Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know The Great Big Yarn of Mel's Hole About this episode One of the most bizarre stories to emerge from the cult radio show Coast to Coast AM – and that’s really saying something – isn’t about UFOs or bigfoot, but a mysterious hole in the ground with some very unusual properties. Top that, History Channel!
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Transcript 10,223 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:10 Speaker 00 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
1:19 Josh Clark? 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 Know.
1:30 Speaker 02 I have to say, I'm fairly excited about this one.
1:32 Josh Clark? Oh, good. I'm so glad. I couldn't tell because sometimes you're just like, this is so stupid when it's.
1:38 Speaker 02 Oh, it is.
1:38 Josh Clark? 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.
1:45 Speaker 02 No, I mean, I'm excited in that it is completely preposterous and silly, but in a, in a sort, in the fun tinfoil hat paranormal sort of way that those are fun.
1:56 Josh Clark? 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.
2:06 Josh Clark? I was going to save that for the end.
2:10 Josh Clark? 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.
2:29 Speaker 02 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-'90s. And the show started out in the '80s, was syndicated in '93, 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.
2:52 Josh Clark? Yeah, he was in ratings for a while there, I'm guessing, the early to mid-'90s. He was just behind Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlesinger. That is up there as far as radio hosts go. And he started to retire in 2002. He finally did host his last episode in 2010, but the show continues on. Host George Newery took over full-time in 2002. He's still doing it. And the whole premise of the show was that you would fax Art Bell, or now George Newery, I don't know if he still has a fax, but definitely Art Bell, you would send him a fax and basically say, "Hey, I've got this crazy story." And if
3:35 Josh Clark? it was, you know, interesting to him, or he 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.
3:52 Speaker 02 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.
4:00 Josh Clark? No, Jerry was like, "Oh, this could go so many different ways."
4:03 Speaker 02 You 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 was 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 rural, you know, in and of itself. He said it's up on the Manitash Ridge and it's a very strange hole.
4:49 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's not your average hole for sure. And we're talking-
4:54 Speaker 02 A hole in the ground.
4:54 Josh Clark? 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.
5:03 Speaker 02 It looks like a well.
5:04 Josh Clark? Sure, but way more different than a well. But yes, you could liken it to a well because it's about nine feet in diameter. The first 15 or so feet down, it was stone, right? So it was lined with stone. That's very well like. Then there was soil, then it turned 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.
5:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, very well.
5:31 Josh Clark? Yeah. And Mel hadn't built that wall. The previous owner had. But one of the things that makes this 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's 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.
5:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. He doesn't come across as the usual sort of tinfoil hat type.
6:03 Josh Clark? Not at all. No, not at all.
6:05 Speaker 02 And I'm sure, you know, you listen to this stuff as well. And so we can both verify that he comes across as credible, even to our sort of skeptical ears.
6:13 Josh Clark? For sure.
6:14 Speaker 02 But like you said, he said it had been there a long time. The previous owner 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 here's, 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 20 people that come
6:57 Speaker 02 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.
7:11 Josh Clark? Yeah. Okay, this is pretty strange. I mean, but you could also chalk it up to just an exceptionally deep hole in the ground.
7:17 Speaker 02 Agreed.
7:19 Josh Clark? The thing is, 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, basically a void, 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.
7:54 Speaker 02 Yeah. As Spinal Tap would say, it was none more black. I pictured the smoke monster from Lost, personally.
8:02 Josh Clark? I hadn't started Lost, but thanks for that.
8:07 Speaker 02 You were gonna get around to it any day.
8:08 Josh Clark? Now I'll be on the lookout for the smoke monster.
8:12 Speaker 02 We also 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 is created by hitting a bottom and bouncing back. So I don't, I don't really know if every deep, deep hole will echo back, but all that can kind of be explained. The, 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.
8:39 Josh Clark? 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, um, the edge of it. And I guess that reminded Mel of Stonehenge and he showed his neighbor a picture of Stonehenge. 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 Stonehenge, chew on that. It didn't have the, the, the stones at top, like just little, little alterations like
9:22 Josh Clark? 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.
9:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, unless you just attach this to it, said his elderly neighbor.
9:36 Josh Clark? 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.
9:44 Speaker 02 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, um, a World War II era Walter P38, which was a, a German gun intended to replace the German Luger pistol. And he, as we'll learn, Mel was a, um, was a gardener and worked in like medicinal herbs and things. 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.
10:21 Speaker 02 I wonder what that means. I wonder if it didn't make any sound at all, or if it just sounded like it was, uh, had a suppressor on it?
10:28 Josh Clark? No.
10:29 Speaker 02 Or if it just, you know, the actual, like movement of the physical movement of the gun didn't even make a noise?
10:36 Josh Clark? I, as I took it, it didn't make any noise whatsoever. But as bizarre as that sounds, it had even stranger properties too.
10:44 Speaker 02 That's right. If you put this gun down by a radio, it becomes a time travel machine because the radio would all of a sudden start playing just random radio broadcasts from different places and 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 the station long enough, it would produce a sound that was, quote, "out of time."
11:13 Josh Clark? Okay, you know, just bear this in mind, too. If you haven't listened to Mel's Hole, I encourage you to go listen. There's like, it's five hours long, 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.
11:35 Speaker 02 As far as we know.
11:35 Josh Clark? 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.
11:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, which made me think it was perhaps set up and shady.
11:58 Josh Clark? Art, no, Art Bell wouldn't have been involved in that, no.
12:01 Speaker 02 And how do you know? You know Art Bell?
12:02 Josh Clark? He was a credible host.
12:05 Speaker 02 Okay.
12:06 Josh Clark? For sure.
12:08 Speaker 02 Okay.
12:08 Josh Clark? I think that's why people loved him so much. Like, he wasn't going to get caught up in something like that. People might call up and pull his leg. He even asked Mel once, like, "Are you pulling my leg?" 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, like, he didn't need to set it up. People would just do it anyway.
12:34 Speaker 02 No, I know. I'm just saying, if it was unearthed, like, the greatest hoax Art Bell ever pulled, this funny trick, like, you would say, like, "Well, that's not possible." Because Art Bell would never do something like that.
12:44 Josh Clark? No, I mean, if there were irrefutable evidence that he had done it, or he admitted to doing it, of course. I mean, I'm not insane.
12:51 Speaker 02 Okay, that's what I'm saying, is that just, you just never know.
12:54 Josh Clark? You never know whether I'm insane or not.
12:57 Speaker 02 I always know that you're not.
13:00 Josh Clark? Oh, thanks, man.
13:01 Speaker 02 I'm just casting a skeptic's eye on this.
13:03 Josh Clark? I understand.
13:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:04 Josh Clark? I don't mean to berate you for that. I was just arguing in favor of Art Bell.
13:08 Speaker 02 No, Art Bell would never do this.
13:09 Josh Clark? I had no idea I felt this passionately about Art Bell and his integrity.
13:12 Speaker 02 I didn't know that either. All right, so, moving on, the hole, 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.
13:36 Josh Clark? Yes, very pet cemetery-ish.
13:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, but other dogs wouldn't go near the hole. They were scared of it.
13:41 Josh Clark? He said his own dogs wouldn't go anywhere near the damn thing, was his quote.
13:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:45 Josh Clark? And Art Bell jumped on this. He's like, oh, 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 10 steps ahead of him, Mel said, it's actually in my will that I be thrown into the hole after I die.
14:07 Speaker 02 Of course. Why not? Give it a shot, you know?
14:09 Josh Clark? 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 hole to try to get to the bottom of it.
14:18 Speaker 02 Ah, nice pun.
14:20 Josh Clark? Thank you.
14:20 Speaker 02 We'll be right back.
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18:00 Speaker 03 Stuxnet.
18:00 Speaker 02 Who's Stuxnet?
18:01 Speaker 03 Say it one more time.
18:01 Speaker 02 Stuxnet.
18:02 Speaker 03 I don't know what that is.
18:02 Speaker 02 You know what Stuxnet is.
18:04 Speaker 03 Is that in this? Stuxnet.
18:05 Speaker 02 Stuxnet. It's a great name.
18:06 Speaker 03 You gotta quit saying Stuxnet.
18:08 Speaker 02 That's the name of it.
18:09 Speaker 03 I know.
18:09 Speaker 02 It's a great name.
18:10 Speaker 03 All right.
18:11 Speaker 02 Stuxnet with an X. Did you mean that pun?
18:16 Josh Clark? Yeah, I did. And I feel ashamed.
18:18 Speaker 02 You shouldn't. That was a good, that's quality pun. And neither one of us are super into puns, but that was a really good one. Very clever.
18:25 Josh Clark? Well, I actually did the whole, like, arching point too, as I said it, which really punctuates a pun.
18:31 Speaker 02 It sure does. It punctuates it.
18:35 Josh Clark? That was good, too.
18:36 Speaker 02 Thanks.
18:37 Josh Clark? 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.
18:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:46 Josh Clark? And it turns out that Mel was what he calls pretty close to a professional shark fisherman, or at least he used to be.
18:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:53 Josh Clark? 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.
19:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:04 Josh Clark? He also had a ton of line, like a lot of line. And so he tied a one pound triangular or pyramidal weight to the end of a line. 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 lifesavers to the end of it once and then paid it out 1,500 yards. And when he brought it back up, the lifesavers were intact, indicating to him that even 1,500 yards down, he hadn't hit the water table.
19:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, I would have used a sponge, but that's just me.
19:39 Josh Clark? Oh, that's a good one. That's a great one.
19:41 Speaker 02 Thanks.
19:42 Josh Clark? So back to the line. He's after the lifesavers thing, he started just paying out line using his shark reel, right?
19:49 Speaker 02 Yes, and he goes down over 15 miles, about 80,000 feet into the hole, allegedly not hitting the bottom. And Art Bell, noted trusted radio host, 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, I 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?
20:23 Josh Clark? Yeah, Central Washington.
20:24 Speaker 02 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 Kola Super Deep bore hole, which is just a little over 40,000 feet. So this is double that.
21:03 Josh Clark? Yeah, it was cute. So we're talking, I don't know if we even said this or not. This whole thing started in 1997. So when that caller calls up with the information about the Marianas Trench, he says that he went and consulted his encyclopedia.
21:15 Speaker 02 Very cute.
21:16 Josh Clark? 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.
21:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:43 Josh Clark? Surely radar can, 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.
22:02 Speaker 02 That's right. He said, all right, I went back to the property and I couldn't get back on. There was, it was blocked off by military personnel. And they said, you can't come on your own property. He said, there was, 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-Files-y. Anytime there's somebody in charge wearing a suit with the military, it's, it's very X-Files-y and very bad news.
22:41 Josh Clark? Yeah. Yeah, Mel turned into a bit of a Karen there.
22:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:46 Josh Clark? So this person, whoever it was, it wasn't in military guard, was in an X-File suit.
22:51 Speaker 02 Smoking a cigarette, probably.
22:52 Josh Clark? Probably. Says, so what's the problem? And Mel says, this is my property. I want to get onto my property. The guy in the suit said, 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.
23:20 Speaker 02 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 had 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 is blocked out on that thing now.
23:59 Josh Clark? 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 Maps today. Laura Dr. Claw helps us out with this, and she points out that there's a nearby military installation. It's called the Yakima Training Center. It's an army training center. But it also includes an 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 Terra Server.
24:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, I also saw, and this is on Reddit, 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.
24:58 Josh Clark? Yeah, I mean, it's not the most incredible part of all this, is it?
25:03 Speaker 02 Oh, no. That's coming soon.
25:07 Speaker 02 I mean, I hope we're in agreement on the most incredible part and it's not a silent gun or a silent hole.
25:13 Josh Clark? We'll, uh, we'll see. I'm not exactly certain what you're talking about, so I'm excited.
25:18 Speaker 02 Oh, come on. You know. All right, we'll get there.
25:20 Josh Clark? Okay, so there was a couple of other things that Mel said had happened since he was first on and it caught the attention of 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 90s, 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
26:01 Josh Clark? spooky. And that, 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.
26:18 Speaker 02 That's right. And you know how he found this out? His trucker buddy told him so.
26:23 Josh Clark? Right.
26:24 Speaker 02 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, basically generally responsible for the safety and security of America's nuclear arsenal.
26:46 Josh Clark? Okay. Yep, great.
26:48 Speaker 02 That's what they do.
26:49 Josh Clark? 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 he was the type to have a real estate agent on retainer.
27:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:20 Josh Clark? And they said, Mel, I've got great news for you. You have an anonymous offer to lease your land indefinitely for a quarter of a million dollars a month.
27:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:29 Josh Clark? How do you feel about this?
27:32 Speaker 02 I mean, that's incredible. 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 Lee C. Or Lee Sor, which one would that be?
27:49 Josh Clark? So he would be the less or they would be the Lee C, lessy.
27:53 Speaker 02 They would be the Lee C, okay.
27:54 Josh Clark? As far as car commercials have taught me.
27:57 Speaker 02 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 were dot AU or something. But he was, somehow he was able to verify that Mel was from in Australia. 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.
28:31 Josh Clark? 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.
28:43 Speaker 02 But we didn't have the government doing all the legwork for us.
28:46 Josh Clark? Exactly, that's what I'm saying. Like, he did. Like, that's not, so that's not Australia's normal MO is what I'm trying to say.
28:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's not nothing, as they say.
28:55 Josh Clark? One other thing that he tossed out there is that, so he was using his medicinal herbs to cure people. He also did some gratifying work rescuing wombats. Just threw 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 eras?
29:17 Speaker 02 I do.
29:18 Josh Clark? 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 as a security deposit. I don't know why he would have needed to do that if he was getting a quarter.
29:34 Speaker 02 I don't either.
29:35 Josh Clark? Maybe he hadn't gotten the first lease payment yet.
29:38 Speaker 02 Maybe, that's the weir- well, that's not the weirdest part, obviously, but that's the part that makes the least just logical sense was why would you be like, uh, here, just, you like old World War II guns? Maybe the guy did, maybe that was it.
29:51 Josh Clark? 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.
30:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, and they never heard from him again.
30:07 Josh Clark? No, as far as I know. And also, the man's son was never named, nor was the man, the landlord, the lesser.
30:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, keeping with the, the, uh, the story.
30:16 Josh Clark? Right.
30:17 Speaker 02 All right. So Mel goes back to the States to visit some family. Um, he did not show for a appearance on Coast to Coast in late 1999. And he was like, yeah, um, 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. 12 days later, I just awoke with no memory of anything that happened in a rough part of San Francisco.
30:51 Josh Clark? And now today, you just call that San Francisco.
30:54 Speaker 02 No wallet, no ID. Uh, I had adhesive on my arm, like residue from like where I clearly probably had an IV. Uh, and brother, my back teeth are gone.
31:07 Josh Clark? That would be so distressing to be like, I'm missing teeth and I have no recollection of them being taken out.
31:14 Speaker 02 It's distressing when you know it's coming and it happens.
31:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, good point.
31:17 Speaker 02 I can vouch for that.
31:19 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, did you get knocked out, I guess, when you had yours removed?
31:24 Speaker 02 Oh, sure. That's the best part.
31:26 Josh Clark? Okay, okay. Yeah, but I can imagine knowing it's coming would be more distressing. That usually is, they say anticipation is the worst part of just about any experience, right?
31:35 Speaker 02 I don't know. That's what I heard.
31:37 Josh Clark? Okay. So regardless, Mel'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, um...
31:50 Josh Clark? What's the word I'm looking for?
31:52 Speaker 02 Innocuous?
31:52 Josh Clark? 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 a craftsman in addition to a grower and maker of medicinal herbal tinctures. And this belt buckle contained a dime, a very special dime, a 1943 dime with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's bust on the side, just like the dimes we had today. The problem is, that dime shouldn't have existed.
32:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, the Roosevelt dimes didn't start until 1946, after FDR died. He was still alive in 1943. So those don't exist. I even did some searching on the internet. The only thing I could find was, apparently they're 1949 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 1943 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.
33:08 Speaker 02 So it clearly wasn't the dime I saw on the internet. And also, if you walk 15 feet away, it goes invisible. And it's not just my eyesight, because I know what you're thinking.
33:20 Josh Clark? Yeah. So he also took one of those dimes to a coin dealer. And I guess while it was in the coin dealer's possession, the Treasury Department showed up and confiscated it.
33:30 Speaker 02 Just like that, they were there.
33:32 Josh Clark? Yeah. And he was using these dimes like, pretty innocently. I saw the belt buckles were World War II themed. 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 a red flag right away that they were special dimes if they were something he dug up on his property.
34:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, he said he found them 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.
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36:49 Speaker 03 Stuxnet. Who? Stuxnet. Say it one more time. Stuxnet. I don't know. You know what Stuxnet is? Is that in this? Stuxnet. Stuxnet. It's a great name. Yeah, it's Stuxnet. That's the name of it. I know. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet with an X.
37:03 Speaker 02 All right, so we're back, and this is when we start to talk about a second hole.
37:08 Josh Clark? Yeah.
37:08 Speaker 02 Because 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 me in 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 sheep herders from the Pyrenees moved there in the late 19th century, and they're still there today, which is great. But this Basque hole, as it's called, is very similar to Mel's hole. It was nine feet in diameter. This one had an actual metal collar around it, starting a couple of feet off the ground,
37:51 Speaker 02 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's been around since the 19th 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.
38:09 Josh Clark? He's like, another black beam? That's nuts.
38:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that's not the craziest part. It's, we're getting there, just wait.
38:15 Josh Clark? Yeah, now I know what you're talking about.
38:17 Speaker 02 I mean, come on.
38:19 Josh Clark? So, I think, 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 Basques had figured out that if you put your tent against it, it would heat your tent in the winter.
38:34 Speaker 02 Okay.
38:34 Josh Clark? Is that it? Is that what the weirdest part was that you were talking about?
38:37 Speaker 02 Are you being coy? Okay. I can't tell if you just are blanking or if you're just messing around with this.
38:44 Josh Clark? No, I really couldn't think of it earlier, but now I know just what you mean.
38:48 Speaker 02 The closer we get to it. I love this. We never have this kind of true suspense on this show, I feel like, so.
38:54 Josh Clark? I feel like I should be doing like a finger drum roll for the next minute.
38:58 Speaker 02 So, it's keeping your sleeping bag warm, it's keeping your tent warm. Mel, 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.
39:10 Josh Clark? Yeah.
39:10 Speaker 02 Like the last one. Then they got some ice, because they were like, this thing has weird heat properties. So let's, let's drop some ice down in there, in a, in a, 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.
39:38 Josh Clark? Yeah, it put out its own heat, too.
39:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, via the fire.
39:43 Josh Clark? Right, so, one of the Basque people who was involved in all of this is like, "Hey, this eternal hot ice is probably a pretty good idea. I'm gonna take it home and put it in my wood stove."
39:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, good idea.
39:55 Josh Clark? 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.
40:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, that stove collapsed along with the rest of the cabin, so that's not the weirdest part.
40:27 Josh Clark? Well, the stove actually kept, like, basically burned a hole, and now it's like five feet into the ground. It's made it that far.
40:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:35 Josh Clark? Pretty nuts.
40:37 Speaker 02 But that's not the craziest part. You ready?
40:40 Josh Clark? Yeah.
40:40 Speaker 02 Dear listener? So this part is also a little awful because it involves killing an animal.
40:47 Josh Clark? I know.
40:48 Speaker 02 We should mention that people at some point suggested like, why don't you throw a cat down that hole? Mel's hole.
40:53 Josh Clark? Bengal cat.
40:54 Speaker 02 See if you can hear it crying and stand-up guy Art Bell was like, no, we're not doing anything like that.
41:00 Josh Clark? That's what I'm saying.
41:02 Speaker 02 I know. That's why, exactly. So they did have a sheep, though, at the Basque hole. And they tried 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 the hard way. They lowered the sheep down 1,500 feet. They, it 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.
41:32 Josh Clark? Yep.
41:33 Speaker 02 No, I'm gonna let you take this, buddy.
41:36 Josh Clark? Oh, really? Thanks, man.
41:36 Speaker 02 The craziest part. Here we go.
41:38 Josh Clark? 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 in Mel, who were there standing over it, agog in amazement.
42:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, so this thing was 18 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 1997. Cause 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, was 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, it looked at them, gave them a nod and took the dive.
42:50 Josh Clark? Yeah.
42:51 Speaker 02 The fetal seal with human-like eyes.
42:53 Josh Clark? 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 boombox was near, they could communicate with the fetal seal. But when somebody grabbed an old Two Live Crew cassette and tried to record over it.
43:17 Speaker 02 Did they tape over the hole?
43:18 Josh Clark? Nothing was recorded.
43:19 Speaker 02 Okay, they better had some basque tape over those square holes, you know?
43:23 Josh Clark? Yeah, I forgot about that part. Yeah, absolutely. But what about Mel's cancer?
43:29 Speaker 02 It went away, buddy. Thanks to the Basque hole, I guess. He had apparently pretty aggressive terminal esophageal cancer. And it was just gone. And so they started calling this thing the tumor seal because of that.
43:42 Josh Clark? Yeah, which is a horrible name for any organism, but there you go. So that's if you if you come across something called the tumor 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.
43:58 Speaker 02 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.
44:13 Josh Clark? Oh, is that right? Seals and sea lions aren't different? So seals are small sea lions?
44:18 Speaker 02 This is a magical story, so that's what happens in this case.
44:21 Josh Clark? Okay.
44:21 Speaker 02 Especially as human-like eyes. So Mel Waters apparently doesn't exist. They have looked. There apparently are the no records of a Mel Waters in the county of which he supposedly resided. There was no wife that worked at Central Washington University.
44:39 Josh Clark? Go Wildcats, by the way.
44:41 Speaker 02 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 was clearly a local. But there was no Mel Waters as far as anyone can tell.
44:55 Josh Clark? 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.
45:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that's was the leaping point for this story.
45:12 Josh Clark? Had to be, but Mel really took it and ran with it. And so, I mean, this caught Coast to Coast AM listeners' attention. And enough that they went out and actually looked for the hole. There was an expedition that was mounted in 2002.
45:28 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
45:28 Josh Clark? Thirty people makes it an official expedition.
45:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:32 Josh Clark? It was led, or it included, a guy named Gerald Osborne.
45:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:36 Josh Clark? Gerald Osborne went by Red Elk.
45:38 Speaker 02 Uh-huh.
45:39 Josh Clark? 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.
45:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:51 Josh Clark? 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 II from Montana.
46:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, thanks for stealing that name.
46:02 Josh Clark? Exactly. So, he was, the reason he was on this expedition is, he said, "I've been to this hole numerous times. My father took me there for the first time all the way back in 1961. 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."
46:20 Speaker 02 Did he really say that?
46:21 Josh Clark? No, but I could kind of see it.
46:23 Speaker 02 Nothing in this story would surprise me, so you can literally dupe me with anything at this point.
46:27 Josh Clark? Right. And by the way, R.I.P. Gerald Osborne, AKA Red Elk. He did pass, and I think 2017, maybe.
46:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, okay. R.I.P. He claimed that a huge spacecraft would appear and hover over that hole, and that the government had a very small underground base there, obviously underground. There's a legit geologist named Jack Powell from Washington State Department of Natural Resources, who was, is, seems like the lone, maybe one of the lone skeptics, aside from me, apparently, saying like, "Hey, this hole's not possible." Josh Clark is even going to say this one day on a very popular podcast. This hole 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.
47:13 Josh Clark? Yeah, they were like, stop saying impossible. He's like, fine, but you get my point, right?
47:18 Speaker 02 He said, and that fishing line wouldn't have made it, or your lifesavers, or anything else wouldn't have survived that depth.
47:23 Josh Clark? 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.
47:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:40 Josh Clark? But this, what this guy's describing could not possibly exist. 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.
47:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, not you, you're playing the role of Jack Powell.
48:00 Josh Clark? Yeah, that was me doing my Jack Powell impression. He and I sound just alike, just like me and Mark Ruffalo.
48:06 Speaker 02 Right. Oh, people said that?
48:08 Josh Clark? Yeah, I get that a lot.
48:10 Speaker 02 Oh, I've never thought about that. Someone said, you talk like someone the other day, Mike Birbiglia.
48:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, I've, I think.
48:18 Speaker 02 I get that a little bit.
48:18 Josh Clark? They might be the first person to say that, I've heard that.
48:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:21 Josh Clark? And then I think, yeah, I think that's it for voice look-alikes or sound-alikes.
48:26 Speaker 02 Same Muppet E. Turner?
48:28 Josh Clark? Love that. I will never, ever forget that. I hold that dear to my heart.
48:31 Speaker 02 You should. All right, so Powell said, as Josh just play acted, let's go to this, this gold mine shaft that I know about. Like, I bet this is it. It's near the Manastash Ridge. I think I said Manastash earlier, it's Manastash.
48:44 Josh Clark? I think it's Manastash.
48:46 Speaker 02 Oh, well, I mean, it depends on which side you live on.
48:49 Josh Clark? Yeah, Nevada, Nevada.
48:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
48:51 Josh Clark? Tomato, tomato.
48:53 Speaker 02 But he took them there, the group of hole, you know, Mel's Hole enthusiasts, and they were like, nah, they're, you duped us. There's no way this is Mel's Hole. It's too normal, basically. It's not doing anything weird.
49:07 Josh Clark? You lying geologist?
49:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. That's funny.
49:10 Josh Clark? 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 gonna go on and form the Seattle Paranormal Society, so there.
49:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, like, we're all here together. We should call ourselves something.
49:28 Josh Clark? Yeah.
49:29 Speaker 02 So they did. Yeah. And here's another just little addendum. In 2012, apparently, like a local library historian 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.
49:44 Josh Clark? Right. They're definitely not under a placemat at my house where I forgot them.
49:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:49 Josh Clark? 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.
49:56 Speaker 02 And Mel.
49:57 Josh Clark? 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 Lore, were like nuts to this. And based on the date of their last post, they seem to have given up the ghost in 2003.
50:37 Speaker 02 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.
50:52 Josh Clark? But he'll keep us posted about whether he's gonna make it to the conference after all.
50:56 Speaker 02 Exactly.
50:58 Josh Clark? So you said that there's so much crud 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.
51:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:11 Josh Clark? Just 2020s internetized 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 Lazarus Pit, and it only exists in the DC comic universe.
51:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:28 Josh Clark? So that probably is not a very credible website. And then also, there's this YouTube video from just this past 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 what he came up with in 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.
52:11 Josh Clark? And essentially, he found what was at the bottom of it, and he did not like what he found, according to this YouTube video.
52:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, legend has it, it was a cave painting of a Cybertruck.
52:23 Josh Clark? I think he would have been gratified with that. Or he would have been like, wow, those things really are ugly.
52:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:30 Josh Clark? 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.
52:38 Speaker 02 And that tracks.
52:39 Josh Clark? So, I mean, it still just keeps going on and on. Some people of a 2017 video went to a location that someone on Reddit said was Mel's Hole. They're like, it's not 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 perfect as is.
53:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's fun radio theater.
53:04 Josh Clark? Yep. Yeah, and that's our assessment, that it is theater, Chuck. I think that's where we both land, right?
53:10 Speaker 02 I mean, that's where I am. I hope you're there. If not, we gotta end the show.
53:14 Josh Clark? I'm solidly right there with you.
53:16 Speaker 02 Okay, good.
53:17 Josh Clark? Well, since we're standing right next to another shoulder-to-shoulder, cheek-to-jowl and all that stuff, I think that means it's time for listener mail.
53:27 Speaker 02 I thought, so relieved. I thought you were about to say we have to jump into that hole together.
53:30 Josh Clark? Never, never. We like our lives.
53:34 Speaker 02 That's true, but maybe it would be like Joe versus the volcano and it would just spit us right back out like Tom and Meg.
53:40 Josh Clark? That was such a good movie.
53:41 Speaker 02 Loved it. All right. Here is a follow up to Project 100,000. 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 guerrilla troops to assist the US in the jungles of Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Many of the troops were children, including my great uncle.
54:08 Josh Clark? Good lord.
54:08 Speaker 02 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 traitors to their countries. In fact, my mom was born in a concentration camp in Laos, and she's only 42 years old right now.
54:24 Josh Clark? Oh, God.
54:25 Speaker 02 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.
54:55 Josh Clark? Nice. Thanks a lot, Melody. I had definitely not heard about that. And I think that's a great corollary to Project 100,000, huh?
55:02 Speaker 02 Totes.
55:03 Josh Clark? 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 [email protected] .
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