Mel's Hole Omnibus

 

I had a wonderfully nostalgic experience a few days ago. I was casually browsing YouTube and I came across an anthology of interviews from the Coast to Coast AM radio show featuring Mel Waters, an enigmatic man who claimed he had a bottomless hole in his back garden. The hole was about nine feet across and surrounded by a two foot retaining wall; looking into it one could only see blackness. The walls are made of stone which turns into natural rock for as far down as you can see. The origins of the hole are unknown. Mel tried to find out how deep it was by lowering a fishing line into it, but never found the bottom. It went down to 80,000 feet before he gave up... It must have been a strong rod and line! This hole had magical powers; it could, for example, bring back dead animals to life, but only in an undead, zombie-like existence. Also if you lowered ice cubes down the hole they came back up as a form of solid combustible material that did not melt. You could use it as fuel. Mel revealed the rough location of this hole as being near Ellensburg, Washington USA. Many people visited the area after listening to Coast to Coast, but the hole has never been found. There is a hole in a field near Ellensburg, but it is clearly not Mel's Hole; it is only about ten feet deep and not in any way magical (and the farmer does not like visitors going near it). Mel has found one independent witness to support his claim that the hole exists, a man called Red Elk, real name Gerald Osborne, who claims Amerindian descent and trained as a medicine man. Mel made a number of calls to Art Bell's show between 1997 and 2002. Later on in his testimony he claimed that there was a second hole with similar properties located at a Basque community in Nevada. The military had sealed it off with a locked steel cover. Again, he refused to give precise coordinates for Mel's Hole number two. He is probably diverting. There are no Basque communities in Nevada; the American Basque diaspora is centred on Boise, Idaho. The Mel's hole call-in shows are all on YouTube in various places. The videos sometimes get deleted, but they always pop up again. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapL9DOYZqI.
 
Before anybody asks; no, I do not believe Mel's hole is real anymore. In the early days of my conspiratorial awakening I even surprised myself with how much I thought was real. Despite everything, I very much enjoyed revisiting the Mel's hole shows. For me it was a moment of true Welsh hiraeth. It took me back to when I first started listening to Coast to Coast and other UFO/paranormal/conspiracy radio shows. I used to download them from my old dialup internet and listen to them while my infant daughter played around on the floor beside me. Sometimes I'd burn a few podcasts onto CD's to take into work and listen to in the porters' lodge. This was many years before I founded HPANWO. Times have changed. Today, conspiracy theories have gone from being an abstract interest, almost a bit of fun and entertainment, to a serious reality. The day my daughter came home from school, aged ten, and told me the teachers wanted to take her fingerprints, my whole life changed forever. Since then more and more of our beliefs are being proven true. This is the end of innocence.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/11/this-is-drawing-done-by-my-12-year-old.html.