They say we are made of stories. Our lives are not measured in years or decades, but in stories that have beginnings, middles, and endings – the relationship with our first love and the disenchantment that taught us more than we wanted, the dream job that propelled us down a path in life. life or travel that increasingly transform us in unthinkable ways.
When we are children we believe in the stories of the toothy mouse or that there are goblins in the gardens, but sometimes as adults we have the need to perpetuate those stories that transform our reality into something much more interesting. Perhaps that is how the intrigue arose around Mel’s hole.
Twenty years ago a phone call started a myth that led thousands of people to become obsessed with that story. On February 21, 1987, Mel Waters called into the Coast to Coast AM radio show hosted by Art Bell. There he began to talk about a mysterious hole in his property that apparently had no bottom.
The call of more than 30 minutes shows a very serious man, who in great detail talks about this hole that he tried to measure by tying a pound of weight to fishing line and that after losing that pound for more than 24 kilometers, still I couldn’t find an ending. People quickly became interested in Mel’s hole, the location of which was never revealed. Mel would say only that he was on his property near Ellensburg, Washington.
The way Mel told the story made many believe what he said. It began as a strange hole, then he inserted the element of depth that seemed to be infinite and then, as if it were not something strange, he said that he had the strange ability to revive animals, because according to him he saw how the dead dog of a neighbor His was thrown into the hole and a short time later he saw him walking around as if nothing had happened.
Despite the fantastic story, many believed it and wanted to know more. Mel kept calling the Art Bell show, elaborating on the theory, they even found maps of the area with a strange white box covering the area Mel mentioned, creating a government conspiracy theory. It was in 2005, when Google Earth hit the market, that many used satellite images to search for the mysterious hole, but all the clues they found turned out to be irregularities or ponds with nothing in particular.
At the time, an Ellensburg District official claimed that there are no papers to show that a Mel Waters ever lived in the area, so Mel’s last Radio broadcast was a bit disappointing when he said the government had expropriated his land. and had forced him to move to Australia and never talk about it. A classic trick of the charlatans.
Little by little the enthusiasm died down and although today it is an urban myth, every so often people come up who claim that Mel was right, that they have found a bottomless hole in the outskirts of Washington and that strange things happen there. Our need to believe in fantastic stories beyond the limits of our reason will always make us believe that Mel was something more than a prank call.
For you, is it a lie or reality?