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April 24, 2000 - Art Bell
01:10:26
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Mel Waters - Rags to Riches to Rags - Mel's Hole Update (hour 4-5)
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Time Text
One of the greatest stories ever told was told on this program.
Um, how long ago was it?
God, you know, I don't even remember now.
About a hole in the ground that had no end, or no end that anybody could find.
It was the damnedest story you ever heard in your whole life.
Anybody remember Mel's Hole?
Well, Guess who I've got on the line, I think.
Mel!
Mel, is it you?
It is him.
God, Mel, I can't believe it!
Mel!
Yes, indeed.
Listen, brother, I just spent an hour red-faced, embarrassed, because I thought the Blair Witch Project was real.
And I really thought it was real, Mel.
I, you know, I...
Really thought it was real.
I mean, I've still got the hook in my mouth here.
And so, I guess the first question I had to ask you is, how long ago, Mel, did we do the shows that we did?
Oh, gosh, this must have been about, I'm going to say, 97? 97.
Well, it was one of the greatest stories, no doubt, ever told.
In fact, it spurred all kinds of things.
Television crews went up to Ellensburg, Washington.
I know it.
I know it.
I heard many things.
So I must begin by asking you, before I go forward any further with you, denied at all, Mel, is this, is Mel's Hole, the story of Mel's Hole, another Blair Witch project?
I will not drop any bombshells on you in regards to this being the Blair Witch Project.
This is not the Blair Witch Project.
This is my property.
I may end up telling you things that will maybe... I haven't seen the Blair Witch Project, so I don't know anything about that, but I will say I can tell you some pretty scary things.
I know you can.
All right, so anyway, I just wanted to get that out of the way here at the beginning before my face goes... No, no, this is not that.
All right, well, back in 97, I forget, did I get like a fax from you?
I sent you a fax way back then.
Is that how it began?
Basically, I was just curious about this hole on my properties.
I knew with your big audience that somebody might be able to return some information to me.
I tried to do a little research on the depth of various holes and so forth and mines and all of those sort of things.
So it's basically picking your audience's brain is what I was doing at the time.
Well, we were picking yours.
It's the damnedest story I ever heard.
Let's... Radio, you have time.
Let's tell... A lot of the audience, you know, would not have been around then.
I would not have ever heard this story, and I've never heard one like it in my life.
So if you would... Oh, sure.
I'll recap.
Especially after all these years, it'll be good to see if your story now fits your story then.
Okay.
Well, sure, sure.
Basically, this all started when I sent artifacts.
I had this property, or had this property, well, we're going to get into that later on.
But you owned the property at the time, right?
Yeah, it was actually my wife's property.
Okay, was it empty property, ostensibly?
Well, we had some outbuildings on there, a couple of trailers.
It was really unimproved land, but while I could, I was living there.
I left the property.
Okay, so you lived in a trailer on the property?
Yeah.
And then there was another trailer or two on the property?
Yeah, there were several outbuildings out there, and I basically was doing a lot of research in various Indian herbal medicines and so forth.
I grew various things.
Yeah, I remember that.
I remember that.
That was my thing.
Actually, I used to spend a lot of time going to Nevada, dealing with the various bands of Indians down there, because there The herbs that they use are the ones that I've been researching.
We might talk a little bit about that too at some point.
Sure.
Because I think you might find that interesting as well.
Alright, now the location, the location of this is near Ellensburg.
On the Monastash Ridge, which is a little bit south of Ellensburg, but it's the prominent mountain surrounding How long had you been living in Ellensburg?
Oh, we'd been there for several years.
It's basically in the center of Washington State, right off of I-90.
It's a very nice little place.
I hear you.
How long had you been living there?
We'd been there for several years.
I married this woman in Ellensburg.
We lived there for a while and then we kind of got broken up.
Well, at the time that you faxed me, you simply said, I don't even remember the fax now, but you said there was a hole on your property.
Yeah.
Into which, I guess for years, people had been dumping stuff.
Oh, absolutely.
And one of the things I didn't tell you about, one of the things that regularly was dumped in the hole, There was a little Mexican fellow who used to come around
about once a week with like a big steak bed truck full of tires that he used to dump in
there and the guy used to pick them up at the various used tire places and I guess
you know it costs money to dispose of tires, right?
Well, yeah, it does, because they have these big yards where they have these tire fires by mistake.
Well, I don't know.
He'd pick them up from wherever he had them.
If they were too bald to be used as retreads or whatever, this little Mexican guy would pick them up and bring them over.
He must have dumped like thousands.
Tires.
Now, let's describe the hole.
Was the hole just a hole in the ground, or was it a well?
Well, if you looked at it, if you were walking up to it, you'd say, this is kind of interesting looking well.
What it was is about nine feet across.
Nine feet across?
And there was stonework around it.
I don't know when the stonework got put into it, but it was sort of... It was round then?
Yes, it was perfectly round.
And you're saying it was nine feet in diameter?
The diameter of it was nine feet, and what I did is I built a metal cover for the top so when it wasn't being used as a garbage disposal, for lack of a better term, it was covered up because I didn't want any problems.
People falling into it, kids falling into it, whatever.
Oh yeah, you'd be charged with a crime or something.
I begin to wonder now if they would have ever been heard from again if it had gone into it.
I don't think so.
You just hear a scream disappearing.
Yeah, just kind of going on into infinity.
But I'd written to you and I said, I've basically let like 80,000 feet Worth of monofilament fishing line.
There was even more before that.
You said people were throwing dead cows in there?
Oh yeah, cows.
One of my favorite things to chuck in there was television tubes.
I'd throw television tubes, the picture tube down there.
And it was big enough so you could drop it.
In other words, the hole, I take it, for as far as one could see or hear, went straight down.
It must have.
If I would hold something over, like towards the center of the hole, I couldn't go all the way to the center, because, you know, going by nine feet across, that's more than four and a half feet across.
Sure.
But if I held something out like the size of a picture tube, you know, a 19-inch picture tube from an old TV set, and dropped that in there, I would never hear it hit anything.
It would just fall off.
And fall, and fall, and fall.
And that's what made me curious, is that how come, you know, I mean, you know, I didn't hear a splash.
No crash.
No crashing, no, uh, you know, I mean, I could hear something if I didn't get things like dead center there, you know, and if it spun and... If it would hit the sides, yeah.
But then eventually that sound would give up too, so... Do you, by the way, going back, do you have any idea what this hole originally was?
Was it anything?
Was it something...
That anybody dug, do you think?
Was it something that was naturally always there, or what do you think it was?
As far as I can determine, and everyone that I'd spoken with, that hole has always been associated with that property.
One person that I talked to says, well, as far as we know, the hole there, and your property's been there as long as the Uh, the whale bone has been in the tree out there in Ellensburg.
We've got a... Ellensburg is a strange place.
We've got a tree out in Ellensburg.
Yes.
On someone's yard.
Yes.
There's a whale bone jaw growing out of the tree.
What?
Yeah, the jaw of a whale bone.
And it's like embedded in the tree.
Are you telling me the truth?
Yeah, you can go to, in fact, I, you know, I was familiar with, because I used to walk in neighborhoods there and see it.
You could see the tree, but you could actually go to the Yakima Herald newspaper, and you could see a picture of it.
How, look, that's central Washington.
Yes.
That's not the ocean.
No, the ocean is good.
Well, Puget Sound's a good 90 miles away.
90 miles.
So how could there be a whale bone growing out of a tree?
There you go.
But the whale bone's been there like for a hundred years.
People tell me, the ones I've talked to, your hole's been there as long as... I mean, Ellensburg doesn't go back much further than, I'd say, 150 years.
150 years.
You know, so I mean, that, you know, was a town, you know.
So that hole was probably there long before.
Way, way before that, and other people held the property, and, uh, you know, I don't know at what point did, uh, you know, the rockery get built around it, but it's kind of, it's kind of nice, you know, it looks nice.
So you're telling me, like, thousands of tires, refrigerators.
Oh, yeah.
Even dead cows.
Dead, dead animals, uh, dead dogs, uh, you know, whatever.
It's like you didn't have to burn trash.
Oh no, no, no.
We're kind of what I would say is sort of ecologically sensible people there.
So we don't really generate a lot of garbage or trash or anything.
But yes, we did put our household trash in there if we didn't use it for compost or things like that.
Right.
So we threw a lot of stuff in there.
So after years and years, you finally got, and I understand, incredibly curious about how deep this damn thing really was.
It was just one of those moments that you know, all of a sudden you say, good grief, I gotta get to the bottom of this, right?
So to speak.
Unintended, yeah.
And so I used to, when I lived in California, I used to do A lot of shark fishing, and so I had some of those big old, you know, reel type fishing poles, and so, you know, the first thing I did was empty... Oh, it must have been about, oh, it could have been about 1,200 yards of fishing line down there.
What did you do?
Did you take a rod or, I mean, how did you load it?
Well, yeah, the first adventure that I had with this, and this was kind of...
Before the obsession began with finding out more about this is that I basically sat down into the hole from just my big shark fishing fishing pole, a fishing weight, and next to the fishing weight I also had a roll of life savers.
The reason I had the life savers at the end is that if I hit water, This old shark fisherman's trick.
If they hit water, the lifesavers would melt.
Well, sure.
Yeah.
See, we used to do that when we'd go fishing.
Yeah, in other words, it would be so far down that anything else you would put down there, I see, would obviously be dry by the time you got to back up again.
Yeah.
So, you know, I just emptied a fishing pole, and then, you know, when I got to the end of the line, I just let it sit there for a while.
And, you know, it takes a little while for a roll of lifesavers to melt.
That's how it was determined that, uh, it was wet down.
You know, it was wet down there.
They hit water.
So how much initial line did you have on that first, uh?
It must, it must, you know, I'm, I'm going, you know, through, uh, trying to, trying to remember what these, you know, uh, big pen reels held, but they was like, uh, it must have been about 1,200 yards on there.
1,200 yards?
1,200 yards.
So that, that would have been about 36, 3,600 feet at least.
That was the first expedition into the hole.
So you let it all the way out?
That's right.
Could you feel, at any point, like the weight... Of course, I suppose at some point, when you've got that much line reeled out, you've got weight, period.
But could you still sense the weight at the end of that line?
Oh yeah.
At that distance, you can actually move the line.
You could move it laterally, side to side, but it was kind of an effort.
You could actually get a swing to it, but it was really hard.
Think about that.
You're trying to swing something that's 3,600 feet.
It's difficult.
And as you let it down, you didn't feel any turns or twists?
No twist, no obstruction.
Basically, I let the line go down freely with the weight on.
I had a one-pound fishing weight at the end of this line, and basically it went down and down and down and down.
know it's uh... at the same pace basically uh...
info yeah that
uh... that that at that point there when i got the lot you know i got all
the lineup there looked at my uh... was scratching your head saying how many
he was out again About 30, that was 3,600.
3,600 feet.
I guess there are holes that go down 3,600 feet.
I'm not an expert on holes, but... That's a little, what, a little bit more than half a mile, right?
Yeah.
And so I guess there are holes that maybe go that, that, that deep down.
That's right.
But that is where the story continues.
So hold on, Mel.
This is Mel, of Mel's Hole, back in the U.S.
from Australia.
But then again, that's another story entirely.
You're just beginning to hear this one.
So, with a fishing reel, originally, down 3,600 feet, no bottom.
But that is not the end of this story.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
after the program we did with mel and the one we're doing now i found out quickly that there
was an abiding gigantic fascination
for this I mean people, I guess,
I don't know exactly what the fascination is, frankly.
I really don't know.
All I know is I had thousands of emails and faxes from people wanting to know about this hole and telling me, in fact, about other holes.
Mel's hole is not the only deep mystery hole in the world, Mel.
There are others, and people have told me about them, but yours is quite spectacular, to be sure.
But there's some fascination, and you must have felt it when you got down 3,600 feet.
You must have been saying to yourself, what the hell?
Well, at that point there, it became kind of a quest to find out how far this will go down.
So I went, basically when I hit 3,600 feet and came up with dry, lifesaver candies, I said, well, I'm going to need more fishing line than this.
So basically, I You know, let out the 3,600 feet, let another 3,600 feet in from a similar reel, so down at that point to 3,636, that's 7,200 feet.
So you're down over, you're like a mile and a half down.
Over a mile at that point there.
And I was still going down.
At that point, their line is still going down.
I'm going down, I'm going down.
Now, a number of people said, after that first show, that after a while, the weight on the end of the line would be insignificant with reference to the weight of the line itself.
Yes, and in fact, I quite in fact recall that, and I was curious about it myself.
And the best I could do, and I wasn't...
Going to bring up all the line I'd let down at the point that we talked about this.
Yeah, you'd be cranking.
Yeah, I would want to get some sort of motor-driven winch at that point to deal with that.
Sure.
Or deal with that.
But anyway, what I did is just looped it around.
One of those spring fisherman scales, the kind that you put in your tackle box and try
to get a weight on that thing.
I think when I weighed it, it was like 17, 18, somewhere around there, 17 or 18 pounds.
I don't have this written down so I don't remember exactly, but the combined weight
of the weight that I had on there plus the weight of all the line that went into the
hole when I took the final reading of line was about 17, 18 pounds of line down there.
That's a lot when you think about monofilament fishing line.
That stuff, even if you have a spool of it, it's pretty insignificant stuff, but when you've got that much out there, it's going to weigh a lot.
No more sure.
And, uh... How much?
What was the final total of how much you got down there?
Oh, I got down exactly at the point that I'd given up putting line in there.
When I'd contact you, I had 80,000 feet worth of line down in there.
80,000 feet?
Zero.
And, I don't know, that translates to, like, what, 15 miles worth of line?
Oh, my God.
Um... 80,000 feet.
And, uh... Is there any way that you could be sure Now, eventually, did you reel all that back in again?
No.
Oh, no.
No, I did not bring that line back up again there.
So you never saw the lifesavers from that far down?
No, no, no.
There were lifesavers at the end of it, for sure, because I just let the assembly go down there.
But it was only, you know, it was just because it was already there.
But I never brought it up.
Not 80,000 feet worth, no.
And how far down again?
I'm sorry, one more time.
80,000 feet.
80,000 feet.
That's 8-0 with three other zeros.
80,000 feet.
God, you must have been going out to buy fishing lines.
Oh yeah, well I would buy it in like...
If you ever go... I don't know if you're a fisherman, Art.
No, I'm not.
That's why I'm struggling a little here.
If you go to a professional fishing store where, you know, fishermen buy their stuff, they sell the line in... well, they have the line there in huge bolts.
You know, these things are like about a foot across.
They're big old things there.
They will fill each fisherman's reel from that.
I've got you.
So you bought the whole line?
I would buy both of the lines.
That's what I did.
I said, I'm going to need this much here.
I figured I'd get a good deal on the line by the whole darn thing.
That was my way of doing that.
Were you telling anybody about this when you were doing this?
Oh, the way I was doing that?
Well, I think a couple people knew that.
When I went to buy the fishing line, I didn't tell them.
Uh, that I was going to, you know, use this to measure the hole on my property, you know.
And, you know, they don't really care what you do with the fishing line.
I mean, you know, as far as they know.
Yeah, they don't care.
Yeah, I mean, by fishing, you know, fishing line there, you know.
Well, you know, they must have a lot of reels to fill, you know.
So, I think, uh, that was the thing there.
So, no, I didn't have any problem with that.
The only thing that really differed at that point, uh, in how I dealt with the line is that, uh, instead of When I exhausted, the two fishing poles were at the line.
I hooked the line up to what is known in fishing as an outrigger, which is kind of like a short little fishing pole that you would have, it was like about a foot and a half long, and it went through that.
I could kind of swivel it over to the side if I needed to, but it didn't, you know, I was going, you know, it wasn't like going down to the middle of the hole, it was kind of about a foot and a half away from the side.
And let it go down from there.
So I would let the line go through the outriggers, basically what I did.
How could there be a hole?
I mean, even if you had hit bottom at 80,000 feet, how could there be a hole?
Well, let's say it stopped running at 50,000 feet.
The line stopped running at 50,000 feet, and I got a reading there at 50,000 feet, and it stopped.
Yeah.
I said, boy, that's a deep hole, 50,000 feet.
But 80,000 and no stomp.
Yeah, it hadn't stopped at that point.
Well, you know, I... Had anything ever come out of that hole now?
Oh, about the... The only thing that we kind of think came out of it is some guy who had a hunting dog that passed away.
The dog died.
He put the dog in the hole, threw the dog in the hole.
And it was the belief of several people that the dog came back from the dead.
And out of the hole?
Well, they didn't see it from the hole.
They saw the dog out, you know, around town and in the area and stuff.
So then you're telling me the guy threw his dead dog in the hole and then the same dog was seen later around.
That's right.
In fact, there was one other... Well, you know, I always wondered, Mel, you once told me, when you die, you wanted to be thrown in the hole.
That was in my will, and that's how I wanted my remains to be dealt with.
More reverently dropped, I guess.
Well, I was willing to take that journey.
I thought it would be a great journey.
I believe, when I wrote to you, I said that the whole was kind of, my dogs wouldn't go anywhere near it and things like that.
It kind of had a weird feeling.
Yeah, well maybe they knew that another dog got tossed out.
That could be it, but there was a weird, just an eerie sense about it.
And you know, I thought about that because, you know, after I talked to you, what was And actually I would get kind of a strange feeling to it.
I'm going to kind of describe the feeling to you.
All right, please.
The sensation that you got there.
Have you ever been surprised by the moon?
It's like you go out, you look out the window and the moon is up there and it's just, it's like for a second you don't realize it's the moon.
Sure.
You get that eerie sense.
and financial and then then your your your uh...
Sure.
your brain Sure, that's happened to everybody.
Yeah, sure, that's happened to everybody.
You get, but that feeling, it's like the, you get, you got that feeling a lot around
the hole there.
Oh.
You felt that feeling, it was that kind of feeling that you would have, you get that
sense that you were constantly surprised by the moon during the day or during the night,
it didn't matter if the moon was in, the moon was out, it didn't matter.
That was, that was the sensation and I finally was able to nail it down.
It occurred to me, and I said, that's the same feeling I used to get, you know, when I was at my property.
It was that strange feeling.
Well, you said there was one other thing, too, that happened with that hole that was unusual besides the story about the dog.
There's a lot of unusual things about it.
There's a specific unusual thing.
The one thing that was said, are we talking about the thing where people would see the dark black shaft of light coming out of it?
No, but tell me about that.
Well this was something again that was told to me but it was the people said that from
time to time what they would see when they would look over towards the property or if
they were on my property and looking at that way they would see like a shaft of the blackest
black that they had ever seen coming out of the hole and extending up into the sky.
Oh.
That is weird.
That is a totally... Let me ask you this, Mel.
It's a pretty wide hole, nine feet.
Could you take a real high-powered light?
Yes, I did shine lights down there and really didn't get very far with the lights that I had.
I would presume you would see the sides of the hole for a while.
I could see where the rockwork went down several feet and ran out.
And then it was, you know, the masonry work around there, you know, where it was like dirt or rocky below that.
But, you know, I could see that.
You know, I could definitely see that far.
And then I guess the light would just flat disappear.
Yeah.
You just run out of light.
And I'm not sure if I had one of those huge, you know, 250,000 candle light power.
I don't know how far it would have gone down.
I've got a six million candle power light.
I mean, even that would just poop out.
I mean, those kind of things are cool to shoot into the sky.
I rather found them useful for pointing at photographers hanging around.
Oh, those are... I've had similar uses of those.
Yeah, they take their video cameras and they split, man.
They need that a little bit more.
especially if they have the night uh... vision on the top of the
it's it's it's all so then
uh...
you were so much of a believer in i don't know dare i say the power of the whole
Yeah.
That you wanted to be, you know... Yeah, I wanted to be... When I died, my body was supposed to be put into the hole.
And I take it your real reason, if I were to ask you for that, is because of the dog story?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And it was just such a strange I have talked to people about what the hole actually is.
I mean, not the people that know what it is.
There are people who know what it is?
Oh, absolutely.
But I cannot go to the people that have my property and say, look, why don't you just fess up there and tell me what it is.
They're not going to tell me.
All right.
What happened was that you came on my program.
Yes.
Maybe your biggest mistake.
Yes.
Yes.
And told this whole story.
Innocently.
Innocently.
That's right.
Absolutely innocently.
And then it was like the next day or a couple of days or how long was it?
It was, you know, I talked the day I sent you the fax.
I sent you the fax and then I sent the fax and I believe you read the fax that evening and then I went out to the property just to think, oh good grief, I'm going to have a bunch of people down there, you know.
Yep.
And so I went out there and then I came back home.
I was living, I wasn't living at the property there because my dwelling unit there got caved in from the snowstorm there, you know, some of these little tin shacks here don't hold up to when you get two feet of snow on top.
So we moved, you know, I had rented an apartment in Ellensburg, and so I went back to the apartment that night, and that's when I talked to you.
I don't remember.
All right.
And then it was a day or two or whatever.
You went back to the property.
Oh, yeah.
After the show.
Yeah, what happened is that the following day I went back to my property and there were
uh... it sounded like a lunatic here but there was like armed people on my property. I didn't
armed people on my property I couldn't get in.
There was barricades there.
There was already a whole bunch of yellow gear.
Your earth-moving equipment was at my property.
Oh, yes.
And I was basically told that there was an airplane accident there.
An airplane crashed on the property and that I couldn't go in there.
You told them it was your property?
Yes.
In fact, I think they knew it was my property.
I mean, I don't know this is my property, so we're going to have to deal with the situation.
Well, I didn't see any smoke.
I didn't see any evidence of a plane crash or anything, but they were not going to let me onto my property.
So I decided, well, I'm going to go back to town at that point there.
I said, okay, this stuff is going on.
And I believe I had talked to you again at that point there.
You did?
I remember you called me that night and you said, my God, there's armed people up there and they won't let me in.
That's exactly it.
Okay.
And so, again, all this time here, what I have is a situation where my property was taken over and why they were out there, how come they chose to go to my particular property that they knew was there.
Well, obviously, there's only one answer, and it's that you were on this program talking about it.
That's right, but for someone to have that incredible level of mobilization, curiosity, wherewithal, and all these things here to deal with that, you know what I'm saying?
It's like this is a big production.
Well, maybe a whole of this kind justifies that kind of big production.
I mean, maybe there's something Well, I can imagine there's something really unusual, special that... There have been some properties that someone was highly interested in, that they thought was very valuable to have, and that they had to have.
That makes sense, doesn't it?
They, to you meaning the government?
That's right.
Were these government employees At the property, I had both civilian and military people that were there.
But I've got to tell you something.
I was in the Army many, many years ago, and I know what a green uniform looks like, and the fatigues and so forth.
But I've got to tell you something.
When I think about it there, I couldn't tell you which Army they were.
Which Army?
Yeah.
All I knew is they were in military.
Uniforms, okay?
I couldn't tell you if they were U.S.
I couldn't tell you if they were German.
I could tell you that they were.
Did they have side arms?
Did they have... They all had weapons.
Everyone there had weapons.
As well as, like, semi-automatic weapons or automatic weapons?
Exactly.
From what I could tell, these were... They also had fully automatic weapons.
Fully automatic weapons.
Well, that's really intimidating.
I've been in countries where I've encountered people with fully automatic weapons who frowned at me, and I didn't like it.
You went to Israel.
You got used to seeing people... Everywhere you go, there's guns in Israel.
That's right.
You bet.
No, hold on.
We'll be right back.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
It's time to get ready To realize just what I have found
I have been only half of what I am It's all clear to me now
Once again, Mel from Mel's Hole fame Somebody just sent me really interesting facts
Okay.
Somebody named Scarlett.
It says, how far is Mel's Hole from the place where Dr. Reed had his encounter with the alien?
You know, and that never hit me until I just got this fax.
They are similar areas, I think.
Indeed.
Also, Not far from where my property was, relatively speaking, is where they found Kenneth Wickman.
Kenneth Wickman, yes, right.
That's a very unusual area up there.
Yeah, I was talking with my nephew about how peculiar ellensburg is a musical town about twelve thousand people
have been college students actually more than half of college students who
basically got about six thousand local there
uh... pretty small place uh... alright
but let me stop you and uh... when you and i last spoke
home you're in charlotte those strange folks up there you had
another encounter with them and they made you an offer you couldn't refuse.
Yeah, well, at first they intimidated the hell out of me, because basically they said, look, you know, one of the civilian fellows there said, hey, you know, we could find a drug lab out here and we could put you out of business in a hurry, you know what I'm talking about.
Oh, that's right, I remember, yes.
And for all intents and purposes, Sure as heck it'll look like I had a drug lab out there.
I had a lot of strange non-native plants growing there.
None of them, I have to say, of narcotic nature.
These are just your typical high desert type plants.
They basically said, hey, we can shut you down and we don't have to worry about all of this.
Ultimately, they did make me an offer that I could not refuse, and I will tell you the offer that they made me.
And it had to do with going to Australia, and I needed money to go to Australia, and I wanted to continue my research in medicinal plants, and so we put together a very interesting package and a very interesting lease on the land to this party.
Well, as a matter of fact, you told... Did you tell me you were going to Australia?
Yes, you did.
Yes.
Yeah, you told me that they had made you an offer for the land, essentially, which was going to be, if I recall correctly, leasing it In perpetuity.
In other words, forever, or for your life anyway.
Exactly.
And so then you were off to Australia with a parcel of money.
I'll tell you, they basically gave me a quarter of a million dollars a month for the property.
A quarter of a million dollars a month?
My God!
And I know you were in Australia because you sent me a number of emails, which I did mention to my audience, from Australia.
I mean, there was no question I was set up in Australia.
I actually, for a good while, lived out there in Perth, which I loved living in Perth.
In Perth?
Oh, it's wonderful out there.
I loved Australia.
Well, I thought, here's Mel, gone to Australia.
I had no idea you were getting that much money.
Obviously set for life.
I'll tell you, it was great.
I built some facilities out there off the outback, basically, where I can grow the various plants that I was allowed to bring with me and cultivate them over there.
We also did a fair amount of wombat rescue out there, which was very gratifying.
Wombat rescue?
Yeah, they're native marsupials out there.
Good sized critter out there, but a lot of them were becoming endangered.
And I can tell you this right now, the wombats now, and I do believe to some degree with the work that I've done out there, they're making a comeback out there.
Well, that's wonderful that you know.
But Mel, what the hell happened?
In other words, here you were in Australia with all this money, and now you're back here and you've fallen on hard times.
Well, I'll tell you, I accepted their offer as good.
I was basically, you know, I was to leave town.
I left town.
I was actually told to leave my car and wait at the They wanted to be damn sure you were going to Australia.
I took my dogs.
I was set up there.
side of ellensburg and i was taken to the airport and taken to san francisco
and then taken to australia and so i'd left the country i had my two dogs with me
and we wanted to be damn sure you were going to australia i took my dogs
i was set up there i already had uh... there was an account already set up for
me the uh... all the complex paperwork that was involved
in uh... uh... you know moving you know moving as a resident of australia was
all taken care of for me.
I mean, it was a piece of cake.
They'd made the arrangements, and so there was some cooperation on the Australian government's part.
Holy smokes!
I know they can do this kind of thing, but I mean, it tells you how important this whole must be.
They were basically willing to give me $3 million a year for the use of the property.
And basically non-disclosure on certain aspects.
I can only disclose as much as I can disclose.
There's a lot of things I don't know.
Well, listen, I can sympathize with that.
Take the money and run.
Hell yes.
Hey, to me it was fine.
On the one hand, you got the guys with the automatic weapons.
And on the other hand, you got the guys with the money and the ticket.
Not a hard choice.
No, no.
99 of 100 people in the same situation would take it.
I don't blame you for one second.
So you went to Australia?
It was wonderful.
I loved it.
I did a lot of good work out there.
What happened?
A number of things happened there and I'll tell you one of the things was I did continue my work with Herbs.
I had some incredible successes out there with some of the things that I'd actually I'm going to go out on a limb on this, but some of the things that I had imported from my property out there to Australia.
They usually don't like that stuff.
Pardon?
They usually don't like that stuff.
No, but we had found some of the plants that I had grown out there had some very remarkable properties.
Do you think that had anything to do with the area where they were originally?
Absolutely.
That's near the hole.
Absolutely.
I've had other plants there that were not native to the whole property that did not have similar results.
So I know that growing in proximity of the whole, and we did a lot of cultivation there.
One of the reasons for being where I was in central Washington was the type of climate that was there was very conducive to going to the various things I did.
I try to fight similar conditions out there in Australia as well.
Yeah, but when I say, Mel, what happened?
I mean, how did you go from being relatively rich and well off in Australia, now you're back here, not well off?
I'm back here, and as you recall, I was to make an appearance on the show, I believe.
Yeah, that's right.
You sent me... I told you I was going to be in town.
We got in touch, and I actually talked to you here from the States.
I promoted.
I said, Mel's got hold of me.
He's in the States.
He's going to come on the show.
And then, of course, you were a no-show.
Well, I'm going to relate to you the chain of events that occurred from the day that I was supposed to appear on the show, as much as I can remember, Bring it up to date until now.
On the day that I was going to be on the show, I helped my nephew move from his apartment.
We got him a place down in the Olympia area.
We moved him down there and all of that.
that. We had to return the truck back to the Tacoma area.
So we got them all settled here.
the truck back to the Tacoma area.
I got up to Tacoma, returned the truck, and I was going to take the bus down to Olympia to take the transit.
There's a bus that runs from Tacoma to Olympia.
I got on the bus and there was an altercation on the bus.
On the bus, there was fighting.
There was commotion going on.
Anyway, we pulled into the And some of you listeners might actually remember this, if they were on the bus or they might have heard of it.
We pulled into the 5th Hall Park and Ride and some apparent transit people got on the bus and they wanted to ask questions about what happened on the bus.
I got off the bus and I said, I talked to these guys here but I have to get back to Olympia here because they're going to do all of this here.
They said, that's no problem.
We've got the transit bus here.
We'll just take you back to Olympia.
I said, okay.
That's the last thing I remember.
The last thing you remember about the...
What do you mean?
It was about 12 days later.
I found myself in San Francisco.
Somebody hit you or did what to you?
I have no idea at that point.
I found myself in San Francisco in a pretty rough part of town in an alley.
These bums were basically trying to wake me up.
Holy mackerel!
They were trying to get me to sing.
I remember this.
They were trying to get me to sing on the road again because I sort of looked like Willie Nelson.
Mel, are you sure?
This is exactly what happened.
And you lost how many days?
12 days.
From an altercation on a bus?
I was told that they wanted to talk to me about it and they were willing to take me back to Olympia from there.
So, you know, I got onto the little transit van, that's the last thing I remember.
So twelve days gone, when you, God knows what, were knocked out or kept in some kind of coma?
When I woke up there, you know, I had nothing on me.
I had no identification.
I had no wallet.
I had no keys.
I had the clothes I had when I was, you know, moving.
They were still as grubby and filthy as, you know, after you move, you get all grubby and filthy.
Yeah.
I oriented myself down there.
I looked around.
I noticed there was pain in my arm.
I rolled up my sleeve.
It looked like, looking at my elbow now here, it looked like, what would you say, an IV was taped to my skin?
Yeah.
There was still the residue of tape on my arms.
Yeah, I understand.
So, obviously somebody kept you out for 12 days for some reason.
And you listen to the first part of your show, and you know, you're talking about teeth?
Yeah.
All of my back teeth have been removed.
What?
I have no back teeth.
You have no back teeth?
None.
You don't mean like... No molars, no wisdom teeth.
You're not talking about wisdom teeth, you're talking about... None.
No back teeth.
Not on top, not on bottom.
Why would they take your teeth out?
I have no idea, Art.
The next thing, I got in touch with my nephew.
I said, look, I'm down here.
He gets me a Greyhound ticket to pick up at the bus station over there.
I get on the bus.
You were broke?
Nothing.
Nothing?
Nothing.
That was it.
He gets me on the bus.
I take the bus back.
You know, and he told me he was just absolutely frantic, you know, because I'd called him collect from down there.
I was frantic, too.
I couldn't figure out what happened to you.
So, what happened is, there I am, you know, it looked like something had occurred to me there.
I had no teeth there.
I have no idea why I have no teeth in the back.
I have front teeth.
Were there scars?
In other words, if there had been recent surgery?
Oh, yeah.
In fact, at the time there, I was still bleeding from the back of the mouth.
I mean, I could still taste blood in the back of my mouth there, so it was pretty ugly.
Boy, you were screwing with somebody you shouldn't have been screwing with.
Well, you know, I would think that the easy and for the uh... that uh... you had something to do with i'm
gonna get on the on the air and mail blah blah blah and say this and
that no recess i have promote the show you up but
that that's really not it that i did if that is it then you could be in danger now
i i i don't i don't i don't believe that was it because you know there's a lot of things that i
was doing i I kind of got myself in trouble.
Yeah, but Mel, if you think about the fact that, look what happened after the first time you came on my show, then look what happened after I promoted years later that you were going to be on my show again, and you're gone for 12 days.
You have to imagine there's a possibility of a relationship there.
We can take the connection and we can put it on the back burner.
But, you know, I'm a curious fellow.
I mean, any guy that runs 80,000 feet of line into a hole... He's a curious guy.
I'm a curious guy.
You know, I got back to my nephews.
I'm still with my nephew now.
Don't even say where.
I don't know if you can appreciate this or that, but the next thing that happened to me is that I found that there was some legal action taken against me.
Legal action?
Legal action was taken on behalf of my former wife.
Your former wife?
Basically, I had the property on the Monast ashes.
You had said it was her property.
It was her property and it was basically she had leased it to me in perpetuity as part of our divorce settlement.
I had helped her go through school.
Alright, Mel, Mel, Mel.
Hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Oh, it just gets worse and worse.
Hope she didn't do that to him.
Oh, man.
Hope she didn't do that to him.
Oh man, we'll be right back.
I was without my belt buckle and that really, you know.
They took your belt buckle?
Yeah, I... Now that's really low.
I mean, you take a person's teeth, but you take their belt buckle.
Well, it was just, you know, I had everything else, and there was another belt buckle on there.
It was dope, but I made a belt buckle out of a silver fork, an eating fork.
Yeah.
And bent it.
I used to bend metal and do all kinds of things with it.
I used to tumble stones and stuff too and I had a nice looking rock that I had on there too that I picked up and put on there.
I had my pants, I had my shoes, I had my socks.
Why take my belt buckle?
Even that might be getting ahead of myself here.
But anyway, I get back and find out that there was some legal action taken against me here, and it was initiated by my former wife.
I see.
Basically, I had the property through part of the divorce settlement there, and I helped her with her school, and it was pretty worthless land.
And she said, well, I'll give you that as part of the settlement there.
So then what was the legal action?
She wanted the whole back?
Well, what happened was that the papers I was served with said that I was in violation of the terms of the lease with her.
With her?
Exactly.
It was part of the divorce settlement and a number of things that occurred at my property.
There were underground fuel tanks put in.
Number two, there was a septic system put in.
Oh, this is what the people who came up there put in.
Number three, there was some paving of roads, and these were all things that were not supposed to occur on the property.
Gotcha.
And so basically, I had lost all rights to the property out there, period.
The sad thing about it was I was giving my former wife, because we kind of had an agreement there, that if I were to profit from the property, I would, you know, take care of her.
We had, you know, we didn't have enough there to keep a marriage going, but we certainly didn't have anything else.
I was giving her $25,000 a month.
Oh, that's pretty generous.
Yeah.
Well, she must have smelled the color of the money.
Basically, I figured.
She must have known if you were giving her $25,000 there was a lot more in that hole.
There's no way that she would have had access to the property as far as I can tell and someone had to get to her.
But if she's got control of the property now, then she's probably dealing with them.
Yes.
With them.
And you're out in the cold, and you get left with the bums in San Francisco with no back teeth?
I'm down there in a really ugly part of town.
I gotta tell you, I don't have any back teeth.
I don't even have my belt buckle.
And right now I'm at the point where I'm actually, I don't know, you could probably tell I'm a smoker, but I'm actually having to sell plasma in order to buy cigarettes.
That's how bad I am right now.
Oh my God, talk about a richest drag story.
I mean, we're talking all the way around there.
Well, and still you're pursuing this, Mel.
Because there's things I have to know.
I don't want to name these people.
You know, you've got some names here.
Yeah.
And I don't want to name them on the air, because I just want to be careful here.
Okay.
But you want to find, for example, the Mexican fellow.
Yeah, the retired guy.
Why do you want him?
A Catholic priest you're looking for.
That's right.
There's a priest, there's a Hungarian fellow that I need to get in touch with.
People who have something to do with the hole.
My question is, after all of this, Mel, what do you think you can do?
Well, you know, maybe I should run this back to my time in Australia, okay?
Alright.
And I did bring some of the various plants that we'd grown in Uh, on the property by the hole there.
There are various plants.
If anyone wants to, they could probably do a little research and find out exactly which plants they are, because the plants themselves have been written about for the last hundred years.
And they had remarkable properties.
Like what?
Pardon?
Like what?
Well, I'm not going to say the names of the plants.
No, no, no.
The property is remarkable.
Oh, they were used, for instance, during...
By a certain army doctor for dealing with the great influenza that we had at the turn of the century.
The one that killed all those people?
Yes, millions.
Yes, and the people of reserve received this Indian concoction.
We're just fine.
And no problems whatsoever.
But I mean, you have been Pardon the pun, kicked in the teeth over this now.
And so, why do you want to keep pursuing it?
I mean, if you keep going after this... It doesn't matter at this point in a lot of ways.
I'm 68 years old.
Yes, sir.
Well, I will be 68 in June.
I don't, you know, I mean, I've... I had a simple life before this.
I had, you know, I had an extraordinary run for the last several years.
And I still need to get some answers for things.
I need to get hold of the guy that I gave the gun to.
Where did you get that gun?
That I dug up on the property.
You know, from time to time when I'm clearing a piece of land to plant on, I'll dig up rocks and I'll dig up metal and all kinds of things there.
And I found this gun and a holster and those little ozermans along with it there.
And I just basically took this and threw it in my drawer in my little workshop there, my office that I had on property there.
And then when I had to move, I gave it to this fellow because I need to move into an apartment.
I gave Thomas a deposit on the apartment.
So it must have been a decent gun.
It was, from what I could tell, and I'm not a big gun man, but it was a German P38.
It looked like one of those, you know, like the Nazis used to use back in World War II.
Yeah, you might have really had something on your hands there, and you gave it to the guy.
Yeah, well again, I'm not a gun person.
I figured it might be worth something.
I don't know.
Why do you think getting hold of him now would be meaningful?
Well, for one, we can't get hold of him.
And two, for some of the things that I remember about the gun now, and that I also found out, and also what he had indicated to you about the gun as well.
What I had found out, and I talked with his son, his son basically says that this fellow, he left the family, he left his wife, he left everyone there.
He can't be found at all.
I'd like him to contact me.
So he's disappeared, too.
And he had the gun that I gave him there, and it was found on the property.
And suppose you found the Mexican guy who threw down all the tires, thousands of tires.
What would you do with him?
Well, part of this is also connected with the gun, so I'm going to tell you a little bit more about this here, and what I found out about it, and I might be able to verify it with some of my own experience.
Fire away!
I had talked with this guy, son, and this guy said that, you know, his father kind of became obsessed with this gun here, and I believe what he'd indicated to you is that he would shoot this gun and it would make a sound.
Yeah, I remember that.
That was a long time ago.
Yes, yes.
Well, I knew exactly who it was.
I'm here to tell you, the guy is speaking the gospel there when he contacted you.
But this thing was, like, dead silent, and it was really weird.
Well, I talked to this guy's son, because he's kind of close with my nephew, and we got talking.
He says, you know what was interesting about this?
I don't know what my dad told me.
We were talking about it, and he kind of demonstrated it for him.
He would set the gun down near the radio, and it would pick up signals from all over the place, like from the past.
This is really weird, Mel.
from any type of radio signal they could change the channel on the radio
this is really weird no he wasn't look this is the everything that comes out of
the area of that whole is weird well that this is what i'm telling you here is that he
would do that if he would uh...
just like like about a foot away from the way this can be a bit
near the gun the channels would change their he would get something like
that a baseball game from nineteen sixty three year would be a
weather report from iowa or would
it would be something from canada or b mexican music playing
But if he was very still, it would stay exactly on a certain channel there, and he would get something like out of time with it.
That's weird.
That's really weird.
Now I see why you want to find a gun.
Well, I'd like to find him.
I'd like to find out that he's okay and that he hasn't done anything really peculiar or very strange.
Maybe it's true that everybody who in any way encountered the hole in the area came to problems.
Well, the guy with the tires, I want to get in touch with him because I had given his, it must have been a son or it must have been a grandson of his, he once drove the truck out there and he had some problems on the property and his son drove out there after him to help him with the truck and get him going there.
He had trouble there too.
To make a long story short, I gave him a couple of buckets of You know, five gallon paint buckets full of rocks and metal
and stuff that I picked up on the property.
Yeah.
That I was, you know, instead of chucking them aside, I would just toss them in these
buckets and occasionally I'd sort through them and see what was going on.
But I gave it to him to put in the back of his car so he could get out of there because
he wasn't getting any traction.
So you know, normally out there when you're in that part of the country, you always carry
a couple of bags of sand or something in the back of your vehicle.
Sure, sure.
So he has a couple of buckets of rocks and possibly dirt and stuff that I want to get on my hand.
So you think then that anything that came from that area has unusual properties?
I'm beginning to believe that.
I'm beginning to believe that.
And if we reel this story up to Australia, I was approached when I was in Australia.
I was dealing with some people in the various ministries there, the government things, the ministries of health and different things there.
They were kind of interested in what I was doing.
I was approached at one point to take some of the things that I had brought from the U.S.
We gave them to some people up there, three men.
Who had, like, advanced HIV.
Yeah.
I mean, these guys were in hospice.
Yeah.
Well, they're not in the hospice anymore.
They're not on death row anymore.
These guys are doing just fine.
Wow!
This is some story.
And, Mel, why did you... I don't understand why you left Australia.
I mean, I... Oh, I just came back here to...
uh... you know uh... you'll be with my family and uh... you know what what family have here obviously a big mistake back in the u s here uh... and uh... that was My primary reason for coming up here.
Yeah, I know, but if you had stayed there, you might still be sipping pina coladas and stuff.
You know, I do wish I was there.
I gotta tell you, on the beaches of Australia, the women there were barely more than two band-aids and a postage stamp.
I've heard that.
Gorgeous.
More ways than one out there.
So the money's gone, the postage stamps are gone, the keys are gone, the belt buckle's gone.
Belt buckle's gone.
Gun's gone.
I'm trying to get a hold of a few people.
The Hungarian man, he lived in the area and actually I have a lot of interest in getting to him.
I don't know.
same same thing he's kind of connected to the hungarian fellow mel you know i'm
going to make a suggestion to you yeah maybe you should do what a lot of people
do and you should write a book about this have you considered it i don't know i mean that's my my my
nephew was you know writing something based on me
He just thought it was great.
I know this celebrity kind of guy here.
People wrote songs about what happened to you.
Oh, I know.
My nephew just showed me the other day.
He had a compact disc called The Ballad of Mel's Hole.
A lot of incredible people told me they had drinks named after all of this.
Mel's Hole drinks?
Yeah, in the various bars in town in Ellensburg.
It was quite a remarkable phenomenon out there.
It was really amazing.
It really created quite a stir in that part of the country.
It's a good thing.
Well, you know, have you tried, this is a key question, have you tried to go back to the hole?
Or the property where the hole is?
No, I can't say as I blame you really.
Right now I'm keeping some of my cards close to the vest because I'd like to put the Some of the screws on my former wife there to see that, hey, let her know, and I hope she's listening, that, hey, you know what happened to me?
Can happen to you?
Can happen to you, and it might be worth your while to keep me a little bit quiet about things.
Say $25,000?
Look, right now I'm happy for an acre or two of land and a trailer I can call my own, you know, where I can keep doing my work.
Well, this is some odyssey.
This is something you've been through, Mel.
All over us.
Well, I was going to say stinging holes, not stinging holes.
Unusual hole.
Yeah, basically it's a hole, but I really did get the shaft in the end.
That's not funny.
It has been a remarkable thing.
I don't know, did you read the facts that I sent you?
Yes.
I mean, did you read it to the audience?
Oh, no.
Because there were names in it, I didn't want to... Is there anything in there you wouldn't want me to talk about on the air?
Only the names.
No specific names?
No specific names.
Specific incidents?
Well, we've covered a lot of that.
Okay.
Can I say this?
There is a very, very, very strong connection with the Heaven's Gate incident and my property.
Well, okay, I will say this.
You wanted to make contact with anyone who saw Marshall Applewhite up in that Ellensburg area prior to the last appearance on Coast to Coast.
Mel, your original appearance here was, damn, I had it here.
In February of 1997.
I think it was February 21st of 1997.
I got a call from my board op during the break here, and he said February 1st, 1997.
And so you think somehow, somehow, there's some connection to the whole Heaven's Gate thing.
I do believe, and that happened, that occurred, as you recall, about a month after my appearance.
I recall, yeah.
I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.
Well, there's no way for people to get hold of you, is there?
I mean, nothing that you can give out.
I will give out an email address if anybody wants to get in touch with me.
Really?
Okay, buddy, go for it.
Okay, it's Mel Waters.
Mel Waters.
One word, run it together, at home dot com.
Mel Waters at home?
Home, H-O-M-E.
At home.
No, I don't have a domain name for it.
So that's M-E-L-W-A-T-E-R-S.
At home, H-O-M-E dot com.
Well, you're going to get a lot of email.
I really want to know if that priest will contact me.
I want anyone that knows.
Any of the people from back then that had to do with you, in the whole?
That's right.
The Hungarian man I'm very, very, very anxious to get hold of and I do believe he would Get in touch with me.
Well, Mel, I'm so sorry all this has happened to you.
We're running out of time here, but you will never know how sorry I am that all this has happened to you.
I'm going to move along here, you know.
You will prevail.
And who knows?
You may not have heard the last of all of this.
Oh, listen.
If my wife is listening, ex-wife is listening, hey, you owe me.
All right, that's Mel Waters at Home, H-O-M-E dot com.
You'll probably hear from the media, too.
Listen, buddy, hold on... I'm on your website there.
I want those people to get hold of me.
Hold on to your front teeth, Mel.
Thank you.
Later, buddy.
Bye.
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