Falling into Mel's Hole
Skeptoid #156
June 02, 2009
Podcast transcript
Today we're going to point our skeptical eye downward, down into the deepest hole in the world. Somewhere in the hills of eastern Washington state is said to be a bottomless pit. Not only can you throw as much junk as you want into the hole without it ever hitting bottom or the hole ever filling up, it has other stranger properties. A black beam sometimes shoots up out of the pit, like a solid shadow. A beloved pet dog that had died was once disposed of in the pit, only to come trotting happily out of the woods hours later, very much alive again. Radios brought near the hole play old-time radio broadcasts. The place has some kind of weird aura that makes animals avoid it.
Mel's Hole offers a rare opportunity for seekers of the unknown, because a hole in the ground is something physical that doesn't move and that's always going to be there if you want to go and see it and test it. So I found the idea intriguing, and trust me, if there was any indication something like Mel's Hole existed, I'd make every effort to go check it out. But I quickly hit a snag: Apparently, there is no such place. Mel's Hole appears to be nothing more than the pipe dream of a series of crank calls into the Coast to Coast AM radio show, beginning in 1997.
A guy who said his name was Mel Waters made five calls into Coast to Coast AM between 1997 and 2002, and told his story to the host, Art Bell. Mel said he'd bought the property in Washington and was aware that all the locals knew about the strange hole, and that everyone routinely used it for garbage disposal. Old refrigerators, used tires, even dead cattle were tossed in all the time, and yet the hole never filled up. Physically the hole looked like a well, about nine feet across, walled with stone, and with a 3-4 foot high stone wall surrounding it. Personally I'd like to have seen the operation that tiled the walls of a bottomless pit with stone, even if they only did the top portion. Must have been quite the acrobatic performance. Mel Waters said that 20 people used the hole regularly for disposal.
In his latter Coast to Coast AM appearances, Mel stated that government agents in yellow suits raided his property, seized it, and paid him $250,000 a year to move to Australia and never discuss the hole again. They also removed it from Google Earth and doctored whatever public records were necessary to eliminate any evidence that Mel, his property, or his hole, had ever existed. In logic we call this a special pleading: An excuse invented to explain away any objection. Why is there no evidence? Of course, the "government" eliminated all the evidence.
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