Mel's Hole | The Supernatural Existence of This Backyard Bottomless Pit

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With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. On a night like any other night, Coast to Coast AM was live on radio in Washington State. The overnight program discussed all things uncanny and entertained the discussion of a local man who claimed his backyard held something otherworldly. He would call in periodically over the next five years, each time with new information about a magical, bottomless pit in his backyard. What started as a piece of local lore eventually required a full government intervention. And the man was never heard from again. Today we're discussing the eerie urban legend of Mel's Hole. This is Red Web. Welcome back Task Force to another episode of Red Web, the podcast all about unsolved mysteries, true crime and the unknown. I'm your resident mystery enthusiast Trevor Collins and joining me hearing this case for the very first time. Alfredo Diaz. This, this sounds like a fun case right here. This is mystery conspiracies like what's going on in the backyard, just like the people listening in on the radio call that are entertained for the five years. I'm sure we're going to be entertained getting a little trickles of like, I don't know. It's just very, it's, it feels story structured. Yes. And then it crescendos in, in something massive happening and then a disappearance. It's like, it's got all the ingredients of a good, yeah, it's, it's, it sounds like a great story off the bat. And the thing is the fact that already my tinfoil hat is squeezed on a little tighter than it usually is because of, yeah, what do you mean he was saying all these things and you're like, I'm not sure, you know, it's some guy telling a wild story. It's a fun series, et cetera, et cetera. What do you mean the government gets involved? Right. Like what evidence do we have of that? And then he goes missing and then he's never heard from again, man, like the government just, you know what I mean? Like I'm getting a little ahead of myself and my thoughts, but the, the, the government is validating this man's wild stories. It is out the gate. One of the most interesting stories. I will say it's an urban legend. We're going to talk about the, the fact or fiction of it when it gets to the theories. It's just one of those cases. Do you believe in it? Do you not believe in it? Why? Why not? We'll break all of that down, but this is like you said, you, you, you nailed it. It is a fun one. This is a short one because last week I feel like we had one of our heaviest or longest episodes we've had in a while. We just wrapped our six year anniversary stream. And so with all the things going on in the red web universe, we felt that this would be a perfect time to kind of have a lighter one, a little shorter one, a little bit more lighthearted as well. There's no, like there's always a few content warnings, right? But less than. Unusual here, but yeah, we are here in the heart of July. It is boiling here in Texas, and if you want to, if you want to continue, by the way, celebrating that six year anniversary of ours, you can still go to store.redwebpod.com. We've got about two and a half weeks remaining for our merch, our founders merch that comes out every year, but exclusively available here in July and all six year anniversary merch purchases continue to support the stretch goals through the end of the month. So even though the stream is over, you can continue to chip away. At any stretch goals we didn't hit on the stream. Again, the merch is available until the end of July, unless you're a Patreon member, in which case you'll have a few extra days. Also on the stream, we just unveiled our Patreon exclusive red web mystery tour shirt. So if you want to join us at redwebpod.com, our Patreon page, you can get access to that shirt just for you guys for supporting us directly. And then this Friday, Fredo, we just recorded this. I'm very excited for the task force to hear it. But we've got Movie Club About Obsession. The recent indie horror. That was probably a movie that we go so in depth on, on so many levels in terms of just like, I don't know. It was probably our most discussed film. Yeah, I'd say so. We could have gone for another half hour. It was a long episode, but we could have gone even longer. And we really peel back the layers of that film. Yeah, like Fredo breaks down the plot very lightly to kind of guide the conversation if you're new to Movie Club or you just joined. You know, our Patreon and that kind of guides our insights like Christian joins us as well. If you're familiar with our producer guy in the chair and we all kind of give our takes. What do we like? What do we dislike? What are the reads, the Easter eggs, the themes? And this one's got a lot, like Fredo said, to break down. So if you haven't seen that movie, either go see it, join us, you know, as we kind of break down the plot. But with that said, that is our business of the week. Let's dive into Mel's hole. This mysterious, dare I say, magical bottom. Let's pit. OK, so let me give you the rundown, the overview, because, you know, typically this is me walking you through a case you haven't heard from before. But Fredo, have you ever heard any inklings of this on the Internet in kind of the rumor mill or anything like that? Oh, not at all. I have. OK, all right. Let me indulge your curiosity then and strap on those tinfoil hats. I can hear those buff brains kind of bulging at the seams there. But according to local legend. Mel's hole is a seemingly bottomless, large hole in the ground, obviously, near Ellensburg, Washington. The first reported sighting of this hole was made by a man named Mel Waters. This is essentially where the hole gets its name, Mel's hole, which kind of makes it weird. But don't get weird about it. So Waters calls into the radio show called Coast to Coast AM. And this was on February 21st, 1997. So not all that long ago, but you're in that digital analog crossroads. This is the crossover era of the 90s. And we've talked about Coast to Coast AM. They're a radio show that explores all sorts of things that we kind of dabble in, whether it be paranormal, extraterrestrials, cryptids, things like that. And it was hosted by a man named Art Bell. And I do have a picture if you want to know what art looks like. Here is a picture of that man sitting next to a bunch of that 90s tech. OK, he's dressed in all black, all black. He's the Steve Jobs of his time. Yeah, he's just. It's a nice little shot of him in his comfy chair, his radio desk. He's got speakers, all the little buttons and everything like that. Yeah, I mean, a room filled with buttons is a good room. I don't know what about it. You've got that chunk and I'm in. You see all the cassettes behind him. That's a vibe. You know what? That aesthetic is why I love that. So he calls in and he starts talking about this hole that showed up in his backyard or that he discovered. So, you know, I should give you some background on his property. It's about. It's nine miles west of Ellensburg, and this is in the Kittitas County area of Washington. And on that land, you know, he discovers this hole. He tries to measure this hole using a fishing line to figure out how deep it is. So he gets a bunch of fishing line by many reports. And I think this is what he says when he calls into the radio show. Like, you can go listen to old recordings of this. He says he went and got like extra large five thousand yard spools of fishing line to weight to the end of it and then lowered it down. That's about fifteen thousand feet for anybody. He lowers that down. And when he runs out of line and still hasn't hit the bottom, he grabs another spool, ties it and then continues to lower that down until he hopefully gets to the bottom, right, just trying to figure out the depth. Now, Waters claims that by the time he used eighty thousand feet for just over twenty four kilometers of fishing line, he still hadn't hit the bottom. It was still going. Down. So he just kept tying more fishing line to it. At what point, though, does the tension snap all of it or just like it break him, but you know what I mean? Like, that's a great question. You know what? Honestly, part of that is going to show up in one of the theories as to like, would a spool of fishing line make it down that far? You're entering into the Earth's crust to a dramatic depth. OK, eighty thousand feet, by the way. Also, if we're talking about five thousand yards, spools, fifteen thousand feet, that's, you know, four spools is sixty thousand. How do you measure eighty thousand feet? You're like two thirds of the way through the spool. You know what I mean? Yeah. OK, I'm getting a little critical. I mean, that's the thing, though, that that's so you got to get behind it. Like, I do love my initial thought was like, I love the detective work here. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But we are kind of getting to a point like, can the fishing line hold how much tension and then from like the science behind it? - Yeah. - Will the knot hold the tension, you know? be that the fishing line can but the knots can't or it's not tied well enough and then so the tension snaps it like that all comes into play because when you're talking about these ridiculous depth numbers in my mind and like okay i gotta like how are we performing this feat here let's science this yeah seemed like it'd be so easy just i took a bunch of fishing line i kept tying to each other and then it was fine christian i'm gonna give you a little bit of homework right now if you don't mind me crunching these numbs i don't know okay what fishing line weighs per foot you know and it's probably not a lot but fredo you're on to something when you're talking to eighty thousand feet that's roughly 15 miles again 24 kilometers of fishing line eventually yeah it doesn't weigh a lot but 15 miles of fishing line is gonna weigh something now fishing line is strong it's meant to like catch a marlin you know you're gonna be it's it bends the line sometimes the pole snaps before the line does it all comes down to what kind of fishing line he's using or what weight he's got but i think you're on to something so christian if you don't mind i'm very curious if somehow you calculate what eighty thousand feet of fish okay or what does maybe just like five spools of five thousand yard fishing line way and then could is the tensile strength of fishing line able to hold that or the knots he tied into it anyway i just gave you a doozy i'm gonna let you cook on that um but i want to give context while he calculates away in the background for reference the deepest man-made hole ever drilled into the earth was russia's super deep bore hole now this took decades to complete and it only reached about 40 000 feet i say only that's tremendous it's about 12 192 meters actually exactly and so that's half we're talking about a hole that is super wide to the point where you can't even see it because it's a hole you could chuck a fridge into it if not like a car and double that depth out of like nowhere and for the mind-blowing context here because you know it starts to get a little nebulous when you talk about like 40 000 feet 80 000 feet whatever if you took the elevation distance from the highest peak of mount everest to the bottom of the mariana trench the challenger deep that would be about 65 000 feet 12.3 miles or just shy of 20 kilometers of elevation depth so this hole is still greater than the tip of everest down to the mariana's trench yeah and for just someone in their backyard be like i tied so much fishing line and it all held together i was like it's a tall tale i mean it i like the red-blooded american nature of it you know this this could just be some farmer who's like that's how i'm gonna i'm gonna measure the hole depth you know that's very bog standard but when you start talking eighty thousand feet and you still haven't hit the bottom so you know it's more than that i start to go okay so mel would call coast to coast am five different times throughout the years of 1997 all the way to his final call in 2002 although we have five calls on record we don't know the exact dates sources kind of vary so ultimately it's unclear what those dates of those calls are we know roughly a few of them but in each call waters would divulge more information about this pit the first time he called in he detailed some of the strange happenings that he noticed around the pit and this is where we go from a hey i found a hole and it's greater than eighty thousand feet into the evolution of here's what i saw here's what i experienced at the hole this is where you start to like move away from traditional physics and you no longer can measure this hole in the same way as you you can't poke and prod like you like you know you're right yeah so he calls in he starts to outline some of these strange happenings for starters his neighbors told him that the hole had essentially been a dumping ground for several years indicating that the locals knew about this hole and maybe never reported it or just it was just something that they knew about now i don't know how common it is for there to be just a casual local dumping ground but some of the people from the community it is said through mel here on the phone call that they would come to this hole to dispose of things whether it be old fridges or in one case you know just dumping of waste unwanted things in one case somebody said they took their pet who had passed and off it went they're like okay here's my burial for my pet and then into the hole it went i mentioned it for a reason because it'll come back around but obviously this hole being of this great depth would never fill up and it never did but what's interesting on top of this is that no one ever heard the thump or the bang of anything ever hitting the bottom yeah and my mind too is like how is everyone keeping this a secret but then again is there a secret to be kept if everyone's like oh it's just a really you know what i mean yeah there's just a really big hole there and people just dump stuff into it when they want to there's nothing really crazy about a big hole right there's nothing like i'm not keeping it a secret but i'm not writing home about it it's just a hole exactly but also i'm illegally dumping fridges into it for some reason so maybe that's why i don't want to say anything that's yeah yeah it was like well hold on it's my illegal little dumping ground so yeah it is interesting and i'm also like how long do you have this property before you stumbled upon this hole and uh not fall in you know i don't know before you jump back in oh uh bad news i don't think i can answer the question that is look it was a that is completely fair i'm i'm treating you like the hive mind of google you know like you wanted to go ahead and do this complex uh scenario here that i've laid upon christian just go and crunch this out and you're just going up but alas right yeah for a second there i saw you in my vision i went christian star date yeah so to explain why fishing line isn't necessarily measured in weight as the line itself okay looking at weights being assigned to it it's more of a test of strength to see what's the maximum tensile weight that the line can handle before it snaps and that can vary drastically it can also vary based on the material that the line is made from and then in terms of trying to attribute that to or correlate that with the length of the line that depends on the fishing reels that you're using the fishing rods that you're using so if we're talking about just line there's really at least from what i can see right now there's really no way to say unfortunately gotcha yeah okay that that's totally valid maybe some of the buff vines out there you know you can string together about 80 000 feet of spool and just slap that on a on a scale somewhere and let us know you know there's something about that and hey maybe it weighs way less than we think and it's totally possible fredo christian boys let's jot this one down i think we have an experiment on our hands i think we got to find a hole i think we got to find 80 000 feet of fishing line a jar of applesauce and a giant spoon and i'll see you at i3 35 they're digging these giant holes next to i-35 and putting like some sort of drainage underneath it i think that might be deep enough just run it running ourselves it's just like keenan and kel we're at the end of every episode he's like yep oh here we go i we got we got something on our hands maybe just a you know an off the beaten path episode of case files you know what i mean just a lot of fishing line you me in a hole a lot of fishing line how much of it does it how much holds this episode of red web is sponsored by rocket money thinking about finances and setting a budget can 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period of time you don't have to worry too much about what you're going to have to do to keep up with what you're doing or what you're going to have to do to keep up with what you're going to have to do to keep up with what you're going to have to do to keep up with what you're doing that's rocket money dot com slash red web rocket money dot com slash red web rocket money dot com slash red web starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like shopify they have the tools you need to start and grow your business from designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond shopify can help with everything you need there's a reason millions of companies like mattel heinz and all birds continue to trust and use them with shopify on your side turn your big business idea into sign up for your one dollar per month trial at shopify.com special offer when an intruder approaches a home they expect a camera what they don't expect stop this is simply safe police are on the way using smart ai cameras live us-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds don't just record a break-in stop it from ever happening plan starting around a dollar a day right now get 60 off your new system with professional monitoring at simplysave.com 30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at 49.99 Okay. So thank you, Christopher, looking into that. I really do appreciate you doing that on the fly. Definitely insightful despite having no answer. I think that's a, that's just a tough one, but coming back to this whole, yeah, it never filled up and nobody ever heard a bang or a clang of the fridge or the pet or whatever hitting the bottom. Now what's interesting is this continues to evolve. So Waters goes on to say that he has his dogs there and they would be very uneasy about approaching this hole. Now I have to say this, this dog is way smarter than, than the man, but the dog's refusing to go anywhere near it. He couldn't even provoke the dog to come closer, whether it be with treats or what have you. Now Waters also begins to report that radios would begin to act strangely as he approached this hole. He alleged that while near this vast cavern of pit, his radio would pick up stations that seem to be like old broadcasts. The music would be a little bit old timey. The source of this is unclear, but basically he'd go from listening to Sabrina Carpenter or I guess in the day NSYNC. And as he walks up to it, he, it switches into like, you know, like something from a different time period. Interesting. Other times the radio would kind of freak out a little bit static and it would return and he would hear voices on the station, but he claimed they were speaking languages that he says no one could recognize. You know, there are a lot of global languages. Of course, Mel Waters has not heard all of them. I'm sure, nor could recognize them just off the cuff, but you know, he's basically saying there's some sort of unearthly language coming out of this. Now, another source claims that he was once able to pick up a broadcast featuring baseball commentary from somewhere in the 1960s accompanied by music of that time. So he's getting all sorts of things from different decades and different places this hole for some reason very interesting but also is he just picking up weird frequency waves weird frequencies i mean who knows maybe there's somebody with like uh what is it called pirate radio what is that where you have your own radio station illegally oh yeah yeah you know maybe someone's just chucking out their tunes on the ones and twos and they just like you know i like we live in the 60s man let's like watch this old yankees game i don't know you know jam our social media coordinator says uh her brother got uh you know the spotify does the rap thing they aged him at like what 102 yeah as far as his music tastes yeah people were getting aged on those raps man people were getting called out he's like what i like i like the stuff from the teens just like the other teens not like 10 years ago but 100 crazy but um so who knows you know like so that's it is interesting and so but it but it shows that now this bottom line is like a little bit more of a joker than it was in the early 90s bottom line is like a little bit more of a joker than it was in the early 90s is now taking on new properties strange elements that are harder to describe here but but it continues to evolve because apparently a few days after this waters calls bells show again february 24th i believe this is the second call and in this call he claims that a neighbor had disposed of their deceased beloved family dog into this hole for whatever reason this is how they decided to um say goodbye and to their surprise a few days after that the very same dog was was found alive in the woods nearby pet cemetery type stuff going on here man i it's pet cemetery i want to say it in the moment yeah and it was like oh someone put a dog down the home we've seen this my question to you is and maybe this is too dark to even answer a hole starts turning dead things into living things are you poking and prodding are you going are you off to the cemetery with a spade to see if you can wait wake up someone hell no i mean i don't know why i asked i knew that answer hell no but then you're not in a movie look i will grieve so hard with my little corgi passes you know years and years and years from now or a loved one but what's gone is gone man what's gone is gone ain't no way and that's the beauty that's the beauty of life that is the beauty of life is it's impermanence and the moments we have together i i completely agree with you like i said very dark question you can't look at it the same like no especially when you know pet cemetery exists ain't no part of me wants to go throw a body in there when i know what could happen that's what i'm saying you're just gonna lie next to that person who was dead and is now alive and just be kosher about no hell no it's one thing to to stumble into it just like pet cemetery starts and just how this moment happens it's another thing to do it knowing yeah um so what's interesting here okay so now we're getting into the very strange so this dog is found supposedly alive in the woods still wearing the collar that it wore when it was deceased or what have you but what's interesting is that so this kind of confirms that it's the same dog and what's interesting is that it was unable to recognize its owners okay so now i know the doubt is starting the red maybe the orange and yellow flags are starting to fly hold on to them because we get deeper all right now there's another source that claims that waters lowered a bucket of ice into this hole as one of his many experiments and i again i love this this is these are just backyard experiments i'm putting ice in the hole but when he brings the ice back up the ice didn't melt whatsoever but it's warm to the touch now this breaks physics my brain don't accept this heat transfer goes from high energy state to low energy state that's why when you touch ice it feels cold your body's energy is going into the ice almost like some sort of endothermic reaction but it's not it's just conduction just like if you touch something hot the energy is certainly leaping to you so you can't have water ice feel warm it's we're talking about broken physics now right yeah it's getting unreal the reality is different right now it continues now i don't know how he noticed this maybe he left his bucket there overnight but he says he noticed that metals that were left close to the hole would transform for example steel would turn into copper brass would turn into silver etc now again this is scientifically impossible and we continue to move further and further into the metaphysical into the impossible realms it harkens back to the old mystical goal of alchemy which is to turn what lead into gold or achieve immortality or what have you if you're interested in alchemy by the way fredo and i did an entire episode on the name of fulcinelli the last alchemist an alchemist from france in the 20th century a wild and interesting episode if you want to go explore that but ultimately these are different chemical elements brass is copper and what zinc there's nothing silver about it and so this is truly a transmutation from one element to another which would which is to say that this this hole is now truly a magic hole that's where we're at yeah the depth is one thing now we're like we're breaking physics left right and center now another claim comes through he says that the hole periodically would emit a large black beam into the sky he described it as blacker than black and so when this beam would emanate at nighttime it was so dark that it made the nighttime sky appear pale in comparison this is just starting to get ridiculous yes like it went from like okay what's happening here just a little hole and then it's like oh my god it's like oh my god it's like oh now i'm just like this story is is a is a grand one i'm losing the thread right like i love it when we can poke and prod and go well maybe but also what about this let's consider it now it's like okay well this is why the theories are is it real or is it not because like okay to have a light beam that is the absence of light see like you at this point you you're you're literally throwing out the most opposite physics possible right and seeing what sticks are you pranking this radio show kind of thing yeah reality science it's all going out the window here it's like just it has its own rules but despite these rules i want to say despite these rules being like obvious like flaunting of physics i just this is the kind of stuff i find very fascinating of course we're going to take it at face value we're going to analyze it we're not just going to believe it but i find it very fascinating so now it's the year 2000 we've had all of these claims but waters calls again it's been about three years since his first call but this time it seems different instead of speaking in a tone of amazement and instead of speaking in a way that shares this escalating tale of the magical properties of this bottomless pit he starts to sound afraid on this call he claims that he was visited by men in unmarked black vehicles soldiers emerged wearing biohazard suits building a fence around this property and then armed guards are appearing to guard and stand watch over the fence this if it's a ruse is a long ruse to keep up but he claims that the men told him that the land was now restricted because of quote sensitive environmental testing end quote so some reports claim that waters was told it was blocked off because a plane had crashed in the area and this is the reason that they said that you need to vacate the premises this is our land now um and initially he protested but then he was threatened apparently and this is i guess per his report here the officials claimed that they would find a drug lab on his property. and have him arrested if he didn't comply this is what he's saying you know if you don't get out of here we're gonna go find something that you don't like us to find here and you're gone what's interesting and if you have a threat like that you're gonna get what you want i think yeah but what's interesting is that in addition to the threat that then offered him a large sum of money to leave the land forever some yeah now some sources claim that that offer was three million dollars a year a salary right some say it was less at 250 000 either way you don't need to threaten me with a drug lab if you got money like that but it's so interesting because again like i can't help but see the inconsistencies here if they've got a threat like that i think they've got you they don't need to pay you off right exactly so why are they willing to pay you off is why per year like oh yeah we'll give you three million dollars a year for the rest of your life it was a threat it would be a lump sum to just get gone right yeah that's my that's what i would think i just don't understand like you don't want to have any ties to you know just hey get out of here like why would they waste resources i don't know like what to keep them hush hush about it that's what the money is for in the first place again the blackmail is enough for me to be like i ain't seen nothing ever right cool i'm gone bye never see me again let alone getting paid and then kind of being on a payroll for a little bit so yeah the story is getting really out of hand it's almost like and i'll be honest like as fun as i it's gotten so outlandish that i'm like is this man just pushing the limits of what's believable to see what the host of this radio show will accept at face value it's kind of what it feels like he's like he's like poking in pride and being like you won't guess what i got him to take today um okay well with the threat under his belt and apparently this large sum of money somewhere between 250 000 and 3 million dollars a year he complies he flees to australia and after this he would not call back to the show for two years shortly after his move this is where things start to get a little interesting and it starts to cross the realm into an internet mystery of a kind because shortly after this move satellite images via the terra server of ellensburg showed two opaque white boxes approximately where water's land was so take a look at this image and you'll see that as i kind of outline what this means so tara's server was essentially the google earth before google earth it was a website that provided satellite imagery of the earth and this is where the internet part comes in because people are saying okay well this is just outside of the town that he lived this is his land or this is kind of where he was living why are there two kind of conjoined white boxes touching off in this area are they trying to hide the hole from satellite images got it and the base or whatever they built around it or yeah and then the base and the the military or federal footprint i didn't even think about that part because these are pretty like you look at the town off to the right these are pretty big boxes it's sizable again it's as crazy and wild as the story seems we're getting little pieces of like evidence here that like okay the government was here or something they're they're you know they're covering some study that could be possibly covering up the location and their footprint and everything it's like as wild as it is we're getting some stuff okay we got something to chew on here yeah so it like kind of starts to draw you back in in addition to this cat our researcher did her best to find amongst all the many scattered less reputable sources all the truth and data that she could uh and collate that and in addition to these more censored images she also has uh take a look at the next image it's like screenshots of essentially google earth it is a coordinate system of of a hole and i i think i tried to type this in and it took me somewhere else i tried to search mel's hole on google earth that doesn't work but i have seen different coordinate systems for what mel's hole is and it leads to like sealed concrete pads like it starts to get a little hairy so all i just want to say here is i don't know if this is officially the same spot or not but it does look like the backyard of a homestead and it looks well what do you think it looks like yeah i mean the backyard of a homestead is the same spot as the backyard of a homestead a lot of land the view that's furthest away is like you know you got a little google maps pin on the hole then there's a magnification of the hole and it looks yeah it looks like a crater all right it looks sizable yeah something like in the close-up and i hate that the pin is right on the hole this isn't our screenshot this is just on the internet you see a lit upside and then almost perfectly down the middle there's a shadow line and then it's dark which would indicate yeah that's a hole and then you see a lit upside and then the sun is at an angle that this is some sort of honestly i want to see some other shadows it looks like all the shadows are on the north side which would indicate that this is not a rock like a boulder because you see all the little shrubs and stuff the shadows are on the top side of the image the north side oh that's a good point damn i didn't even think about that so if that's the case i think that does confirm that this is a hole of some kind definitely a divot but i don't know if this shows that it's a bottomless hole i also okay now we're getting into the vibe check territory okay if this is a hole i don't know if this shows that it's a bottomless hole i also okay now we're getting into the vibe check territory okay if this is a hole i don't know if this is a bottomless hole i also okay now we're So that's very interesting too. But I mean, like, would you care people were dumping stuff? Maybe, maybe he doesn't care, you know, maybe he doesn't. But again, I, I'm going to try to do it again after we record. I want to look up these coordinates. Actually, Christian, if you don't mind, try typing in these coordinates and see if it takes you to a similar image. Cause maybe I had a typo, but when I tried it before, it took me somewhere in like Europe or it took me somewhere else, which I think I just messed up. But I didn't get these screenshots. And then I tried to look up the coordinates for Mel's hole. So I could copy paste them in, found completely different coordinates that went to somebody else's backyard where there was like a concrete round slab as if it had been like, that's where it was, but it's been sealed up. And they will, you know, how do you even seal that? And the hole isn't like a slab doesn't just sink into it. Yeah. Like, do you just like build a concrete slab, truck it out there, drag it over the hole and then. And then like, that's it. Cause I'm also thinking like, why would you stay at the edge of this thing? You know, if it's that deep of a hole, what if the edge just sloughed off, it just shears off and then you just fall in and you're gone. That's true. That's very dangerous. And then like, then that concrete plug falls in, you know, a lot of things just aren't passing, like the, the just gentle vibe check, you know, but we'll get into the theories though here soon. But ultimately though, the arrival of these censored images. Before these uncensored ones that I showed you, the arrival of these censored images has led many people to believe that the government was trying to cover up whatever phenomenon was taking place here. And Christian, who's quick on the ones and twos pulls up his screenshot of these coordinates. What do you think Fredo, taking a look at what Christian just shared, I believe from Google maps. Oh, that looked like a big hole. But does it look like a big hole? Most of it's lit up, which means the sun's hitting solid surface. I just see. A sliver of shadow. I mean, it could just be that the, the angle of the sun, it's just giving us that like big illumination. Yeah. Like you're just seeing the wall. Yeah. You're seeing the wall. Cause it like, if anything, you might see the, like the lit up portion of the wall and then it all goes straight down. It all goes straight down. Yeah. It depends on the angle of observation from the satellite too. Yeah, dude. That's rough. Hey, project number two, case files on the road. We're going to go find a hole. We're going to find that hole. And I will, I will look at it from a distance. From a distance. I don't want to fall in a hole. No, we don't. We'll get one of those bomb bots, dude. We'll get a bomb bot with one of those little claw hands. And it's going to just like, it's going to pinch down and hold on to like the tip of the fishing line. And then it's going to run out there. You know, it's going to hold a little spool and then we'll just feed it from afar. You know, we're, we're miles away, just feeding 80,000 feet of fishing line down this hole. And then we'll get a drone. You know what? Then we'll get a drone. Oh, you get a drone. You get a drone. Yeah. Okay. Is there a drone that's got a range of 80,000 feet? Oof. Probably not. And yeah, think about like the connection with the rock and everything. And yeah, you might be, yeah, that drone, that drone's gone. That drone is gone. That drone is gone. Could you drop like GoPros on a cadence of every five seconds and then they have a localized mesh network so the bottom camera can speak up to the second, to speak up to the third, to the fourth, to the fifth. And so you can. You can get a live view. You know what I'm saying? Oh, my goodness. Just keep dropping routers in. Now we're getting into the intricacies and the science of it all. This is insane. Holy. One stabilized GoPro so it doesn't spin around. It's aimed down. It's got a bright flashlight. I'm talking a mag light. One of those things that lights up the forest at night. And it's looking straight down. And it's got a mesh network of routers also falling behind them. This man is. - Why is Frankensteining this whole thing together? - I'm a farmer 20 yeah what's the year 2026 sorry i came from the future that's how advanced i am this is okay this is like 30 years old we're talking about what a farmer would do in the 90s with fishing line now we're a farmer in the 20s okay this is the difference with time chuck a couple of routers and a gopro task force let me know how brilliant that is okay let's get back to brass tax he goes quiet. He escapes to Australia. That's what we know. Two years goes by. The year is now 2002 and life is good. Hannah Montana is peaking right now, but Bell hears back from Waters. He calls in. He still sounds afraid, but perhaps even more paranoid than before, like this whole thing has continued to spiral. And he claims that he had returned to the U.S. from Australia. However, almost as soon as he lands and gets off this plane, he says he is abducted. He says the next thing he remembers, Fredo, is that he woke up in an alley in San Francisco. He doesn't know how he got there. He's checking his body to figure out what's going on and he says he has random, strange injection marks on his arms and his back teeth are missing. He also realizes that when he finally comes to, the day between him waking up and the day between him landing, it's been about 12 days. He's been in the hospital for about a year. He's completely blacked out and has no idea what has happened to him that's crazy this whole thing is a mystery in itself now we're losing track of time like it seems like reality doesn't function normally around here right and i think that's the through thread is that reality continues to stay broken and more broken okay in my head if this is like okay well you came back to the states you broke your deal this is the government acting would they just fully disappear you like i feel like the government any given government has the ability to just disappear a person there's missing persons all the time yeah but would they i mean it would validate what's going on more but then again it's like even if it validates it like what happens you know what i mean people just go there's a mystery there and no one's gonna do anything about it because no one has any authority it's strange i mean again i want to i want to believe it just to assess it at face value but i don't believe it you know what i mean but like if this is what happened i don't know if this is the most obvious move for a government to make if that's who did this but i do think it's interesting because maybe this is to character assassinate let's have him look like i don't know a junkie or something he's got these injection marks they pull out some of his teeth like i don't know and maybe this is to discredit his his claims and so if he ever came forward again people would be like oh what's going on with him i don't know well this that and the other and assess him on a societal level you know yeah i mean that i mean that's a tactic that people use just crediting the person yeah so they throw him into these like this strange scenario in a strange city to make him you know look like he went on a bender or something yeah i don't know this is a this is an interesting turn on this case it was it's unexpected for sure yeah now he did have one more claim before he disappeared and never called back in ever again so his final claim was that he was contacted by a native american tribe we don't know which who wanted to consult him on a similar hole that they had found so supposedly this second hole was very similar in nature but instead had a metal rim seemingly was electrically charged and this metal rim was also warmed to the touch i don't know where this was again i don't know which tribe it is so i can't look any closer but this is what he shares on his final call and after he hangs up we never hear back this episode of red web is sponsored by first leaf do you like a good glass of wine at the end of the day but never really know what to buy enter first leaf it makes the whole thing easy they match wines to your taste and send them right to your door first leaf delivers premium wines straight to your door every month just answer a quick quiz about your preferences and they'll send you personalized selections no more guesswork no more settling here's what really makes it click every box comes with 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the tools you need to start and grow your business from designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond shopify can help with everything you need there's a reason millions of companies like mattel heinz and all birds continue to trust and use them with shopify on your side turn your big business idea into sign up for your one dollar per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer so this is where a brief but interesting investigation unfolds and it starts to become a little bit more from it moves from a like local urban legend into kind of an internet mystery a little bit here in the early days so later that same year it's 2002 there's a group of about 30 people who embark on a search for mel's hole whatever this hole is they want to find it and they're led by a man named gerald osborne and osborne was and this is really all we could find on him was a shaman who referred to himself as red elk they searched high and low they navigated through dry creek beds dense brush and everything that they could kind of in the immediate area and they found some sinkholes and some long abandoned mine shafts but they didn't find anything that matched the description that mel waters had given something that was deep beyond measure essentially and maybe looking back at these images maybe those are sinkholes or maybe those are like a piece of a mine a mine shaft or something oh true could be but what's interesting here is that the more people that began to investigate the truth and reality behind this hole this pit the more cracks began to show in the story at large for starters there was no record of anyone named mel waters in kititas county in fact there's no documentation proving that anyone named mel waters ever existed in general like not even the ownership of the house or anything like that no in fact i don't even know if we know for sure which house which property or where in the town or in the county this was but ultimately kititas county never had a mel waters in like living there interesting i mean like i mean like tinfoil had the government co-lifed it yeah yeah you just that's the thing is when you got the silver bullet which is the government did it you kind of become not necessarily but unimpeachable because it becomes the trump card it becomes the the gotcha yeah like i win the government can kind of do anything hand wavy magic kind of thing now on top of that there's a lot of stuff that's been done that's been done that's been done that's been done that researchers could not find any property documents i love this tax documents or land deeds that were linked to a name or a location right so nothing with mel waters nothing to do with the satellite images that we discussed earlier it's unclear honestly i i was talking to cat i was like well let's look closer let's see if we can maybe find who did own the properties where these censored images were or where this hole that we just looked at was but it's unclear who might have actually owned the property or who might have actually owned the property we we just don't know and if we did know all we would say is it's not him and we wouldn't dock somebody but this has led obviously many people to believe that the nature of this story is fictional that mel waters simply made this up given that coast to coast am certainly attracted stories of this type many of which are to be believed many of which bend reality a little bit and that's kind of the place that red web lives is let's take a look at those like really interesting stories and see if we can unpack them understand them and find the truth within but that leads us to our theories simply enough and i'll let you guide the conversation here fredo which you want to explore first was this a hoax or is this some otherworldly phenomenon that was documented and then kind of hushed those are our two angles here let's go with the route of is this a hoax first okay so obviously this is the most obvious theory given what we just said that mel's hole is something of an imagination a story made up by somebody going under the alias of mel waters now i don't want to discredit the idea of there being an alias in general if this was real i don't know if i would say hey my name is trevor collins and i saw an alien i think i'd be like you know if if you start hearing about a huck johnson and they have a very attractive silhouette okay you got to believe that it might be me i'm just i'm but it's not me but it could be could be okay huck johnson saw an alien got down with it cheeked up aliens got down with it it rhymes you know you know i just put it all out there but given the fact again and this kind of reiterates a few of the things i said but given the fact that no one was able to find this mystical abyss that there's no records of a mel waters existence many start to think that this is not just a theory but that this is almost certainly not real additionally geologists have come forward to speak on the geographical impossibility of this hole which again i love i love the idea of these buff minds coming to play so talked about rocks sloughing off and this hole being kind of unstable but geologist joe powell stated that the depth of this hole would almost certainly cause it to collapse and that's why we're talking about a hole that's going to collapse into itself just due to the pressure and the heat of the surrounding earth 80 000 feet depending on where you are on this earth is a heck of a distance through the earth's crust it's not all the way through unless you're at the seabed in which case you might punch through into the mantle but it still gets very hot at that level yeah you know you start boring down at 40 000 feet these bore tips need to be diamond coated because they're essentially melting as they dig and so he's saying that not only with the pressure from the the crust around it kind of constantly tectonic plate moving it would be pushing into this void this void has no resistance and so it would just push into that naturally fill that space you also have the heat coming up from the bottom which continues to keep it unstable so it might crumble from down below i love the science behind this i love the science i mean if nothing else it's a fascinating story with some really interesting science to debunk it now there's another guy i love this guy's name there's another geologist named pat pringle okay once you pop you can't stop stop pat you can't stop pat okay so they're claiming that a fishing line could not have lowered 80 000 feet as the earth's heat would snap it in half well before it was able to reach that depth that makes sense you know yeah that fishing line's very thin it's you know it's got some was it tensile strength it's got some yeah that fishing line's very thin it's you know it's got some was it tensile strength it's got some it's you know it's got some was it tensile strength but when you're applying heat and everything like that things are different right it might be able to hold on to a marlin but you put a match underneath one of those things and it's going to melt and snap right away so that's what i love that you were on to that i loved that immediately you were but you were thinking differently but still valid okay well at that length there's some sort of weight at play and that must be like this is outside of the game it's not like it's not like it's not like it's not like way outside of the confines of what fishing line is meant to do imagine trying to reel something in from 80 000 feet away you caught a fish 12 miles north you know yeah that's crazy that's just an insane amount of length now ultimately to me kind of giving my thoughts here this theory would answer for pretty much everything from the man who didn't exist to the lack of reputable sources making it difficult to research this particular episode all the way through the whole laundry list of physics breaking properties now does that change it in the minds of many believers and you know like people that believe whether it be in aliens or the paranormal or in the metaphysical it's fascinating it's deeply attractive it's intriguing but there are a few kind of cornerstones that allow people to continue to believe in opposition of this theory but what are your thoughts before i dive into that i think this i think the science holds i think the science makes it very difficult now are there science breaking aliens and physics breaking aliens out there absolutely probably right i don't know there's there's going to be life and science elsewhere in this universe that is stranger than we can comprehend you know again oh yeah a sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic and so it's got to be out there somewhere is it here that's the question so in opposition to this previous theory there are those who believe that waters was telling the truth that waters in fact was a real person whistleblowing on what he was seeing in his own backyard in response to the lack of documents surrounding his existence some believe as you kind of guesstimated here fredo that they're unable to be found because the government had erased all traces of mel waters in an effort to silence him erase his findings or just simply discredit the story that was now on this radio station some have also speculated that the bottomless pit could actually be a portal to another dimension some sort of time warp anything like that we we've heard many hot spots and portals to hell and all sorts of things like that and it's one of those things where you just kind of go maybe it's this and you hand wave it away and you don't really address it but it helps answer for weird activity happening in a hot spot but yeah like you know wibbly wobbly time stuff could be the answer for why his radio was freaking out and catching stray broadcasts from throughout the decades prior i don't know but people then say that also explains the dog coming back to life but if again it's some sort of time bending thing and the dog goes backwards to become alive would they not recognize their owner again i don't know we're in a place that's hard to understand yeah i mean the rules are all over the place so you don't really know you know what i mean you chuck me into a hole and as i fall to the bottom i start to become baby me that doesn't mean baby me is going to wind up in a in the woods nearby yeah that's just ridiculous yeah like that reality like it's wild this makes me think like stranger things was a fascinating show because it caught on to some ideas like this you know like you just don't need the answer because it's just interesting enough and you have the rest of the plot but this no you need the answers you're claiming to be real you got reality at your in your sales like let's try to figure this out yeah these are like grand claims here and so they're i think there needs to be some sort of reality check happening yeah now when it comes to the black beams of light coming up out of this hole some claim that these portals or this time warp or whatever could also somehow explain these dark beams of light i don't know exactly once again it's just kind of oh it just yeah the fact that it's a portal kind of explains that but kind of building on that they say that there's a lot of people who claim to have witnessed extraterrestrial activity in this area and that this is why the government was so eager to strike it from an angle and that's why they're so eager to strike it from an angle and that's why they're records maybe the airplane crash was actually the crash of a ufo or a uap or some sort of action like that or again this then starts to harken into the subterranean aliens theory which i won't even begin to unpack here but ultimately like okay sure yes if there's aliens in the area maybe that's why things are going a little haywire yeah but what is this blast of dark light and what's the purpose of that that's where i start to get like maybe aliens can bend space time and and break physics a little bit but that doesn't mean they're just doing that let's turn his steel bucket into gold and let's change the radio stations and let's blast a big old beam of black light and i just don't know if they'd be doing all that yeah that just is so wild and so isolated in one area yeah it's far-fetched it's far-fetched and again like i said this one is kind of like a break from all the the the the the the episodes we've done in in recently in uh in the big stream but ultimately i feel like we have a pretty shared opinion here oh yeah ultimately you know we may never know who this was what was going on here but it has certainly solidified itself as local urban legend there in the state of washington oh yeah and you think that you could just go and check it but like i guess apparently not right because like is this the hole we're talking about come on someone with these coordinates and a house being right there someone must have been there someone was there and it's probably just someone that's not a part of internet culture and has no idea there's this whole conspiracy around this hole in their backyard dude this is like okay this is where i'm gonna get a little meta because way back in the day when you know we were still part of a big old conglomerate company and there's a lot of other moving parts you know we talked about red webs next steps in evolution and could there be other things that we did and one of the iterations was like getting hands-on and tangible with stuff like this i would love to tell the story of mel's hole dissect it in an honest way but then go there i want to go to that hole and show the people is this a hole or is this not how hard is that you know it's like one of those things just go the loop go to the location just go to it it should be there somewhere like you could find it and just look at it and go that's there's you know that's a big hole or that's not so big of a hole but you know it's a mystery for a reason whether you believe in it or not right right it is certainly capture the imagination of many people believers skeptics what have you and again you know it's one of those episodes where i feel very strongly that i think we debunk a lot of the extraordinary claims but that's the thing about extraordinary claims they require extraordinary proof or just any evidence whatsoever but it started man it started intriguing uh when this was submitted by the way by task force member midi thank you so much for submitting this one because when you first submitted it in we're like this sounds wild yeah it does and then he just starts like he he just takes the story too far too fast maybe that's what i'm thinking dude i think in the stories he has been taken too far too fast i think that's the thing where it's just like you had everyone hooked and i think at that point you went oh okay like i got everyone's attention and he just kind of like really ran with it like like one of those creepypasta stories that just like went on too long and then you started to go okay you were real good and then now i just like i can't fit what the story is going on with or i don't know i don't know but you know it does fit the same energy of like creepypastas where there's something fascinating to be said maybe this was like the format was radio show and then it like oh man i don't know yeah but coast to coast am it's got a lot of interesting things a lot of like fascinating topics have popped up on that show many of which lie very much in this territory and and that's only like a sliver of what red web has kind of discussed and uncovered but any final thoughts it's a fun one you know what i mean it's definitely like i said off the bat i was like oh this is gonna be fun i'm very intrigued and there's a ton of stories that in a ton of different ways you might have some that started off ridiculous and then end like you go you know being more believable than when you first walked in so i think this was a fun one it definitely was a fun one i think it was a fun one definitely is fun to cover stories that start strong and then it's not that it didn't end strong but just spiral out of control yeah you know what i mean um like how do we get here yeah but i'm about it uh i thought it was very intriguing it's just it lands in the frustration section for me where i'm like let's just go check it just go just go check the hole like is it there or you know we've had stories in the past before or it's just like okay like maybe maybe this is real maybe this like or we could just send someone to go look like sometimes we have the location and we're just like we don't know i'm like or we could like i feel like we could but a fun one nonetheless a fun one nonetheless and sometimes you gotta just air it out with stuff like that but you're right sometimes cases start really normal and then suddenly a shark is caught in the wild is put in an aquarium throws up a severed arm and that arm belongs to a missing person and you crack open a true crime case of the century sometimes things like that happen and then you're just like oh my god this is like the shark arm case just happened and they're wilder than fiction but yeah it's also nice to explore these paranormal stories sometimes but dang it the freak in me wants to go like all right that's a coordinate that's a house we got an address yeah let me do a bit of googling let me ring them up and say listen full full stop i'm like an advertiser right now like i'm sorry i'm hitting you with this but could you walk about a hundred feet south of your back door yeah and just take a photo of that hole all we need to do is just take a look at that hole real quick thank you just a glimpse facetime me on that hole and then if you really want to go uh and then drop the facetime plus a handful of routers in five seconds successional drops you know and just that way you know let me know all right i got a small ask i got a small ask get about a thousand routers and an iphone that could do facetime and drop them down don't worry i'll send the equipment i have your address don't worry i know where you live yeah yeah man an interesting one midi thank you so much if you want to submit task force an episode for us to explore have fun with a true crime case that you want us to unpack and react to whatever it is sometimes it's a movie club let us know you can do that we made a post that is available on our patreon page redwebpod.com it's all about how to submit something there is a link to a form then you're off to the races but with that said i also want to shout out some of the task force members our newest task force is lady ishka thank you so much for joining us and then our buff scientist of the week is luis and then of course our squonks we have a new one as well in the squonk list here we have brett omura zarathustra james hill and new squonk on the block is evan guillen or guillen however you prefer let us know but thank you all so much for supporting again if you're here at the end store.redwebpod.com you got about two and a half weeks on that exclusive july merch so come and get it the patreon exclusive merch it will be available for forever but exclusively to the patreon members as a kind of thank you for supporting us directly you get access to that real cool band tour shirt inspired design that we're really stoked about all right fredo enjoyable diving down the the rabbit hole or into mel's hole today with that i'll see you right back here next monday for yet another mystery starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like shopify they have the tools you need to start and grow your business from designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond shopify can help with everything you need there's a reason millions of companies like mattel heinz and all birds continue to trust and use them with shopify on your side turn your big business idea into sign up for your one dollar per month trial at shopify.com special offer