Mel's Hole: The Bottomless Pit Nobody Can Find

On February 21, 1997, a man calling himself Mel Waters phoned into late-night radio and told America about a hole in his backyard with no bottom. He’d lowered fishing line into it for over fifteen miles and never hit anything. A neighbor’s dead dog went in and reportedly came back out alive. Then, he claimed, the government took the land away from him and paid to fly him to Australia so he’d stop talking about it. He kept talking about it anyway — and nearly thirty years later, nobody has ever found the hole.

The Call That Started It

The show was Coast to Coast AM, the host was Art Bell, and Mel Waters said he owned a piece of rural property nine miles west of Ellensburg, Washington, in Kittitas County. Somewhere on that land, he said, was a hole of unknown depth. He’d fed fishing line down it, weighted at the end, and run out — over 80,000 feet, more than fifteen miles — without ever feeling it go slack.

Locals apparently used it as an all-purpose dump: old tires, dead animals, whatever nobody wanted. Nothing ever filled it, and nothing ever made a sound hitting bottom. Waters returned to the show four more times over the following five years — February 24, 1997, then 2000, then 2002 — adding detail each time, including the claim that federal agents eventually seized the property and quietly relocated him out of the country to make the story disappear.

The Medicine Man Who Says He Saw It Too

Waters wasn’t the only voice attached to the legend. Gerald Osborne, who goes by Red Elk and describes himself as an intertribal medicine man, told reporters his father showed him the same hole back in 1961 — decades before Waters ever called in. By 2012, Red Elk had taken the story further than Waters ever did, telling interviewers the site sat above a secret government facility where “alien activity” occurred.

In April 2002, Red Elk led a group of roughly thirty people onto Manastash Ridge to actually find the hole. The Seattle Times covered the expedition. They didn’t find it.

What Reporters Actually Found

Journalists who went looking for the paper trail came back empty. No public record of anyone named Mel Waters ever living in or owning property in Kittitas County. No deed, no seizure record, no relocation. The version of events broadcast to millions of listeners had no name attached to it that county records could confirm existed.

The science holds up even less. A Washington State Department of Natural Resources geologist called a hole of that claimed depth geologically impossible — at that scale, surrounding rock pressure and heat would collapse it before it ever formed, and the likeliest real-world inspiration is an ordinary old mine shaft, the kind scattered across that stretch of Washington, going down a few hundred feet at most. A second geologist pointed out a simpler problem with the fishing-line story: at the depths Waters described, heat from the earth would have melted or snapped the line long before 80,000 feet.

A Legend That Outlived the Evidence

None of that killed the story — if anything, it fed it. Rebroadcasts of the original Art Bell segments kept circulating for years, and by 2008 the legend had made it into a gallery: “Aspects of Mel’s Hole,” a group show at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana featuring 41 artists responding to the tale, with a 146-page catalog to match. It’s since been filed alongside things like Skinwalker Ranch — a real place with a fabricated mythology stacked on top of it, except in this case, there isn’t even confirmation of the place.

The Verdict

What’s actually documented: a radio broadcast happened, a caller told a vivid story, and a medicine man later added a second layer to it. Everything past that — the hole itself, the fifteen miles of fishing line, the resurrected dog, the government buyout, the secret facility underneath — has no property record, no physical location, and no witness independent of the two men telling it. Geologists say the hole as described couldn’t exist in the first place.

Mel’s Hole isn’t a cover-up with the evidence scrubbed clean. It’s a story that was never anchored to anything solid enough to scrub.