Mel's hole III.

Search for clues about mysterious pit comes up empty

There's an eerie pit, 80,000 feet deep, near Yakima that the Army desperately wants to keep secret.

Don't believe it?

Just ask the folks who are spreading the story.

If you can find them.

The tale first emerged about a month ago, when someone calling himself "Mel Waters" called a national radio talk show that often boasts its affinity with those entirely normal folks who stay up all night.

The story reached the Mid-Columbia last week when a Tri-City disc jockey started talking about the hole.

Other than that, facts about the pit are harder to find than personal decorum at a Star Trek convention.

"What I understand is, this Ellensburg guy said he had some property on Manastash Ridge, and he was going up there to visit it and was stopped by soldiers," said Ken Cooper, spokesman for the Army's Yakima Training Center.

Then comes the good part of the story, a narrative element that echoes back a half-century to the crash of a mysterious saucerlike machine near Roswell, N.M.

"The soldiers said he couldn't go on his land because there was a plane crash up there," Cooper said.

This obviously disappointed Mel - plunging him so deep in despair that he could find solace only with a radio talk show - because he wanted to visit the 80,000-foot-deep sink hole he had found earlier on his land.

And how did he know it was 80,000 feet deep?

"He said he used his fishing pole and got his line down 80,000 feet," Cooper said. That's 15 miles.

"But you got to understand, this is all thirdhand information," Cooper said.

The search for firsthand information led to a Tri-City radio station now called Thunder Country.
The woman who answered the telephone said, yes, disc jockey John Travis had been discussing the hole on the air, but, no, Travis was not available to speak with the Herald on Monday.

She took a message, saying she would ask Travis to return the call.

He didn't.

Nor did Art Bell, the guy who aired Waters' first call. Nightly, Bell broadcasts a strange alchemy of UFO information and conspiracy politics from his isolated outpost in the Nevada desert.

But the closest the Herald got to Bell was a radio marketing company in Central Point, Ore.
The woman who answered the phone Monday said she'd try to get a message to Bell - but didn't sound too confident the Dean of the Dark would return the call.

Even the Time Out Saloon of Kittitas - which had been mentioned as a rich source of information concerning the pit - proved to be a dry hole.

"No one who knows anything is here right now. Better call back later," said the woman who answered the phone at the Time Out.

How much later?

"The end of the week."

With all experts on the paranormal not talking - or perhaps mysteriously abducted - that left the usual cast of experts.

Mel Waters wasn't listed in Kittitas County telephone directories, nor did the county assessor have him on taxpayer rolls.

But was Waters merely lying low in Ellensburg?

"No, sir. He's not here," said Jerry Shuart, a sheriff's detective who has fielded several such requests in the past few weeks.

There hasn't been an airplane crash in the past

two months in the area, said Mitch Barker of the Federal Aviation Administration in Seattle.
The Army's not hiding an aviation accident, nor an 80,000-foot-deep pit, Cooper said. "We're just training, just like we always do."

Even the Ellensburg Daily Record newspaper - which milked three stories out of the mystery, announced its disbelief with this headline: "Mel's story full of holes."

But perhaps the most damning evidence against Mel and his pit was found in the Tri-Cities, within the mind of Bill Chambliss of Bill's Fishing Hole.

Chambliss, who bills himself as "The World's Greatest Fisherman," seemed the perfect person to ask about Mel's claim he plumbed the 80,000-foot depths of his pit with a fishing pole.
"The average reel holds only about 600 feet of line," Chambliss sniffed.

And would a fisherman lie?

Source : Tri-City Herald (1997, Don McManman).