The claim is that a nine-foot shaft in central Washington swallowed eighty thousand feet of fishing line without touching bottom. That is twenty-four kilometres. Instead of asking whether the man who phoned a radio show in 1997 was telling the truth, it is more useful to ask what a twenty-four-kilometre hole would actually do, because the answer rules the story out on physics alone.
The short version
- The story began as a caller's account on a late-night American radio programme in February 1997.
- County property records contain no trace of the man who said he owned the land, and no agency has a record of the hole.
- A state geologist investigated and found nothing matching the description anywhere in the area.
- At the claimed depth the rock would be several hundred degrees, the pressure would close an unlined shaft, and the line would snap under its own weight long before it got there.
What was claimed
A caller described a hole on his property near Ellensburg: roughly nine feet across, ringed by a wall of brick or concrete, with no measurable bottom. He said he lowered spool after spool of fishing line, more than fifteen miles of it, and never felt it land. He added details that escalated with each retelling. Radios would not receive near the opening. A dead animal thrown in came back alive. Government officials seized the land and paid him to keep quiet. Later he said the hole had closed itself, and that a second one existed in Nevada.
None of that has ever been independently observed. What makes the case interesting is not the escalation, which is ordinary, but that the original measurable claim is specific enough to test.
Twenty-four kilometres is the whole problem
Start with the line. Monofilament and braided fishing lines have breaking strengths measured in tens of pounds. A continuous vertical hang of twenty-four kilometres of line weighs far more than any such line can carry, and it fails near the top, where the whole load is concentrated. This is the same reason deep-sea winches use tapered steel or synthetic cable engineered specifically for self-weight, and why drilling rigs use jointed pipe rather than anything spooled. Long before the theoretical bottom, the line parts and the angler feels exactly what the story describes: nothing.
Then the rock. Continental crust warms with depth at something like twenty to thirty degrees per kilometre. At twenty-four kilometres the surrounding rock is several hundred degrees Celsius, comfortably hot enough to soften plastics, cook electronics and set anything organic alight. This is not speculation; it is why the deepest borehole ever drilled had to stop.
The comparison that settles it
The Soviet Union spent two decades drilling the Kola Superdeep Borehole and reached about twelve and a quarter kilometres, roughly half the claimed depth of Mel's Hole. At the bottom that hole is around twenty-three centimetres wide, not nine feet. Drilling stopped because the rock at that temperature behaved plastically, flowing back into the hole and seizing the bit. A nine-foot open void twice as deep would not merely be difficult to make; it would close under overburden pressure measured in hundreds of megapascals, whatever made it.
For scale in the other direction, the deepest cave systems anyone has descended bottom out at a little over two kilometres, and they are natural, water-carved, and famously hard to reach. There is no known geological process that produces a vertical cylindrical shaft an order of magnitude deeper.
| Detail | Figure |
|---|---|
| First told | February 1997, on a US late-night radio programme |
| Claimed diameter | About nine feet |
| Claimed line paid out | 80,000 feet, about 24 kilometres |
| Deepest borehole ever drilled | About 12.26 kilometres |
| Width of that borehole at the bottom | Roughly 23 centimetres |
| Rock temperature at 24 kilometres | Several hundred degrees Celsius |
| Deepest cave descended | A little over 2 kilometres |
| County records for the claimed owner | None found |
What the paper trail shows
A hole on private land leaves administrative residue: a deed, a parcel number, a tax assessment, a well log, a mining claim, an aerial photograph. Researchers who went looking found none of it. County property records turned up no owner by the name given. State geological staff, including a geologist who investigated the reports directly, found no feature resembling the description and pointed out that the local geology, layered flood basalts, does not produce anything of the kind.
The government-seizure element of the story is what makes this unfalsifiable, and it arrived at exactly the moment it was needed. Once the land is said to be confiscated and the hole is said to have sealed, every absence of evidence becomes confirmation. That is the structural signature of folklore rather than of a suppressed discovery.
Why the story endures
- It was told calmly, in detail, in the first person, on a programme with a huge audience.
- The setting is real, remote and plausibly empty.
- Every later addition was designed to explain why nobody can check it.
- Bottomless pits are one of the oldest and most portable folk motifs there is.
Why it cannot be true as told
- No line of that type survives its own weight over 24 kilometres.
- Rock at that depth is hundreds of degrees and deforms plastically.
- An unlined nine-foot void would be crushed closed by overburden pressure.
- No deed, well log, survey, photograph or agency record exists.
Why testing the physics is the right move
It is tempting to dismiss this kind of story by attacking the teller, and that is both unkind and unpersuasive. The stronger approach is to accept the claim provisionally and follow it to its consequences. Do that here and the story fails at the first quantitative step, with no need to speculate about anyone's motives.
This matters because the same method works on claims that turn out to be true. Extremely deep holes, freakish natural shafts and inexplicable acoustic effects all genuinely exist, and each of them survives contact with numbers. A cave two kilometres deep in Georgian limestone is real, was found by cavers, and is documented to the metre. A borehole twelve kilometres into the Baltic Shield is real, and its own data explains why it stopped. Real anomalies leave residue. Mel's Hole leaves radio audio.
The verdict
There is no bottomless pit in Washington state, and there is no footage from inside one, because there is no hole. What there is instead is an unusually well-told piece of late-twentieth-century American folklore that spread through a radio network the way an earlier version would have spread through a tavern. The physics that rules it out is more interesting than the story: at twenty-four kilometres down, the Earth is hot enough and heavy enough that it simply refuses to hold a hole open.
About the author
Motech researches and produces long-form video on technology and the unexplained for an audience of more than 270,000 subscribers. Corrections and tips: info@richardelhaj.media