Bottomless

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For decades, paranormal researchers have heard tales of a strange anomaly in the hills of central Washington, a hole so deep that it devours everything thrown into it, and that seems to possess supernatural powers.

In the late 1990s, a man named Mel Waters came forward, claiming to own the land upon which the bottomless pit resides.

But after going public, he found himself at the center of a conspiracy involving top branches of the US government that ultimately led to his disappearance.

Was it all a hoax, or is there more to the curious case of Mel's Hole?

Mankind has always had an obsession with what lies beneath our feet.

The existence of natural caves, wells, and pits has only served to deepen this fascination over thousands of years.

Eventually, people began to theorize that there might be holes in the earth that are so deep, they could take you to another place or perhaps even another time.

In ancient Hierapolis, in modern-day Turkey, there was a temple known as Platonion, which the priests of the day believed contained a cave to the underworld.

It's said that any man who approached it would drop dead instantly, and that even birds who flew too close would fall to the earth, dying before they even hit the ground.

For decades Platonian was the scene of bizarre animal sacrifices, in which celebrants would place the beasts near the mouth of the cave and simply stand back as they perished in the toxic air.

There was also said to be a fabled pit located in the centre of Huska Castle, a foreboding 13th century structure outside Prague.

For centuries, rumours have swirled that the castle, which lies in an otherwise unremarkable area of wilderness, was only built to keep people away from accessing a bottomless hole said to lead directly to hell.

As far-fetched as it sounds, architectural plans seem to indicate the castle was designed with its fortifications facing inwards, as if its purpose was to keep something from getting out rather than getting in.

The architects even decided to place a chapel around the pit itself, a last-ditch layer of godly protection against whatever horrors might emerge.

And then there is Mel's Hole.

At first glance, the story of Mel's Hole seems to lack the significance of its ancient counterparts.

Yet there is good reason why the tale of this American bottomless pit has captivated the world for nearly 30 years.

Perhaps it is the earnestness of Mel himself, or how his story so perfectly ties into established paranormal law.

Either way, it all started with a phone call.

On the evening of February 21st, 1997, a man identifying himself as Mel Waters called into the late-night radio show Coast2Coast AM.

One of the most popular shows of the era, the broadcast had a reputation for entertaining the fringe and the fantastic.

But even host Art Bell, a veteran of the paranormal airwaves, seemed genuinely stunned by what he heard that night.

In a sincere, matter-of-fact manner, Mel told Bell and his audience that he owned a parcel of land about nine miles west of Ellensburg, Washington.

Tucked away on this remote property was what he called a bottomless hole, which he described as being roughly nine feet across and lined with stones.

Upon purchasing the land, he learned that nobody knew where the hole had come from, or when it had been dug.

He only knew that the locals had been using it as a dumping ground for decades.

Not wanting to drive into town to dispose of their rubbish, people in the area had simply gotten used to throwing food, broken furniture, appliances and even livestock carcasses into the void.

The strange thing about it, Mel said, was that the hole never seemed to fill up and nothing that was thrown into it could ever be heard striking the bottom.

In fact, no sound emitted from the hole at all.

not even an echo.

As Bell pressed the caller for more information, Mel explained that he had recently started performing experiments on the shaft, with some rather surprising results.

The two men didn't know it at the time, but the conversation that followed would completely alter both of their lives.

Talking to his proxy audience via Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM, Mel began to recount a series of bizarre tests he had performed on the hole in recent months.

Having seen firsthand how people could throw objects down the hole without it producing any sound, Mel first decided to try and get a more accurate measurement of the pit's depth.

So, he took a spool of high-tensile fishing line and weighted it with a £1 lead sinker.

Using the line itself as measurement, he began slowly lowering the sinker until it hit the bottom.

The problem was, it never did.

Upon running out of line, Mel simply went inside to get more.

After doing this several times, he realised that he'd put tens of thousands of feet down the hole without a single bit of resistance.

In total, he claimed he'd tied together at least 80,000 feet of fishing line, more than 15 miles, and had yet to hit the bottom.

There was no sound.

no vibration, no indication that the weight had touched anything at all.

Realising that he wasn't going to solve the puzzle of the hole this way, Mel took to other methods.

He had already noticed that his dogs behaved in an extremely strange manner whenever they were in its proximity, as did birds and other wildlife.

His own dogs would barely get near the pit and would sometimes bark and bite at the air whenever they were around it.

And come to think of it, Mel didn't even recall seeing any insects near the mouth of the hole either.

Therefore, he decided to test what else might react to it.

One day, he got the idea to bring a portable radio to the site.

He quickly noticed that every time he got closer to the edge, the signal would start to go static.

If he stepped back, the signal would return.

But if he stepped even closer, it would change entirely.

as if he'd switched to a different channel.

In one instance, Mel recalled picking up what he described as old-timey music.

As he switched the channel, he came across a baseball game.

However, after listening to it for several minutes, he realised the same game had been played back in the 1960s.

It was at this point that Mel decided to ask his neighbours if they'd noticed anything strange about the hole.

He was still new to the area after all, and he figured they might have even more strange experiences to report.

And he was right.

During a discussion with one of his neighbors in which Mel described how his dogs acted so strangely around the hole, the man he was speaking to recounted how he had lost his own dog some time prior.

Not wanting to bother digging a grave, he simply threw the deceased animal down the hole.

But that wasn't the strange part.

The man went on to say that his dead dog reappeared several days later.

Apparently he was walking through the woods when he came across an animal that bore a striking resemblance to the one he'd just disposed of.

Upon getting closer he realised that it was the exact same dog with an identical coat, colouring and collar.

Thinking that his old pal had been resurrected, he called out to it, only to have it ignore him and run away.

By this time, Mel had been speaking to Art and his audience for over an hour.

The host thanked him for his story and wished him luck, thinking he'd gotten another great paranormal account for his audience to digest.

But this would hardly be the last time Mel and his bottomless hole would feature on Coast to Coast AM.

From 1997 to 2002, he would become something of a regular on the programme, and each time Mel called, his story would take a new, shocking turn.

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Almost immediately after his debut, circumstances with Melon the Hole began to change.

It started with small things, strange cars passing slowly by his property late at night and people he'd never seen before walking the roads near his land.

Not long after that, he and his neighbours began to see unmarked black helicopters flying low to the ground at all hours.

Then, things took a more dramatic turn.

Arriving home from a trip into town one day, Mel found that the access road to his property had been blocked by armed military personnel.

When he inquired as to what was going on, A soldier told him that there had been a plane crash on the property and that the government was mounting a recovery operation.

This seemed strange, as there had been zero reports of any crash back in town, and Mel couldn't see any signs of smoke or fire anywhere.

After pushing back and asking to speak to whoever was in charge, Mel was confronted by a man in civilian clothes.

To his shock, he was calmly informed that the property had been reassessed.

and that the land was now under federal jurisdiction for reasons of environmental safety.

But there was good news, because the government was going to pay Mel $3 million a year to lease his land.

In exchange, all he would need to do was sign a non-disclosure agreement, leave the country and never come back.

Recognising the underlying threat, Mel took the deal and spent the next two years living in Australia.

Still, something about the incident never really sat well with him.

Eventually, Mel decided that he would not only return to the United States but reconnect with Art Bell to provide updates on what had happened with the case.

But as soon as his plane touched down on the west coast things got very chaotic very quickly.

Having been gone for two full years Mel was anxious to see his family.

Whilst in Australia, he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and by his estimate had only six months left to live.

Shortly after returning to the States, he was travelling by bus to visit his nephew, but a fight broke out on board, and the bus driver was forced to pull over and call the police.

After questioning the passengers, the officers put them all onto different buses and sent them off to their respective destinations.

But Mel never arrived.

Instead, he woke up 12 days later in San Francisco with no memory of what had happened in the previous week and a half.

Speaking to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM months later, Mel reported discovering needle marks and tape residue on his arm as if he'd been hooked up to an IV.

To make matters worse, his back teeth were missing.

But the real shock came when he went to withdraw some money to get home, only to discover that the millions he'd been paid for his land were gone, wiped from his account.

Jarred but determined, Mel attempted to return to his former property outside Ellensburg where neighbours informed him that there had been a large-scale operation up at the site the entire time he'd been in Australia, but that one day the camp had suddenly packed up and moved.

As for the hole, it had completely disappeared.

It seemed that Mel had lost everything.

but not for long.

His decision to reach out to Art Bal and update him about the story paid off when he was contacted by a Native American tribe living deep in the Nevada desert.

As it turned out, they had a bottomless pit of their own.

Unlike the hole in Washington, this one was known only to the tribe in the Basque transplants who used the nearby area for sheepherding.

When Mel arrived he found a pit that was remarkably similar to the one he'd seen on his land, about nine feet wide, black, and seemingly bottomless.

bottomless.

But there were differences as well.

This one was lined with a metal collar and had metal rings going down as far as the eye could see.

Speaking to Art Bell, Mel stated that the air around the second hole felt heavy and thick, as if it was electrically charged, and that the metal around the hole was warm to the touch.

At the behest of the Basque and the native tribes, Mel used a fishing line and weight to try and test its depth.

Once again he put thousands of feet of wire down the pit without hitting the bottom, and so they began performing some additional tests.

Given the heat emanating from the edge of the hole, the group wanted to see if it was actually hot inside, so they began lowering buckets of ice into it.

To their surprise, the ice didn't melt.

Instead, it came up changed, as if it had been transmuted into a salt-like substance.

Upon trying to melt the ice over an open flame, they found that not only did it not melt, but it actually caught fire, and continued to burn for months afterwards.

Now convinced that the hole had some ability to change the physical properties of objects, the group decided to do something more drastic.

One of the locals proposed that they lower him into the void, but they eventually talked him into using one of the Basque's sheep instead.

Like Mel's dogs, the sheep panicked the moment it was brought anywhere near the pit.

Nevertheless, they continued lowering the terrified animal to a depth of 1,000 feet.

At this point, the thrashing animal fell silent.

and a great humming sensation came up from the earth.

When they finally brought the crate back up, the sheep was still and lifeless.

Not knowing whether the animal had suffocated or died from some other means, the Basque decided to butcher it and see if they could determine its cause of death.

But as they cut into the carcass, they noticed something strange.

The sheep appeared to have been cooked from the inside.

Moreover, its entire body cavity was filled with what appeared to be a large black tumour, and it was moving.

As scared as they were, the men knew they had to examine it.

Upon gently slicing open the tumour, they found a small fetal creature attached to the sheep by an umbilical cord.

Mel would later describe it as looking like a baby seal.

Its body was still embryonic, but they could see that it possessed features that seemed to be both aquatic and mammalian.

Yet the most unsettling part was its eyes, which seemed very human.

According to Mel, the group watched in stunned silence as the animal, whatever it was, crawled slowly to the edge of the table and began stretching its body out towards the hole.

Wordlessly, Mel picked up the creature which was covered in a thick slimy fluid and placed it near the edge of the chasm.

After several seconds it leapt in and disappeared.

As fantastic as all this sounds, it was not the most amazing part of the story.

After returning from Nevada, Mel went to visit his oncologist only to discover that he was now suddenly 100% cancer-free.

Neither he nor his doctor could provide any reason for his miraculous recovery, yet Mel spent the rest of his life convinced that the seal-like entity that came out of the sheep had something to do with it.

In 2002, Mel made his last appearance on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM show.

After five years of dealing with two bottomless pits, losing his land and fortune and being somehow cured of terminal cancer, it seems he had finally had enough.

He never called into the show again and he did not respond to emails or messages.

Rumours say that he was abducted and that this time his memory had been erased permanently.

Whatever the case, Mel was an an old man by the time he left Nevada.

Cancer-free or not, he wasn't going to live forever.

But as far as the site itself was concerned, the secret was already out.

And with the military gone, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to locate it again.

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From the moment Mel's story hit the airwaves, people have wanted to see the hole for themselves.

This became much more difficult in the years it first came to light, as Mel was adamant that the military had taken possession of the property and would keep any intruders out, potentially with deadly force.

But as time went on and the internet and satellite imaging technology became more and more widespread, new people uncovered the location of the mysterious chasm, even though footage of the hole itself remained scarce.

Some say this is because the hole has long since been covered up by the military, an assertion that seems to corroborate what Mel said in the years leading up to his disappearance.

Then, sometime in the 2010s, a disturbing video circulated online that claimed to show a research group using a drone to explore the hole.

Using archived satellite imagery, radio transcripts and old topographic maps, the group had worked for months to triangulate the best possible location of the Ellensberg site.

Eventually they were able to locate a circular depression that they agreed fit the known evidence.

Since the area was remote and access was blocked off, the team decided to send in a high-tech aerial drone.

Equipped with thermal imaging and high-resolution optics, the small device was able to fly over the forest canopy scanning for signs of disturbance.

After some time, it found a spot where the soil looked darker than the surrounding area.

As the team flew the drone closer, it finally revealed a large hole matching the description provided by Mel all those years earlier.

Excited, the team began scanning, trying to get some measurements of the depth or temperature.

However, as they flew the drone closer, the readings began to fluctuate wildly.

Next, the drone's GPS began to send back errors, as if it was having trouble determining its exact location.

Seeing that the video camera on board was still recording, the crew lowered the drone into the hole, fighting to maintain control of the device amidst the static.

But after just a few seconds, it simply went dead and fell into the pit, never to be seen again.

The video of this incident immediately made the rounds on the internet, yet no group has come forward to claim that they were the ones responsible.

Within a few weeks, rumours began to circulate that there was new activity around the area.

Was it all a coincidence or had the military gone in to finish the job before someone else decided to go exploring?

As with the rest of the story, we may simply never know.

So what are we to make of Mel's story?

Sceptics are of course quick to point out that it all seems quite contrived.

Nobody save Mel himself has ever come forward to claim that they have seen the hole or know where it might be located.

Moreover, no public records exist for Amel Waters in Kittitas County.

Was he using a pseudonym to protect his identity?

That's one answer, but one might also argue that he simply never existed in the first place.

Expeditions to find the site, including a highly publicised one in 2002 led by tribal medicine man Gerald Osborne, have all been in vain.

And though satellite images have occasionally shown strange depressions in the area, none have matched the description precisely.

The best potential match was later identified as an old well, and it most certainly wasn't bottomless.

To many, Mel's tale seems like exactly the sort of story Art Bell might use to create buzz around his radio show.

He is the only person who claims to have sent people out to the site, stating in one discussion with Mel that his team found treadmarks and boot prints that seemed to indicate the military had been there.

Of course, it's equally plausible that Mel was pulling Art's leg, a bored old man telling stories on a late-night radio show as a means of entertaining himself.

The science is pretty firm on bottomless pits.

In his first interview, Mel claimed to have put more than 80,000 feet of fishing line down the hole, a depth equivalent to nearly three Mount Everests.

Not only does it seem unlikely that someone would have that much fishing line on hand, but geologists argue that the line itself would dissolve from the heat of the Earth's crust.

As for the hole itself, it's largely agreed to be geologically impossible, as it would completely collapse in on itself before reaching anywhere near that depth.

Unless, of course, it had its own special properties which defied the laws of physics.

More open-minded people feel that the hole doesn't have to exist physically to exist.

They argue that it could be a portal, a sort of gateway to another place or time.

Mel was adamant that there was something unnatural about the pit on his property.

something that terrified animals and caused electronics to act strangely.

If the later drone footage is genuine, this would corroborate what he said happened to his radio.

Could the pit represent a rift between space, time or both?

That would explain the fact that Mel's radio seemed to pick up old broadcasts and baseball games from more than three decades ago.

And what of its effect on living matter?

The dog coming back to life and the entity inside the sheep would fit with reports of other space-time disturbances, which seemed to produce all manner of exotic phenomena.

In the end, one of the best arguments supporting the possibility that Mel was telling the truth could come from the very people trying to debunk him.

A widespread claim by sceptics is that Mel used a service called Terra Server to find a blacked out area and then simply claim that his land was inside those coordinates.

That way, web sleuths who looked up the property would see evidence that the government was indeed trying to keep people from accessing topographical maps of the area.

The only problem with this theory is that Terra Server launched six months after Mel made his first call into Coast to Coast AM, meaning there was no way he would know the area would appear blacked out after the fact.

Many people maintain that Mel's hole is a classic case of myth-building.

a story borne on the airwaves and kept alive by the internet.

But if that's true, why does the land where where the hole once existed remain so secretive?

There's no getting away from the fact that Mel's hole reads like a campfire story, but others argue that it's a tale of a man who encountered a remarkable phenomenon only to have the government destroy him and his livelihood to keep it a secret.

Skeptics might argue it's a geological impossibility, but believers claim that the hole doesn't have anything to do with science and doesn't have to.

We may never get to the bottom of this tale, literally and figuratively, if indeed the hole ever existed at all.

But the story endures, not because of proof, but because of possibility.

In a world driven by facts, there's still room for the unexplained.

And perhaps that's what makes this legend so intriguing.