The Why Files: Operation Podcast - 73: Getting to the Bottom of Mel's Hole

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

On Mel Waters' property in the Manastash Ridge, west of Ellensburg, Washington, there is a hole in the ground that looks like a well -- but it's not a well. Like the owners of the property before him, Mel used the hole as a trash dump. His neighbors used it too. Garbage, broken appliances, old tires, everything went in the hole. After a while, Mel started to wonder: why doesn't it fill up? Then he started to notice other strange things about the hole. His dogs wouldn't go near it. It caused his radio picked up strange signals. And it didn't seem to have a bottom. Mel's curiosity became an obsession. Let's see if we can get to the bottom of Mel's hole. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thewhyfiles/support

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Look, this would go a lot faster if you would just let me get through it without... On Melwater's property in the Manassas Ridge west of Ellensburg, Washington, there's a hole in the ground that looks like a well. But it's not a well. Like the owners of the property before him, Mel used the hole as a trash dump.

His neighbors used it too. Garbage, broken appliances, old tires, everything went into the hole. After a while, Mel started to wonder, why doesn't it fill up? And then he started to notice other strange things about the hole. His dogs wouldn't go near it. It caused his radio to pick up strange signals, and it didn't seem to have a bottom. Mel's curiosity became an obsession. Let's see if we can get to the bottom of Mel's hole.

Mel's hole is a round pit 9 feet 9 inches in diameter. There's a stone retaining wall built around it that goes down about 15 feet. After that, the hole extends down into darkness. Not only did Mel Waters and his wife dump everything in the hole, but so did his neighbors. And this has been going on for a long time, for years before Mel even moved in. Mel's neighbors said they couldn't remember a time when the hole wasn't there. So why can't you hear objects hitting the bottom? Why can't you hear your own echo?

Mel set out to determine exactly how far down this hole goes. An avid fisherman, Mel had spools of fishing line on hand. So he attached a one pound weight to the line and sent it down the hole. It went 4,500 feet, the full length of the reel, and didn't hit bottom. He reeled the line up, attached a roll of Lifesavers, and sent it all the way down again. Mel wanted to see if there was water at the bottom. And if there was, the Lifesavers would come up dissolved. But they came up dry.

And Mel had more spools of fishing line, each one 5,000 feet. He attached another spool, now down almost 10,000 feet and still no bottom spool after spool of fishing line went down the hole he could not reach the bottom by the time Mel ran out of line he was 80,000 feet down over 15 miles and still no bottom while experimenting Mel noticed that his dogs wouldn't come anywhere near the hole even Even when forced, the dogs would dig their feet in. There were no animals of any kind near the hole. No wildlife, no insects.

Birds even flew around it. And since the hole was known to his neighbors, Mel asked around if anyone noticed their dogs feeling uneasy by the hole. And they all said yes. Then one of his neighbors said, Speaking of dogs, not too long ago his dog died so he threw its body into the hole. A few days later, that dog came back. After Mel's neighbor threw his dead dog into the hole. Why? Just why? I don't know. You can't bury

it? I really don't know. Sometimes humans are very disappointing. They certainly can be. Anyway, a couple of days after disposing of his dog's body down the hole, he saw it running through a wooded area near the property. Now, he knew it was his dog because it was wearing the same collar. But for some reason, the dog didn't come when he called. The dog acted like he didn't know his owner at all. Oh, maybe it's a version of his dog from another dimension. Well, that's definitely a theory. As the weird stories piled up and the fishing line kept going down, Mel was at a loss.

He was out of his depth. Right. Mel needed help figuring out exactly what this hole was. And in 1997, there's only one place to discuss the strange and mysterious and be taken seriously. Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or a good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours. Coast to Coast was on hundreds of stations around the world and had 10 million listeners.

If anyone could help Mel, it was Art Bell and his audience. Mel sent Art a message on February 21st, 1997. Art called him and Mel's hole became known to the world. Over the course of several shows, Mel Waters would reveal more and more details about the mysterious hole. The good news is Mel was getting really good advice from people all around the world, like use a laser to measure or use radar to check the distance. The bad news is, now millions of people knew about this hole. And from clues given by Mel on the radio, you can get a pretty good idea of where it was. The day after the first broadcast, Mel was returning to his property, but the entrance was blocked.

The government. Yep. The U.S. military was now aware of the hole, and they wanted it. All to themselves. After the show, on Friday night, I went out there and noticed there was some helicopter activity around the property. There was further helicopter activity the next day. And so I figured that clearly somebody out there listens to your program. Yes.

Mel said that the hole could affect things in the environment around it. Animals avoided it, but plants seemed to grow extremely well. Radios acted weird. If Mel brought a radio near the hole, the signal would get very staticky, and then start picking up broadcasts from somewhere else. One day his radio started picking up what he describes as old-time music. So he goes to change the channel and tunes into a baseball game. This is fine until he learns the game was played in 1967, 30 years ago. Art's first call with Mel goes on for about an hour and then they wrap up. Mel was staying in Ellensburg for a couple of days and had made the call from

there. When Mel Waters returned from town, the access road to his property was blocked by armed military personnel. And there was evidence that heavy machinery had been brought in. Mel was told there was a plane crash on the property. But there was no report of a crash. No fire, no smoke. Still, Mel was told he couldn't access the property

until the crash was completely investigated. When Mel asked to speak to the person in charge, a man in civilian clothes told him that the land was not necessarily his anymore, and it would be very easy to find a drug lab on the property if he didn't leave. Mel threatened to go to the press. The man in charge, Man in black. The man in black told him, go ahead and talk.

Nobody would believe it. But Art Bell and his audience would believe it. And a few days later, Art called Mel for an update. Mel said that a neighbor saw a dark beam coming out of the hole and up through the clouds, darker than anything he'd ever seen. Now, Mel admitted he didn't see this himself. But Art Bell and several callers said that this part of Washington has a lot of UFO sightings, disappearances, and other paranormal activity.

Callers had their own theories. Maybe the hole was sitting on a ley line and there was a portal to another dimension. Or it was a portal through time. And that's why everything thrown into it disappeared. Maybe somewhere in an alternate reality, there's a big pile of garbage, old appliances, and dead animals just piling up.

Who knows? One caller thought this could be a tunnel to the hollow earth. Ooh, like a subway for lizard people. Something like that. There were a lot of theories. And since Mel couldn't access his property anymore, he talked to other locals trying to get more information. An elderly neighbor said that many years ago,

there was a series of stone columns around the hole. Like Stonehenge? Right, but without the crossbeams, which are called lintels. Lintels? Lintels. What'd I say? Someone from the audience reminded Mel that calling into the show is a big mistake because obviously the government is listening. So the show ends and Mel agrees to come back for an update.

On the day Mel is scheduled to reappear, he's a no-show and not picking up his phone. Maybe my audience is not aware, but a television crew went up to Ellensburg after we did the last program and researched this. And I'll be doggone, they didn't find the hole, but they did find near the area where you were talking about a lot of military boot prints and all kinds of information that would indicate the military, in fact, had been there or was there. Oh, they would have probably seen a lot of yellow gear tread marks on the ground. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

It would be three years before Mel resurfaces. He said he was offered $3 million a year to lease his property to somebody. But the deal was sign a nondisclosure agreement, leave the country immediately, and never come back. So Mel takes the deal, and he lives in Australia for two years, but he's missing his family and decides to come back to the States for a visit. Not smart. It wasn't.

Mel was warned not to do this, but he does it anyway. And during this time, he gets in touch with Art Bell and agrees to come on the radio, but he never shows up. Mel said on the day he was supposed to come on, he was on a bus to visit his nephew. And on the bus, there was some kind of altercation and the police were called. All the passengers are questioned and put on a different bus.

Then Mel blacks out. Everyone's got a pro. Need tires? I've got a pro. Car making a weird sound? I've got a pro. So who's that pro? The pros at tread experts

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krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map.

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scrubbed from every map. You battled krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen.

Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. And the next thing he remembers is that he's in San Francisco and 12 days have passed. Mel woke up in an alley. His wallet and keys were missing. He realizes his arm hurts. He rolls up his sleeve and there are needle holes and tape marks from an IV. And as he becomes more lucid, he tastes blood in his mouth. His back teeth are missing. Whoa!

Mel never makes it back to the property. There was legal action taken against him for illegal construction. Power lines, septic tanks, paved roads. Of course he didn't build these. The government had occupied the property for two years. Still, Mel lost everything.

And a day or two after calling into Art's show, his bank account was emptied. Now, to be fair, plenty of people are calling in saying that this is all a hoax, but Art Bell is the master. Hoax or not, it's a great story, so he lets Mel continue. But Art does say that a TV crew was in the area looking for the hole. They didn't find it, but they did find evidence of a lot of military activity, and the no-fly zone has been mysteriously expanded to cover the area. In fact, TerraServer, which was a mapping site before Google Earth,

showed that the whole area was blacked out, and this was confirmed. Skeptical callers said that Mel could have found the blacked out part of the map and pretended his property was there. The problem with that is TerraServer launched six months after Mel made the first phone call. He couldn't have known. Soon we learned that a Native American tribe had contacted Mel and asked him if he wanted to come to Nevada and help them research.

Research what? Another bottomless hole. They took you to it. They took me there. I did not go all the way up to the hole, but there was conversations between the Native Americans and the Basque and blah, blah, blah. They basically agreed that everything was as it should be, that I wasn't from CNN or the FBI or the CIA or whatever. And so I went there and I got to see the hole. What's there? The second hole wasn't located on the Indian reservation where they lived.

It was actually on public land that was used by Basques. The Basques are an ethnic group that comes from a small region between France and Spain. The Basques settled a couple of areas in the United States, including Nevada, in the mid-1800s, and they were using this land to herd sheep. They told Mel that the hole was there for as long as their people were, so at least 200 years, and they consider the hole and the land around it sacred. This hole was just over nine feet wide, just like Mel's. But where Mel's hole had a stone retaining wall of a few feet, the second hole had a metal collar and metal lining down as far as the eye can see. And this hole was warm to the touch. You could feel heat all around it. And the metal

wouldn't make any sound or vibrate at all. Mel accidentally dropped a tool on the metal collar and the impact was completely silent. So Mel and the Basque begin their experiments. any sound or vibrate at all. Mel accidentally dropped a tool on the metal collar and the impact was completely silent. So Mel and the Basque begin their experiments. The first test was they lowered a bucket of ice down into the hole about a thousand feet and they kept some ice at the surface as a control. When the surface ice was melted,

they brought the bucket back up. That ice didn't melt at all. And even stranger, the ice was no longer cold to the touch. And it wasn't wet. The ice felt like large pieces of salt. So they tried to melt the ice over an open flame. It didn't melt, did it? Nope.

It caught fire. Not only that, it continued to burn for months. So they continued sending different amounts of ice down the hole. About two-thirds of the time it melted normally, but one-third of the time it was transformed. Now at this point, one of the braver Basque volunteered to go down the hole himself. What? Is he nuts? Yeah, everyone agrees that's not a good idea. So they decided to send down a sheep. A sheep? Oh, what happened to the sheep? Oh, no! Well, I just felt I was in the presence of something extraordinary, something beyond extraordinary, something like in that category of having a religious thing. This was just such a stunning thing to witness.

The sheep did not want to go in the hole. The closer it got, the more it tried to kick its way out of its crate. They lowered the crate down the hole to 1,000 feet. At that point, it stopped moving. They felt a humming sensation. They left the sheep down there for 30 minutes and then brought it back up. There was no movement. The crate was unchanged and the sheep looked

fine, but it was dead. The Basque, being shepherds, knew how to butcher a sheep, so they brought it to a table for a quick autopsy. Oh, for crying out loud, what are they doing? The first thing that they noticed is that the sheep looked like it was cooked from the inside, and taking up

almost the entire cavity of the sheep's body was what Mel described as a giant tumor. Ugh. Then the tumor starts moving. What in the **** is going on with this **** story? Oh. I'm sorry.

This is intense. Then they cut the tumor open. No. Inside the tumor is what Mel describes as a fetal seal. Wait, wait, wait. Did you just say a fetal seal? Yeah, like a baby seal. It was attached to the tumor by an umbilical cord. But this seal-like creature had the eyes of a human.

They watched the creature for a while as it crawled to the end of the table. And Mel felt like it wanted to get back to the hole. So he picked it up and set it near the edge. Of course, the creature was slimy, and Mel said that the fluid had the smell of ozone. So the men studied the creature, and it seemed to study the men for about two hours. Then the seal creature gave them a final look and jumped in the hole. Now, before Mel went to Nevada, he was diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer. He had only six months to live.

But after this experience, Mel was cancer-free. He thinks he was cured by the magic seal. Yep. Mel felt like he had a transcendent experience. He was completely changed after this. And just then, the radio show runs out of time.

No! You searched for your informant, who disappeared without a trace. You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed. You swept the city, driving closer to the truth. While curled up on the couch with your cat.

There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. Across from me over here is the actual roadway into Mel's Hole. Don't go up that road. A few months later, Mel returned coast to coast. Something crazy happened with that bucket of ice. Remember when one of the Basques took the burning ice to his cabin to keep warm? He had it in a stove. It burned for months and it was pulling all the moisture out

of the air. The air in the cabin was always dry. The owner's skin was always dry. He was constantly thirsty. When boiling water, the steam would be pulled into the stove. One day, the stove crashed through the floor and into the ground under the cabin. But it was still warm, so he patched up the floor and used the hole for warmth. A couple of weeks later, he's returning home and his entire cabin has collapsed and turned to dust.

He moves in with his brother for a while. A month later, he comes back to the cabin and sees that the stove is now five feet underground and the hole made by the stove was perfectly smooth. It was making a new baby bottomless hole. It was, and they couldn't get the stove back up. It took a giant crane to finally get the stove out of the hole. And at this point,

the Basque said they were sometimes visited by the entity that they discovered in the hole. The magic seal? Yes, The magic seal? Yes, the magic seal. They felt it was a benevolent presence and considered the whole experience to be very spiritual. There are now brightly colored birds circling the hole. Birds that seem to be immune to bullets. That's how they respond to a spiritual experience? Shoot the birds?

I guess. Freaking Basque. The Basque even believe the magic seal is communicating with them over the radio using a system of beeps and clicks as language which they can understand. The creature warns the Basque that

the ice is dangerous and can't fall into the wrong hands and would lead to the destruction of the planet. Art asks if there's a recording of this language. There is. The Basque recorded everything. For the next hour, a few more theories are considered and Art finally gets Mel to agree to come back on the show. But this time he would bring the recording, photos, video, and everything he can get his hands on. Mel agrees to go back to Nevada and gather all the evidence. He hangs up and the

show ends. Mel is never heard from again. He doesn't respond to Art's calls and eventually the line is disconnected. So after five years, the story of Mel's hole finally comes to an end. But it left so many questions. There are a lot of Art Bell highlights and Mel's hole is right near the top. So how much of the story can we confirm? First, the location of the hole. Terra Server did black out that part of Washington, but on Google Earth it showed back up. But if the military really had taken over the property, they would have covered up the hole.

People have been searching for it for years, and of the many locations I found, there was one that was really compelling. This is the Google map. Someone actually went to the location to see what was there. These are the pictures. During one of his phone calls, Mel said there were two old buildings on the property, and one of them eventually collapsed under snow. This fits the description pretty well. And also on the property is this. Yep, a hole about nine feet wide with a stone

retaining wall, exactly how Mel described. Now, this caused quite a stir online, but the hole turned out to be an old well and definitely had a bottom. If you search the internet, you'll find a lot of people claiming they found Mel's hole. They haven't. It's never been found. At least, not yet. As for Mel, he's a complicated character. There's no record of a Mel or Melvin Waters living in the area. But some have claimed he was using a pseudonym to protect his identity. That makes sense.

Now, something that really hurts the credibility of the story is the lack of pictures. In every call, Art asks for photographs. But sometimes Mel just doesn't think to take a picture. He forgets, which is ridiculous. Another time he says cameras don't work near the hole because of interference. Or he does have pictures and recordings, but they're not handy, so he'll send them when he can. But in Mel's defense, he never plugs anything. Even if this is a hoax, he could have made a fortune selling t-shirts, books, phony photographs, anything. People would

buy that stuff just because it's cool. I would buy a Mel's Hole t-shirt. I went to Mel's Hole and all I got was this magic seal fetus. Yeah, that part of the story was pretty wild. And that's a common argument that Mel's story got crazier and crazier, and eventually he just couldn't keep up with it, so he bailed on the hoax. But he was pretty consistent with the facts over five years. And Art Bell tried many, many times to trip him up, but he couldn't do it.

Now, the hole itself just isn't geologically possible. A hole many miles deep would be unstable and collapse in on itself. Unless it was a bottomless hole to another dimension. Right. Unless it's that. But I don't think we'll ever know. Mel's Hole has many believers,

but I don't think Art Bellow is one of them. But Art was an entertainer, and this is the type of story that his listeners loved. It's a legend that people still talk about 30 years later. But for me and this channel, this was a masterclass on how to present an urban legend. Let the story breathe, but still challenge the specifics.

Explore the mystery, but keep it grounded. Be critical, but compassionate. I try to approach topics this way. But very few others do. A channel that tells mysterious stories without giving all the facts will get more clicks, and it will get more subscribers. But that's a shame because it's dishonest and you deserve better. We all do. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish. This has been

the Y-Files. If you had fun or learned anything, do me a favor and like, subscribe, comment, and share. Today's story was a request from you. And if you'd like to suggest a video, go to the Y-Files.com slash tips. Special thanks to our generous patrons who make this channel possible. If you'd like to support the Y-Files, consider becoming a member on Patreon or picking up a hecklefish for president t-shirt. Right. There are links below. That's going to do it. But until next be safe be kind and know that you are appreciated You searched for your informant who disappeared without a trace.

You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed. You swept the city, driving closer to the truth. While curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible.