Mel's Hole
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Mel's Hole is the name of an alleged infinitely-deep hole featuring paranormal powers. The site was purportedly located by Mel Waters, who publicised its existence on episodes of Coast to Coast with Art Bell airing between 1997 and 2002, on property he owned located near Ellensburg, Washington, near the Manastash Ridge. Art Bell and many of his listeners believe in the existence of the hole, and continue to search for it today, though its existence has not yet been independently confirmed.
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[edit] Summary
According to the stories surrounding this, Mel Waters owned land outside of Ellensburg, which had a hole he plumbed to the depth of at least 80,000 feet. According to the Seattle Times, he claimed that "soldiers in yellow gear cordoned off his property and threatened to 'find' a drug lab on it if he didn't cooperate," and that "one neighbor claimed to have thrown a dead dog in the hole, only to see it later frolicking in the woods; how another saw a black beam emanating from the hole; how transistor radios brought to the hole play programs from the past." Search parties to this day routinely search the territory near Ellensburg for evidence of the hole.[1]
[edit] Hole History and Mel's Story
Mel asserts that, for years, locals had known about the "bottomless" nature of the hole, dumping garbage down the hole, including dead cattle, truckloads of old auto tires, and large appliances like refrigerators and TV tubes. When garbage was dumped in the hole, no sound of the object hitting the bottom was heard.
Mel claims he began a series of experiments with the hole on his property, including one where he lowered a roll of Life Savers into the hole, to detect if any water was at the bottom of the hole, at the end of progressively longer lengths of fishing line, up to the 80,000 foot (over fifteen miles) length of the last attempt.
At that point, in 1997, Mel sent a Fax to the Coast to Coast AM show describing the hole, and shortly thereafter appeared on the show.
Soon after the broadcasts, Mel claims that men he identified as government agents told him that there was a plane-crash nearby and that he could not approach the hole. He says that the government then offered to pay him a large monthly stipend to lease the land in perpetuity, which he used to move to Australia and fund a wombat-rescue operation[citation needed]. These alleged payments are said to have continued from March 1997 through the beginning of 2000.
In December 1999, Mel returned to the US.[citation needed] While on a bus to Olympia, Washington, Mel claims he witnessed an altercation between police officers and another passenger, after which he was taken off the bus to sign a police statement. According to Mel, the next thing he recalls is walking around San Francisco, twelve days later. He claims he had been physically beaten and his rear molars were extracted. An alleged IV scar on his arm convinced him that he had been drugged.
Mel claims that he later returned to the hole, at which time he was served with papers indicating that his ownership was now in question, due to modifications that had been made, presumably by the government tenants.[citation needed] Mel alleges that his assets were frozen for unstated reasons and that his wombat rescue facility in Australia was dismantled.[citation needed]
[edit] Alleged Properties of the Hole
On his appearances on Coast to Coast, Mel Waters described the hole as being roughly nine feet across and at least 80,000 feet deep. He also claimed that it had numerous supernatural powers. According to Mel, a dead hunting dog thrown into the hole by a local was seen much later running through the woods, as if hunting with somebody else.
[edit] 1943 Roosevelt Dime
Mel Waters manufactures a particular folk art belt buckle, with a design which incorporates a silver fork and coins depicting Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Roosevelt portrait consisting of a US dime.[citation needed] When allegedly kidnapped by the government, Mel claims his own belt buckle had been removed.
According to Mel, a number of these belt buckles included a Roosevelt Dime with a 1943 mint date, with a "B" mint mark. This is odd because there is no mint using a "B" designation, and the first Roosevelt dime was released in 1946, after Roosevelt's death in 1945.[citation needed] Mel and Art Bell have speculated that the dime came from an alternate universe where the Axis Powers won the war, with the "B" standing for "Berlin," which also implies the death of President Roosevelt prior to 1943.
Mel claims that he found ten of these 1943 Roosevelt dimes on his property in a red envelope that is commonly used to give money on Chinese New Year. A 1943 Roosevelt dime given to a friend of Mel's was allegedly confiscated by agents of the US Treasury.
In a later interview, Mel claimed the 1943 dime could not be photographed, and would even become invisible from more than fifteen feet away.[citation needed]
[edit] Second Hole
After his appearance on Coast to Coast in 2000, Mel claimed on a subsequent appearance that he had found a second hole.[citation needed] This second hole is alleged to be on public land in Nevada, under the management of the Federal Bureau of Land Management. According to Mel, the land nearby is used by Native Americans as well as "members of the Basque community" who were using the land for grazing sheep.
Mel described the second hole as being 9 feet in diameter, the same dimensions as the first hole. Unlike the first hole, however, Mel claims that the Nevada hole has a solid metal liner, or "collar" sticking out of the ground, 2 feet high, 2 feet deep, with several notches in it. Mel speculated on Coast to Coast that, "in my estimation... it could possibly be a locking collar... something could be lowered onto it and locked into place."
Mel claimed that the alleged second hole's collar was composed of a substance with the following unusual paranormal properties.
- Mel claims that he dropped a box wrench on the metal collar, but that the impact did not make a noise. He says this implies that the collar absorbs the sound or energy.
- According to Mel, the hole is "solidly lined" with this metal as far as one can see into the hole.
- Mel claims that even in winter, the area around the metal collar is warm to the touch and will keep nearby tents warm. He says the collar is not hot to the touch, however.
According to Mel, local Basques say the hole has been there, in its current state, for their community's entire existence, dating back to the 19th century. He claims one man had personal recollection of the hole since he was young, over 70 years ago at the time of the interview (since around the 1930s). In addition to his claims regarding the Basque community and the second hole, Mel has also speculated about a Basque connection to the second hole: He claims he found a whale bone near the first hole, which he asserts could have Basque origins to a history of whaling in Basque culture.[citation needed]
Mel further claims that the hole occasionally emits a "black beam". He acknowledged that, "this is a contradiction, but a black beam of light, okay, comes from the hole. It lasts a very short time, but it just goes directly up to the sky... if you had a flashlight, and it was capable of throwing up a solid black..." However, Mel admits that he has "never personally witnessed the black beam."
[edit] Burning Ice
Mel claims that he and assorted Basque locals performed an experiment with the Nevada hole, in which they lowered in a bucket of ice they bought from the grocery store. Allegedly, one bucket of ice was lowered 1500 feet into the hole, and the other bucket of ice was kept at the surface as a control. By the time half the ice on the surface bucket had melted, the bucket in the hole was to be retrieved.
According to Mel, the ice in the lowered bucket had not melted, and additionally, was no longer cold to the touch. He claims that the ice had been changed in an undefined way, and described it as having a texture like silica desiccant found in packaged food.
As a further experiment, Mel claims they placed the alleged bucket of unmelted ice on a cooking fire, and instead of melting, the ice allegedly began to "burn." Mel Waters described the fire as "not so much a flame, as kind of a... have you ever used a gas stove? it was like the barest turning of a gas stove on. It was like that last flicker before you turn it off."
According to Mel, additional trials of the same experiment have resulted in melted ice, unchanged ice, and occasionally (about one out of three times) more of this supposed "burning ice."
Mel goes on to claim that this new substance could be used as a source of heat, saying that "one guy took some stuff home, he put it in his wood stove... and the thing's been keeping his place warm" for over three months (September to January). Mel claims this man also reported that steam from a nearby kettle was absorbed by the burning ice, and that the area surrounding the burning ice was always very dry.
According to Mel, after a few months the stove with the burning ice crashed through the floor of the man's cabin for unknown reasons, and that the man returned weeks later to find the entire cabin collapsed into "wood dust." Mel attributed this alleged phenomenon to all of the moisture being sucked out of the wood by the burning ice. He claims that on a later visit, the stove with the burning ice had sunk 5 feet into the ground.
Mel claims that a team of unknown researchers, which he speculated as possibly being related to the government, appeared later at the site of the cabin and attempted to use construction equipment and metal chains to remove the stove. He alleges that upon pouring water into the hole created by the stove, the metal chains fused with the stove, after which it was successfully lifted by multiple construction cranes, loaded onto a large truck and driven away by the unknown researchers.
In a later appearance on Coast to Coast, Mel brings up the fictional substance Ice-9, invented by writer Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat's Cradle. Mel compares the burning ice to Ice-9.
[edit] Sheep Experiment and Seal Entity
Another experiment Mel claims to have performed on the hole involved lowering a living sheep to a depth of 1500 feet, resulting in the death of the animal and the appearance of a mysterious "seal-like" entity.
Mel claims that the sheep was led to the hole, but became agitated when it approached the hole and had to be stunned and placed in a crate. According to him, the sheep awakened as it was being placed over the hole and began trashing around in its crate and making "screaming" noises.
The crate was allegedly lowered to about 700 feet, at which point Mel claims that the vibrations caused by the sheep's agitation could no longer be felt. He claims that when the cable had been lowered to its full length of 1500 feet, the metal collar around the hole began to vibrate. According to Mel, the sheep was left at this depth for thirty minutes before being winched back up the surface, where it was found to be dead.
Mel claims that from an external perspective the dead sheep appeared the same as when lowered, but that inside, "the sheep looked like it had been cooked." In addition, Mel claims that he then observed a jellied blob that filled the body cavity where the internal organs normally would be, which he described as looking like a "huge tumor."
According to Mel, the alleged "tumor" was removed, and the experimenters believed they saw some movement inside it. He claims that when the tumor was cut open, it released a "fetal seal," with human-looking eyes, connected to the tumor with an umbilical cord. Mel explains that the "seal" seemed to have a hold on those present, and that it and the human experimenters viewed each other for over two hours.
Mel claims that the seal seemed to him to be a being "filled with compassion," and that after nodding at the experimenters, it dove back into the hole. The tumor and sheep remains were allegedly bundled in a tarp and thrown back into the hole, thereby removing any evidence of the experiment.
Mel claims that he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer prior to his experience with the seal, but that afterwards the cancer was entirely gone, with no evidence it had ever existed. Mel feels that he was healed by the seal-like entity from the sheep carcass.
In a later interview, Mel claimed the seal entity was now making regular visits to the Basque shepherds camping around the surface of the Nevada hole. He claimed that the seal was able to communicate with the shepherds through a portable radio. However, when recorded, Mel says that the result was only a series of unintelligible sounds, as one might hear in interference on a short-wave transmission.
[edit] Unfinished experiments
- Mel claims that a local Basque man volunteered to be lowered into the second hole, but that the man was convinced to reconsider by Mel and the other experimenters.
- Mel expressed his wish to have his body thrown into the Nevada hole after his death.
[edit] Cultural References
- The Handsome Family recorded a song inspired by Mel's hole called "The Bottomless Hole" on their 2003 CD Singing Bones.
- The description of Mel's 2nd Hole in the Nevada desert bears a strong resemblence to the hole or bottomless pit believed in by The Manson Family and discussed in the various court proceedings. Manson preached that a bottomless pit with mystical powers existed in the Death Valley area.[1]. The Manson pit figured prominently in his end times predictions.
[edit] Broadcast History
Mel Waters initially appeared on Coast to Coast on February 21st, 1997, and again on February 24, 1997. His next appearance was in April of 2000. There was then a hiatus for about two years, until January 29, 2002. Mel last appeared on Coast to Coast on December 20, 2002.
[edit] External links
- Mel's Hole official website
- Mel Water's guest page on Coast to Coast AM
- Audio Clips from a Coast to Coast show featuring Mel Waters
- Audio clips of the original two shows featuring Mel Waters
- The Seattle Chat Club's page discussing Mel's Hole
- 1997 reference in Tri Cities Herald, local newspaper near Ellensburg
- 2002 Seattle Times article about an expedition to Mel's Hole
- 2002 article in Seattle PI referencing the hole
- Google Maps image of the area.
