In 1997, Art Bell, anchor of “Coast to Coast AM,” a popular radio talk show that discussed strange occurrences and unexplainable phenomena, received a fax from a man named Mel Waters. In the fax, Mel mentioned an unusual pit with unknown origins on his property in Manastash, Washington. The pit was, in his words, “bottomless” and spooked wildlife in the area so badly that birds never flew over it.
The letter went this way,
Dear Art,
I’m writing to you to see if I could get some help from you or your vast listening audience. I live in rural eastern Washington near the Manastash Ridge. On our property, there is a hole. Like the previous owners, and the owners before them, we’ve been throwing our trash into the hole. Apparently the hole has been there as long as anyone can remember. At first, I thought it was an ancient well. Anyway, the hole is 9 feet, 9 inches in diameter. There is a stone retaining wall around it and we put a steel door on top to keep anyone from falling into it. As I said earlier, people have been “throwing their trash into the well for decade.” Furniture, household trash, dead cows, building debris, you name it. The thing is, I noticed the hole never filled up. So I got curious, actually obsessed, began trying to measure the depth of the hole. I emptied three fishing reels of about 1500 yards of monofilament trying to determine the depth. Soon I was buying fishing line in bulk. So far, I’ve sunk about 80,000 feet of line into the hole without reaching the bottom. My wife works at a local university with a geology department, we hope to get some professional scholarly help in determining the depth of the hole. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing else particularly strange about it except for two other things: Dogs refuse to get within 100 feet of the hole, birds won’t sit on the retaining wall or metal door. Another strange thing is there’s no echo when you yell into the hole. Indeed, I’ve never heard anything hit bottom when tossed in. We once tossed in an old refrigerator and we never heard it hit bottom, no crash, splash, or crunch. I hope your listeners can help with possible explanations. I’m wondering if this, based on my measurements thus far, might be the deepest hole on Earth.
Signed,
Mel Waters
Soon after, Art Bell invited Mel to appear on his radio show, where Mel introduced the world to what would become one of the most famous mysteries of the 21st century – Mel’s Hole.
In Mel’s phone interview from Ellensburg, Washington (about 18 miles from his property), he told Bell that he had bought the Manastash property a few years earlier, and the hole had always been there. Mel said that everyone in the area, including the neighbors, knew of the hole quite well and would regularly dump garbage in it. People dropped broken heavy machinery, trash, rocks, and in one instance, a dead dog. Mel told a story about a neighbor who had lost one of his dogs to death. Instead of burying the pet, Mel’s neighbor decided to use the handy hole as a grave for his dog, and he promptly threw it in. A few days later, the hunter saw his trusty dog, right as rain, trotting through the woods. Mel’s neighbor stated that the dog, though unharmed, never responded to his call or whistles and raced along like it was on the hunt. He was sure it was his dog as he recognized the collar.
It’s was obvious that Mel’s hole was more than just a hole. It was a round well-like pit, a little over 9 ft across, with a stone retaining wall at the sides, and extending down, about a few feet before dropping off to dirt. The insides were pitch black, and the depth unfathomable.
Actually, Mel did try to measure the depth.
After dropping heavy tools in the hole and not hearing a splash or thud, Mel became extra curious. He decided to do a test. Mel figured the pit might be filled with mud or putty, hence the lack of sounds or echoes. So he tied a couple of “lifesavers” candies to the end of a fishing line and lowered it into the hole. If the candies dissolved, then there was water at the end. Mel’s line finished after 1500 feet, and he drew up the fishing line. The candy was whole.
Next, Mel bought several spools of fishing line and tied a lead weight to it. Slowly, he lowered the cable into the hole. Spool after spool after spool entered the hole, yet nothing happened. The hole just kept eating the line. After a while, Mel stopped. He discovered that he had lowered about 80,000 feet of line into the hole — a little over 15 miles of rope. Yet, he hadn’t reached the end. The hole had no end.
Mel had contacted Art to help him mark the pit’s depth since he was clearly out of his depth.
Art suggested that they lower a volunteer down the hole with pulleys. But Mel was skeptical about this idea. He explained that the mysterious occurrences near the pit might harm any volunteer. There could be toxic gases too, and the pressure from the surrounding earth could crush whoever went in. Mel refused, even though a caller volunteered; He didn’t want to be responsible for whatever happened to anyone who dared enter the bottomless pit.
Weirdly enough, Mel admitted that he would jump into the pit if diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. He believed the pit had unknown powers that could probably rejuvenate him.
The call continued into the night, with people calling in to explain this strange occurrence. Mel’s hole was the night’s topic, and it would remain a Coast to Coast topic for years to come.
In a second fax to the radio show, just four days after the talk, Mel informed Art that exactly a day after the broadcast, Mel returned to his property at Manastash. On his return, he found out that the road to his property was blocked by armed military personnel who prevented him from entering the property. They claimed a plane had crashed on his land and were investigating it. However, Mel hadn’t noticed any smoke or debris near the site. Instead, he’d seen, in his words, men in “yellow gear” probably Hazmat suits, moving around the land. Mel asked to speak to someone in charge, and they gave the same story.
They subtly threatened him, implying that the land was not necessarily Mel’s property and they could easily, quote, “find a drug lab” on it. Mel said he would go to the press, but the uniformed man scoffed and dared him to, explaining that “Nobody would believe it anyway.”
Mel also added that his neighbors told him something interesting about the hole. He said that some time ago, before the broadcast, he had seen a beam of solid black coming out of the hole like a searchlight reaching into the sky; it seemed to have no end and sucked in the light around it.
Art Bell promptly invited Mel to a second call on the show. He asked if there were any new developments on the military issue and if Mel had taken pictures of the pit. Mel said no. In his defense, there was no way the military men would’ve allowed him to take any photos of the scene.
Mel also told Bell that he’d received a message from his real estate agent indicating that someone was interested in buying Mel’s property. There was no offer yet. However, his agent assured him that it would be juicy.
Mel also talked about an older man who told him the hole once had stone columns around it, similar to Stonehenge. Does that mean that the hole is much older then anyone imagined? Could the hole have been there since time immemorial?
A caller from the same area reported that in 1989, his college Professor had also mentioned a large bottomless pit. Another caller noted that Mel’s property stands next to the Yakima Training Center, a government facility. Hence, the swift military interference. Mel also recounted that some older neighbors had previously indicated that the hole was old. In fact, it had been there as long as the famous whalebone stuck in a tree in Ellensburg.
Before the end of the call, the audience told Mel to be careful, since the area was a well-known site for UFO sightings and weird occurrences. They were interested in Mel’s story and hoped he’d be back.
But little did they know that Mel wouldn’t be back.
Not until three years later.
Mel didn’t call back to tell the show about his property or the lucrative offer he had for it. Nothing was heard from him for over three years, and it seemed like he’d dropped off the face of the earth.
However, in 2002, Art Bell finally tracked him down and brought him on the show again.
He made Mel recount his story about the hole, checking to see if he remembered the facts. Mel did.
Mel Waters also divulged a crazy secret.
Some people had offered him $250,000 a month for a perpetual lease on the property! All he had to do was take the money, never talk about the pit, and relocate. Mel took the money, of course, and migrated to Australia.
When Art Bel asked why he never showed up again on the show or called from Australia, Mel narrated a chilling story. In December 1999, when he was to appear on the show, he tried to help his nephew move into an apartment in the Olympia area. After returning the moving truck to Tacoma, Mel had to catch a bus back down to Olympia.
That was when the strangest thing happened.
Their bus got pulled over by the Transit Authority because of an altercation on the bus. He was led to a second bus, along with other passengers, and that was all he remembered.
About 12 days later, Mel found himself in a dirty San Francisco alley. His personal effects were missing, and he found an IV tape on his arm. His molars had also been removed while he was knocked out. In desperation, Mel reached out to his Nephew, who got him a ticket back to Olympia.
A few days after his arrival, Mel finds that he’s been filed with a suit. It was his ex-wife (the true owner of the property), and she was suing him for violating the terms of his original lease. The violations included constructing an underground fuel system, a septic tank, and paved roads. Mel didn’t build any of this, but perhaps the government did.
A most intriguing and somewhat unbelievable part of Mel’s story revolves around a simple dime.
After he woke up in San Francisco, Mel noticed that his belt buckle was missing too. It was a homemade buckle made out of a bent fork, stones, and coins found around the sight. Mel had made 10 of these buckles with 10 Roosevelt dimes found in a mysterious red Chinese “lucky money” envelope.
Mel wondered why they took his belt, so he traced one of the men he had sold his custom belt to.
While examining the coins in the belt, Mel discovered that the dime was produced in 1943, despite the fact that there were no dimes with Roosevelt’s portrait in 1943. Furthermore, each American coin bears a letter indicating the place in which it was manufactured. This dime bore the letter “B,” despite the fact that no city in the history of US currency minting had ever begun with the letter “B.”. It was most unusual, and they sent it to a coin expert to have it appraised. However, a few days later, the expert claimed that the treasury department had confiscated the coin from him.
Richard C. Hoagland, a Hyperdimensional Physics Theorist, and famous alien researcher, later suggested that the coins may have originated from a parallel universe.
If these coins found near Mel’s Hole came from another parallel universe, does that mean the hole is some sort of interdimensional portal? And if so, are there other bottomless holes around the planet that function in the same way?
With the fame Mel’s Hole received, a group of Native Americans in Nevada heard Mel on the program and invited him via email to their reservation to discuss a strange pit that dated back to the 1800s — all the way back to an old town of Basque settlers in the area.
The Basques are a small and mostly isolated ethnic group from a small region of Europe. They reared sheep in Nevada and considered the hole as holy ground.
This hole was nine feet wide, just like Mel’s Hole. Only, this one has a metal collar around it, with notches on the top. The metal was warm to the touch and made no noise when it was struck. Animals were also afraid of this hole, or so the Native Americans said. Mel and the villagers decided to try several tests on the well. Like Mel’s Hole, this hole also seemed bottomless.
They wondered, what would happen if a living being descends into the depths of the hole. Then they decided to test this, by lowering a sheep into the pit.
The sheep went crazy before it was even lowered down. It kicked and fought against the hands lowering it into the hole. Eventually, the villagers knocked the sheep out and dropped it into the hole. About halfway in, the sheep woke up and let out a terrifying scream. It continued for a while, then stopped.
The villagers quickly retrieved the sheep, but Mel saw that it was dead. Thе cause of the death was unknown.
Over the years, several theories have been put forth to explain Mel’s Hole mysteries.
The first explanation was Volcanic caves:
Caves of various types and sizes can occur where volcanic rocks are exposed. They are created by flowing lava near the land surface and are easily destroyed by erosion.
The longest and most complex form of volcanic caves are lava tubes. They are formed from the courses of lava rivers that formerly flowed downslope from a volcanic vent or fissure. Lava tubes form best in highly fluid lava, particularly pahoehoe basalt. The state of Washington rests on a highly active volcanic hotspot. And it could be that Mel’s Hole was a very resilient lava tube formed thousands of years ago. But that doesn’t explain all the other strange occurrences in the hole.
The second theory is connected to The Hollow Earth Theory, of which we have an entire 40-minute documentary in which we present many scientific clues that support this theory. This is the idea that the Earth is hollow, below a rather small layer of rock. Concerning Mel’s Hole, the idea is that the fishing line and items tossed in never seemed to “hit bottom” because the hole led to the empty interior of the planet.
The next theory was that the entire thing was some kind of secret government project. The fact that the pit was located near the Yakima Training Center also made this story plausible. However, how come the government allowed people to discover and use the hole as a garbage disposal unit for so many years?
On December 20th, 2002, Mel Waters appeared again on Coast to Coast AM for the last time. He told Art Bell the most shocking story of them all. He said that the Native Americans near the second hole were communicating with some kind of interdimensional creature that used the hole for communication. He claimed that the creature described itself as capable of traveling through worlds, and it issued a dire warning to humanity. The creature warned of the use of weapons using the power of the two holes and that if we harnessed that power for military purposes, we would destroy ourselves. It said that other beings on other planets were waiting for our destruction, so they could come in and resettle our planet.
After this most strange and shocking broadcast, nothing was heard about Mel Waters ever again. He didn’t sell any books or plug any merch. He just disappeared.
The true location of Mel’s Hole also remained a mystery.
But what exactly was Mel’s Hole? Was it a top-secret military project or some kind of time travel gate? Or was it a portal to an alternate dimension like the wormholes of quantum physics?
These are questions that may never be answered in our time. Not when all records of Mel Waters and the Hole may have been erased from history. Mel’s inability to give concrete photographic evidence also contributes to the mystery around this phenomenon and leaves many people to think that the entire thing is just a hoax.