before 80,000 feet. Jack Powell, a geologist with the Washington Department of Natural Resources, said a hole that deep would collapse under the pressure and heat of the surrounding rock. The Russians drilled the deepest bore hole on record in 1989, and it reached 40,230 feet.

Powell grew up in the valley and believes he knows the real hole: an old gold mine shaft running down at an angle into a field northwest of Ellensburg, on private land behind barbed wire. After a search group contacted him in 2001, he guided them to the shaft. They thanked him, served him pie, and kept believing. The legend, Powell said, looks indelible now.