Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowDo you live near a mysterious cavern, pit, or abandoned mine? In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore the wide world of mysterious holes, spanning the globe from the remote wilds of Canada all the way down to Antarctica.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission control decand most importantly, you are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Heads up, this episode is not for the tripophobes in the crowd. We remember that meme, right, the fear of small, densely placed holes.
Yes, it's a weird texture, not gonna lie. Even looking at it as a non trip of phobe sufferer, it does creep me out a little bit that I'm not gonna lie.
Yeah, same, It's just it's a weird look literally, uh and speaking weird things. In an earlier Listener mail program, conspiracy realists, cool Guy Uh hipped us to a story of Mel's hole, which which Noel, you brought unlist have brought to the class, brought to the show, and we realized as we're exploring this that Earth is absolutely riddled with mysterious caverns, drops, minds, pits, boreholes, scientific experiments, and so on. So what do you say, should we dive.
In to the holes? A few of them? Okay, then let's plunk it.
Yeah, here are the facts. The world is full of holes, and it's kind of weird that billions of people have lived on Earth for what we would consider a long time.
Uh. And there are still so.
Many partially or holy holy unexplored subterranean environments out there, Like we're still finding enormous caves.
Remember that Disney movie Holes from the early two thousands. This is called Holes I never saw. It's described of Wikipedia as a neo Western comedy drama based on a novel by Lewis Soccer from nineteen ninety eight, starring Sigourney Weaver, Patricia Arquette, Shia Labouf, and John Voight. A couple problematic figures in this Disney children's Yeah, it's about mysterious holes.
That's pre Cannibal Shia, right, sorry, pre cannibal controversy.
Oh yeah, he said some odd things to some lady friends. Yes, that's right. Yeah, this is when he was a cute, little, cute little Disney kid.
That's right. Okay, the nineties. So you know what, I'll put that on the list to either read the book or watch the film because I had no idea that existed. That would have been Yeah, okay, well we know in real life, people just recently, just a few years ago, found a enormous cave in British Columbia up in Canada.
No one had any.
Idea, at least officially, that it existed until now, like throughout human history, and they it's so new it doesn't have an official name yet. Its street name is the Sarlac Pit like in Star Wars.
Yeah.
Sweet, yeah, it's huge, right, it was hidden for a long time they discovered it, which is weird to think about that humans could still stumble upon something like that because it's huge.
Right, it's egregiously so, I mean, we always say humans are good at losing things, but we should be a little better at finding stuff too. Right in the Wells Gray Provincial Park, this Sarlac Pit may run for as long as five clicks, so that would be a little over three miles. And they we humanity only found it by accident. They were not looking for a cave. In twenty eighteen, there are these people have a really interesting job. They hop on helicopters and they count cariboo every year.
I'm sorry, what's the official measurement of a click kilometer? Okay? I've always just used a click as a stand in for just a kind of amorphous unit of measure. Hey, can you turn that up? Two clicks?
You know?
Yeah? Okay? Can warn something new every day? Yeah?
Like notchez or you don't remember when in corporate America everybody was saying dial it up or dial it back.
Yeah, I kind of miss that that trend, at least I just to ignore it. Yeah, it's a weird win.
But so these folks were looking for cariboo. Yeah, and they found a giant hole.
Yeah, well the caribou fell in likely that's where they were all drawn to the hole.
It's a happy accident, Bob Ross's style, because if these folks have been counting caribou on foot, or if they've been searching it the wrong time of year, they would have missed it. The helicopter pilot Ken Lanquour was the guy who said, oh, that's weird. We should probably tell someone just in case, you know, it hasn't been discovered yet. Because this is again a very very remote part of the world. And the Sarlac name comes from a biologist who was on the on the bird looking at caribou. His name's Bevin Ernst. And then they went back and they did research and they've got aerial photography from as far back as nineteen forty nine. And what they said is, we would have never found this except for climate change.
Oh yeah, because it was covered in snow and it took that snow to melt at least sufficiently enough for somebody to notice the depression and then they're like, oh, hold on, maybe there's something below that snow.
Well, there's a climate change silver lining guys, right.
Think of all the new caves, think of all the new holes will discover.
There are actually.
Several holes that we're going to be talking about today that appear to be at least somewhat assisted by ye old climate change.
Of course.
Yeah, and this one Starlac pit here is just one example, right of a larger trend we're going to see. The entrance to the cave is three hundred and twenty eight feet long by one hundred and ninety seven feet wide, and in the BBC they described that they compare the size to a football field or a soccer field. So again, just knowing how large or small the average human is, this seems like it'd be something difficult to miss for so long. I mean, thank goodness, they've found it in a helicopter, not by walking on snow and falling it.
And you'd have to repel down the cave wall to get inside. That would be the first step of the spullunk.
Right, yeah, just so, I mean we also we know that they still are not sure how deep the thing actually goes because a river runs through it, and that river creates mist as it falls, so when they're trying to they've got a team of people who have gone in in twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, and they're still working on it. But what this shows us is the issues that we're all describing here. Some are in some of these apertures in Earth or the middle of nowhere. Some are at the bottom of the ocean. You can easily overlook all of them. A lot of times, the first person who finds a cave dies because they found it by accident.
You know, the old trope of the explorer discovering the previous explorer's bones, you know, with the crumbled up map its skeletal fist, and.
We're we're lucky to live very close comparatively to the largest known caverns system or the longest known cavern system in the world, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. And people are still finding new tunnels in Mammoth Cave. We don't know where it goes, you know what I mean, Like Soromon said, we shouldn't delve too deeply.
Right, Yeah, but we do know that tuberculosis patients were kept in there, and that place is haunted.
Yikes. Well with a name like the Sarlac Pit, I sure hope they didn't discover any of those cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers. Well they like in the film Chud, but also like in the films The Descent, which I think the first one is excellent and if you want to the terrifying splunk into the unknown, watch The Descent. But speaking of cave systems that are functional in nearby US, have you guys ever been to a concert of the caverns. Everyone's just screaming about it. It's apparently wonderful. Yeah.
I was going to go to see God Speed You Black Emperor. Yeah, that would have it.
Yeah. Yeah, Ken Gizzard played there as well. But it's like a legitimate of concert venue in an underground cave and it looks absolutely fantastic, just up the way in Tennessee to Tennessee in Grundy County.
And that's just the beginning. So join us tonight we ask what are the world's weirdest, most mysterious holes. Spoiler there are a lot. This may end up being a two parter. Will need your help, folks. Here's where it gets crazy. The race to be the weirdest hole is a surprisingly robust competition. There are tons of these. We're going to find mores. Technology improves as climate change continues, as more people are searching with better and better equipment, and frankly, as more people start to encroach into environments that humans historically did not visit.
Yeah, and like you said at the top, I guess probably a good place to start in terms of mysterious bizarro hole related we should go to Mel's Hole. Ben, you put it here here, a quick and dirty recap of Mel's Hole. And I'm just gonna take this as an opportunity to to titter a little bit, and then I'm gonna be a grown up from here on out. And I'm not gonna laugh anymore when we refer to holes. I'm all about it. I want to let's get weird with it. Let's make this it's weird, whether or not I am an immature child. But Mel's Hole, man, we definitely kind of did a little not a deep, not a deep spelunk, a you know, a surface kind of exploration of Mel's hole. But according well, let's we'll kind of give you the basics here up front. According to a man identifying himself as Mel Waters in a series of calls to Coast to Coast beginning in nineteen ninety seven, Mel's hole was is a bottomless pit. Which is an interesting term, right, like the idea of a bottomless pit. You hear it in literature a lot, like, especially in like kind of fantasy fiction type stuff, the idea of a bottomless pit. It's hyperbole too, yeah, hyperboldy. It is right, or it's in some way magical because unless it goes out the other side of the damn planet and knows this thing as a bottomless pit.
I was imagining the possibility of someone thinking they've discovered a bottomless pit by finding some kind of shaft that goes down sufficiently long enough and then curves gradually and slowly to where when you dropped something, you wouldn't get that satisfying plunk, You would get like a for a long time, and then just kind of as it scrapes along a wall rather than just impacting.
And it could also you know, we know that because especially things are formed by natural processes, they're going to have variances in you know, how wide or narrow they are, so you could think you're at the bottom, but then technically there might be a smaller part of the you know, the floor surface that just keeps going might just be at the lip of something deeper.
And this alleged bottomless pit is meant to exist somewhere along the Manustache Ridge near Ellensburg, Washington, in Washington State. Of course, Water said the hole was on his property, which is like a rural kind of you know, I guess, homesteady kind of location, now, fourteen miles out of town, yeah, exactly. And here are some of the kind of wider claims that he made about said hole.
Oh yeah, yeah, okay, So first he said the hole has an unknown depth five right, all holes will have an unknown depth until you plunge those depths or being adults. Okay, he says that he did something similar to what Matt is describing. There he got a fishing line and he waited it at the end, and then he rolled out more and more feet of line, like eighty thousand feet of issue line. That's his claim that he had still not hit the bottom by the time he ran out a lie.
Well, there was another one. Maybe it was this one, but there was another one or another person that claims they lowered down a packet of life savers, the candy and to see if they hit water, because it would have dissolved the life savers. Again, this is like some of this is very apocryphal, and there are multiple kind of varying stories about this and as well as we'll get to kind of what the what the likely reality of it is. But I thought that was interesting because that would be a smart way of seeing if you hit water, is to see if like something like that dissolved.
I would use an alka selser tablet with the whole punched in.
It and for the yeah, I would lower a child into it. Of course you would, you monster, I'm.
Kidding but the so you're right, there are these other claims. I think one thing that excited all of us about the story and cool guy as well, were the more paranormal things like, oh, a black light emanates from a hole. Oh, my neighbor put a dead dog in the hole, and then the dog came back and frolicked in the woods.
Yeah, it was sort of a limp weird evil frolic though, right, very pet cemetery.
And then he says so when he in later conversations, after his first conversation on Coast to Coast AM, which is just an amazing radio show, he says, after I went public with you, Art Bell, soldiers in hazmat suits rocked up to my property. They cordon did it off, and they said I had to sell it to them or they would find a drug lab on my land. So they hate him off. Seems a little bit. I don't know if they would say it, they would have said that.
Is that an eminent domain situation where you were sort of like forced to sell your land to the government.
Yeah, Usually they would just say eminent domain. They wouldn't say you are going to be framed for operating a meth lab.
Be a shame if somebody found her secret drugs lab.
Yeah, it's so secret that Mel didn't know about it, right, Yeah.
And then they said Mel, you got to get out of here, and he said, cool, help me get to Australia and.
They said done' that's the story and people.
Turns out the whole led to Australia. All we had to do is hop in and then he bopped out the other side.
And in two thousand and two, inspired by this growing local lore, a guy named Gerald Osborne and a crew of about twenty nine other people said we're going to go try to find a whole. There was a lot of discourse about this on a website called melshole dot com, which I don't think is active anymore. But they did a really diligent effort to find it. Unfortunately, they came up with no dice. Waters never specifically revealed the location past the vague language that we gave you from the call. And he did, however, have a ton of stories about this. For someone who thought their life may have been threatened by the Feds, he was pretty forthcoming about different things. He said, you know, everybody in our area used the hole as a dump. Basically as a landfill. It's where we put our old refrigerators and dead cows and stuff.
Dead cows just thrown in there for good measure. Yeah. I do also like the idea that there's so many fun little paranormal tidbits in here, that like animals avoided it, that dogs somehow had a spidey sense of something sinister lurking in there. I believe he even referred to the idea of hearing some sort of creature, you know, lurking and hulking around down there. Right.
Yeah.
Heard a lot of again apocryphal stories, but what great stories these are, especially when we look at the meta version of this. Mel Waters have himself may be a story. There is no historical record of anybody named Melwaters or anything like Melwaters living in this area.
Ever, I just feel like that is the perfect ending for one of those like Scholastic book fair scary stories, kind of like collections, you know, and there was and it turns out there was no Melwaters and he maybe he lives in the hole. I don't know. We gotta do some work shopping here, but I do feel like there's an opportunity here for a good scary story where Melwaters. Is this like maybe he was and he was dead all along and then his head fell off.
I think about some callers who would call into Coast to Coast, callers who would call into this show who give themselves a moniker, a nickname, something else that's different. I wonder if that could be a situation where there is a real shoeman that had this thing. It's just his name was completely different.
Finite, definitely. Yeah.
I agree with you because the you know, we ask you on this show to use a cool nickname. Your g man name is fine too, if you're comfortable with that. But it would make sense if someone's trying to hide their identity in some way. However it does sound, we do know there was a real person calling in, an actual human being. They Melwaters is probably not the real name. It doesn't sound like they're using voice modification software of any sort. So now we have just enough of a grain of truth. There is a person involved for these legends to grow, and experts their opinions on this range from amusement to like collegiate irritation. Because geologists, the vast majority, will say a hole like this in this region as described is geologically impossible.
That's what makes it so great, because some.
Dark mystic powers holding it up. Because then correct me if I'm wrong. You know, we talked about the way these kinds of deep holes can taper, but a whole of the depth being described by mister Mel here would likely collapse in on itself, you know, due to its own weight and structural you know.
Instability, unless it was bored by someone or something.
Not stop it with technology that we have lost predecessors, y'all spooking me out.
Knock it off a predecessor civilization. Shout out HB. Lovecraft.
That get gets into another set of like at least one particular hole we're going to talk about later about deep holes in places that are currently, at least at the time the hole is built inhospitable.
Yes, that's true.
And just like Mel's hole, the existence of some of these things is unknown or unproven. The locations are often kept secret even when authorities know about them, to preserve these unique ecosystems with it, because there are living things in a lot of these places, and still the legends persist. We're gonna take a break for word from our sponsors, and then we're gonna get even weirder with it.
There's a hole at the bottom of the sea. There's a hole at the bottom of the sea. There's a whole. There's a whole. There's a whole at the bottom of the sea. Remember that from Family Guy or Stewie just sings that joke and sings that song like over and over and over again. You know that Family Guy bit where they just go on and on and on. I know the birds the word is it like that?
I don't know the bottom of the sea.
There's a hole the bottom of the sea. Yeah, it's apparently it's a children's song, So this apparently is such a thing that deserves it's in tune.
I know there's a pineapple at the bottom of the sea.
There it is. I know that.
I know that SpongeBob taught me the US dollars supported by imagination. Sorry for texting you guys.
That just kind of why would you apologize for texting as fire memes?
So, uh, maybe we'll we'll get we'll get it on our social media. But just okay, well, great setup. Because more recent mysterious holes are not on the land surface, they're underwater, and right now as we record, just off the coast of Big sur California. There's a weird landscape that's the size of Los Angeles, thousands and thousands of small round divots or we're larger ones, varying size, and animals have started taking like making these into natural shelters. So there's you could call it an undersea suburb of California. It's just fish and other wildlife live there.
It's really weird to look at some of the imagery from high up above, or at least illustrations that try and show like what the region looks like, because it really does look like I don't know how to I mean, they call it pockmarked for a reason, sure, because it really does just look like someone grated over it with some nephilim sized machine that makes you know these.
Like they rated the yards.
Yeah, exactly, but on a massive scale.
Yeah, they call it the Sir Pockmark Field as you are, although Sir pock Mark is a funny name for later, okay. And we owe a lot of the research to the scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute or MBARI, and the umbarians found found tons and tons of holes, and at first they had no idea what these things were how they came to be. They just knew they were the hottest real estate for local maritime life, and for decades people weren't sure what it was. One of the first initial guesses was methane gas, you know, methane venting, and that could maybe explain it, but they don't look like methane vents. They sent some robots down to check there were no signs or what they've described as there was scant evidence that there would be fluids involved or methane gas. Instead, what they said is, hang on, this suburb may have been a long time in the making because it looks like it's based on a slope, right. The photographs from above may appear to be you know, a relatively even horizontal surface, but because they're on this continental slope, it looks like sediment flows down it every so often, like on the rate of thousands of years.
More like a trench kind of.
It's weird. I've seen these holes described in well they try and give averages. Right, so the majority of the holes are fairly small, but there's another set of like five two hundred at least according to Science Alert, that average five hundred and seventy feet wide and sixteen feet deep. So there are some like again, it's like varying sizes, right, We're staying average on purpose here. Some are huge, some are small, and especially the larger ones where the sediment Ben's talking about here flows down hits like the center of these holes and causes a tiny bit of erosion every time on each one of those holes.
Yeah, and some of them are some of them are little guys, and then some of them are kaiju. And the last big sediment flow they believe occurred fourteen thousand years ago, maybe due to an earthquake or some other tecton or some other shift right in the land.
But we're talking a major event, right, not like you know the earthquakes that La experiences all the time.
That they expect at this point.
Yeah, So with this erosion, we see that the mystery appears to have been solved without know ancient civilization or Atlantis. It's a bummer, but stick with us because it's weirder. Did you guys see the thing about those holes out by the azoris they look like we may have even talked about some of these. They look like someone took a a serrated pizza cutter and just rolled it across the ocean floor.
Whoa yeah, or like some kind of giant craft landed and scraped.
To the bottom. You were on fire today, Matt, or something like.
It has a what is it a snout of some sort with just a single long row of teeth.
And it just keeps going suffs.
Oh dude, no, speaking of aeration, that's exactly what it looks like, like a sing if you had a single blade rator.
Is that a thing?
No, But if you had one, that's what it would look like.
Your beer pizza cutter. Analogy I think holds.
Yeah, but it's a serrator.
Yeah, you're right, we could single blade arrator. I wonder if that's the thing. I wonder if that's one of those inventions we can make. Well, you know, like when you only want a strip of grass.
Well, though it would be like a planting strip, it would be like a planter. Those exist where they punch holes at a certain distance apart from each other, but in a singular line.
And this this is weird because our pals that Noah have on their website a couple of fascinating statements about this, and they say, they say, look, a scientist hypothesize that the raised sediment may indicate excavation by an organism living in the sediment, or digging and removal, perhaps via a feeding appendage of a large animal on the sediment surface. Well, shadows of Cthulhu, right.
M hm, saying out down there, he's got a heat, he's got to dig for sea truffles.
I just want, I want a large, previous, unknown maritime animal to be discovered right in the modern day past the colossal squid, I get it. I'm not trying to be spoiled about it, but it'd be great to have another one too.
It can be squid like, right, it can certainly have tentacles and perhaps demonic wings and giant glowing red eyes.
Well, I have a feeling that's gonna happen sooner than we may think, and like absolutely is gonna happen, because I'm sure we haven't talked about it openly, I don't think. But the vast majority of the focus in the future on UAP is planning to be underwater, so like usos are the unidentified some merged objects. So I really do feel like as more and more eyes are on the bottom of the ocean in different places and far flung places that humans don't generally go to or feel like they need to research because there's not gonna be some to undersee mining in those regions or something. We're gonna discover stuff.
We talked about this a little bit with Amua Mua and the research in Papua New Guinea which continues today. Right, Also, the FEDS are showing a strange amount of interest in the Galileo project, and I don't love it well. Which one is that the Galileo Project is the one out of Harvard that is trying to search for technological signatures from other civilizations. But the people, a lot of the people who are associated with Galileo are also increasingly focused on this underwater USO search, right, Unidentified submerged object or trans medium object.
You guys, A quick quick minor de realm and not really And I'll definitely keep this in the back pocket for strange news. But did you read about that Harvard study that suggests that aliens might be living among us in disguise, either underground or on the moon. What? Yeah. The Human Flourishing Program of Harvard University also said that UFOs might be alien spaceships that are visiting to meet their alien friends living on Earth. So I don't know much about this human flourishing product. Even like Giant, you know, well respected Ivy League universities could have programs that would seem fringy, but that, yeah, it's going to be one that might rather be a Harvard. I'm fascinating. I want to read more, but I just wanted to mention that, especially given the underground aspect of these findings, what they call them, crypto terrestrials. We'll get into it. They did it.
You're right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember hearing this is Yes, this is great for strange news. We also know that the exploration of these weird underwater holes we just gave you two examples, there are many, many more, and given the sheer vastness of the seas, it is statistically inevitable that there's more stuff out there we do not know about. You know, creature that lie dead yet dreaming, right, waiting, estivating for their opportunity to consume the minds of the surface world, sunk in cities, hidden caverns that go on and on for unlit miles. I'm feeling it. Yeah, I hope we find more.
Yeah, you are bro I'm loving it, thanks man.
We also know that there are so many different types of mysterious holes. It may be surprising for some of us in the audience today to learn that some of the more mysterious ones are made by people. We know exactly when they were made, we know ostensibly why they were made, and in a few cases there are rumors about why they were actually sealed back up after spending you know, the equivalent of billions dollars.
But yeah, come on, now, we got to know how deep this thing goes. We got all these egg heads telling us what's at the center of this thing we call Earth. Why not drill down there and see for ourselves.
Memory back to the space race in the Cold War, and someone, maybe in a boardroom or at a meeting in Soviet Russia, says, well, if the Americans are going to try to beat us to the moon, why don't we race to the bottom. They built the cola super deep borehole. This was in response to another weird hole the US was building. But it's from the late sixties the early nineteen nineties. They built the deepest artificially created hole on Earth, and then they sealed it up.
Yeah, because what will they find down there?
Oh man, you know, we'll get the official version.
It's weird because it's like the race to build the highest skyscraper. Are people just running toward hyperbole? But there is a lot of science involved.
You know.
It does teach us a lot about geology. The end goal is to reach Earth's mantle. Everything that humans have done is terms of digging into the surface. We have never dug a hole deep enough to get to the mantle. Where's still just a bunch of crusty folks because we're in the crust, the crust of the hole.
Stop it will continue to please. Fine, this is making my day really quickly. Are we about to leave the sea? Are we leaving the sea? Yeah? We're in the man made holes as we leave the sea. The song that verages at the top of the segment the hole in the bottom of the sea is what they call a It's like an escalating song. So the last verse is there's a smile on the flea, on the fly, on the war on the frog, on the bump on the log in the hole on the bottom of the sea. So yeah, it goes verse by verse adding it another dumb thing, and it's been done many many different ways by many many different children's performers. So perhaps there could be a sinister aspect to the Hole in the Bottom of the Sea song. If anyone out there in conspiracy Land wants to write one up, send it our way. That seriously at iHeartRadio dot com.
Sounds like it speaks to the fractal nature of the universe. Guys, it gets as bigger as it gets smaller.
You know what I'm saying.
Oh, wheels within worlds within worlds, all the universe and a grain of sand. No wow, Yeah, so this also you could tell we've got Friday energy here today, folks.
We hope you enjoy it. Effie. Yeah.
The mantle of Earth is forty percent or more of the planet. There's radius of four thousand miles.
It is. It just it's right like a layer cake.
It's right under the crust, and it sort of heaves up and down. Picture it kind of breathing or rotating. Because Earth is very much alive. Shout out to the Gaya superorganism hypothesis, and the crust, the part that humans are mainly concerned with. It's uneven and it's just a little tiny portion. It's like the crust on a krim brewlay. It's three to twenty five miles thick.
Are you all picturing those infographics from your middle school textbooks right now? The kind of bisected earth you know, with like the different layers labeled than the the me your mints and all of that stuff. It's boom, Yeah, it's burned into my memory.
I'm going to be a dummy. I need someone to write in or call us to explain how humanity understands that the mantle is one eight hundred miles thick and understands what is deeper than that mantle right towards the course, right, But we're saying the deepest hole here that we've ever dug is an attempt to reach the mantle, right, and we we I guess we failed, or maybe they were successful to hit the mantle and that's why they stopped because the mantle is something different.
Yeah.
Officially, so yes, geologist fulcanologists, we want to hang out with you. Officially, the hole took about twenty years to reach a depth of around seven and a half miles. But when you're hearing this right, you might be thinking of the wrong kind of this is just not when it gets down to the business. It's just nine inches in diameter because of all the pressure from the rock right increasing temperature. The Americans had their own thing, Project Mohole in nineteen fifty eight, but they quit in sixty six, and the Russians just kept going. Man, that that seven point five miles or so, that is at best maybe halfway to the mantle, probably less o.
Ooh, guys, quick point of scientific clarification. The a lot of mantle studies and just in general the bisection of the layers of the earth are but through the study of seismic waves. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, and vibrations. So it's like learning to cover up. Yeah. I also that that's not convinced.
Well, it's not that I'm not convinced, it's just yeah, I don't know. There's this this feeling that we really know, we really understand. I keep thinking back to my the science textbooks from elementary school, middle school, even college that are just so, yeah, this is exactly what the Earth is made up of. These are the elements that may make it up.
And sometimes they turned out to be confidently incorrect.
How much have we learned about things like particle physics that were just fully wrong back then or absolutely often enough to where it changes our understanding of all the stuff we learned as kids.
Well, but think about all of the materials that are extruded by the Earth during different seismic events, you know, like rocks that have risen due to convection and things like that. Like, that's another way they can study it too. It's like, maybe we spits up every now.
Maybe we've only been focusing on the bad volcanoes. Maybe there are volcanoes that erupt nod magma stuff, you know, like flower flowers. I don't know, you know, it'd be cool if there was a volcano that erupted and in chocolate volcano, a chocolate volcano, or a secret a secret civilization of underground folks who are just like, hey, we're not sinister. It took us a while to find the.
Door at the center of the Bubba Gub Kingdom. I love this world.
I don't want anyone to think that I, or Re or anybody here is saying that we just don't believe the science. I think it's more it's tough for me to believe that we have such a full understanding of some of these things at this moment rather than saying, to our best knowledge, this is what the makeup of the earth and layers are.
Yeah, we also know that the science has to continue. And again, what defeats the human mind and a lot of these pursuits is just the immensity of scale. It's just the sheer size difference here.
And we know.
Okay, so these incredibly ambitious, brilliant people in Russia build the world's deepest hole and eventually, okay, here's the legend. The modern legend is just like the dwarves and morea, the Soviets dug too deep in pursuit of eldritch powers, and they found mysterious fossils, and then, without hesitation, they sealed up the hole and vowed never to reopen it lest the world be imperiled.
They found an iPhone down there, they found it's.
A future hole.
They found a box of old playboys. Right, No, no, we've got to keep.
This for us. Oh no, Matt, my picture when you say they found an iPhone down there that they found like it shouldn't. There shouldn't be an iPhone down there. No man has ever been down there.
In nineteen ninety seven or whatever.
I'm sorry, that's what I thought you were getting hit And it was some sort of portal. Yes, thank you, just making sure we're on the same page.
We're on the same page. They did find really weird, unexpected things. Four miles down they found two billion year old fossils of microscoptic planked And that part is true.
It also stumbled upon the microscopic plant. Yeah, they're just like paper.
Yeah, and they said, oh crap, it's a rock. So we also know that the hole is sealed. That part is also arguably true. But the real reason for sealing it up, the official one at least comes from the Smithsonian has a great summation of it. They say, quote, the Cola hole was abandoned in nineteen ninety two when drillers experienced higher than expected temperatures three hundred and fifty six degrees fahrenheit instead of the two hundred and twelve degrees that they had mapped up to that point. So what that means is, again, because this is a living, dynamic environment, it's changeable, that it means maybe things could have gone wrong quickly. What does that higher temperature indicate.
I love the way they put it. It's such a visual thing. The idea of the surrounding materials were so hot and essentially almost liquid. I guess you know that the temperature would absolutely annihilate their equipment. It was dangerous as hell to occupy. The more liquid the environment became, the harder it was to maintain that that drill. And the thing I liked with the Smithsonian said was it's like trying to keep a pit in the center of a pot of hot soup. Because I got immediately picture trying to do that. It would require constant churning, you know, and the moment you stop it just you know, closes in on itself.
I'm gonna make a hard stance here, guys, I say you you do stop and then you put new equipment down there that's soup based rather than rock based.
Yeah, laterle you switched to it like a latter situation.
I don't know, Come on, man, a straw you know what I mean?
Super beat straw beat soup.
Or at least something that could get through that more easily to continue on its journey down that's weighted. I don't know, right.
Yeah, it's great.
We're calling Russia and that soup quote comes to us courtesy of Benjamin Andrews, who's the curator for the National Rock and Work Collection at the National Museum in Natural History. So he does know what he's talking about.
Yeah, he also does. It makes all of his He does all of his science explaining through soup metaphors, which I think is really powerful because that's something we could all get behind.
Dude, I had carrot soup last night.
It's so good. Did you make it yourself? No, it's not hard. You just you know, pure the crap out of the carrots and then add some nice cream a little.
Oh, of course, of course I put garlic in everything. Actually, all the stereotypes are true.
Indian spices go really well, and a carrot soup. I made a carrot and coriander soup one time. It was fabulous. And well.
All the experts, of course, agree on this Russian super boor story.
Uh, just like it.
The temperature makes way more sense than the idea of an Eldritch conspiracy. But the Eltritch love crafting conspiracy story is so tantalizing that it's just too good not to not to contemplate. And we have to ask, would it be a would it be possible to cover us up something of that magnitude.
If so, what would you cover up? And why have you guys seen the new kind of reboots of the Godzilla Kong universe. I believe Legendary Pictures is responsible for Hollow Earth. Yeah, the Hollow Earth thing. And there's like the idea of these these creatures living in this like past, the land that time forgot that exists deep, deep, deep, deep deep within the earth. I think that's you know, uh, you know, certainly inspired by this type of thinking. Yeah.
Also that great TV show Land of the Lost.
In the Land of the Lost, yeah, banging theme song, Yeah the Loss. Maybe, Well, nostalgia is a heck of a drug.
As we explored in some other episodes, We're going to take a break for word from our sponsors and we're gonna hit you with some even crazier news. Not all mysterious holes are on Earth. You know, you ever meet someone you're like, Wow, your holes are out of this world.
One time, it's a really good pickup line, man, I'm gonna try that. Oh really, did you know? The Land of the Loss is get created by the same team that did hr puffin stuff, Sid and Marty Croft. As it's now that I think back on it. It's very puppet based, just like Puff and Stuff was, but lots of crazy dinosaur puppets and things. But I want to go back on what There was a Will Ferrell movie reboot of it, but the show from the I believe the seventies is gonna be a fun, fun revisit.
I like the Slee Stack. I love a villain. The slee Stacks were the the reptilian humanoid creatures, all right, shout out Slee Stacks.
Oh. It reminds me of the time Machine, the HG. Wells novel where you had the Murlocks and the Eloys or whatever, and which was the Murlocks were the underground dwellers that like really couldn't hang in the sun.
The yeah, the Morlocks were they can.
They come and snatch up the Eloy's animal.
Industrial class who became the Rulers and HG. Wells a whole other bag of badgers. But just this week, you guys news broke about weird holes on the planet Mars. Strange pits are being discovered there. There's a lot of Martian news that's pretty interesting. Some water actually froze on there right pretty recently.
But now this isn't just your average crater, right. You know, we think of the surface of Mars is you know, pocked with these craters, but those are more what's the word superficial then what you're talking about, Ben, Right, Well, we yeah, we don't know how deep they go.
But the exciting part is they might go really deep because they're on the side of a ginormous extinct volcano. And if they do go really deep, there's some cool implications for us humans.
Yeah, picture this fellow would be astronauts. Your new home on Mars. Why it's not a mobile home. It's not a split level condo. No, your very own lava tube. It's like a new kind of shotgun house because.
It might need to work on the brand.
Well, I'm imagining it like lava tube apartment complexes, right, I mean this is it's a real build.
Floors into the structure, right, it's like a silo. You think of it like that.
But it's a stark outlook.
Yeah, it depends on it's definitely not going to be a pleasant life for the pioneers, and it also depends on the size of the lava tube. I mean it's an esthetic choice. Would you personally want to have the privacy of your own smaller lava tube or do you want to share a gigantic one and have a studio apartment.
That's what it would be. You'd get like one loft type floor. Because how wide are we talking? And the depth I understand various, But are they of uniform width or is that pretty all over the place too?
You know what, Noel, actually don't have that handy, but we know this indicates it's probably there are probably more than one pits of this nature, and if they go down farough, then they could be the new home for future human astronauts. Not because of the pleasant decor, but because they will solve one of the biggest problems with humans on Mars. The first one is getting people tomorrow safely. The second is keeping them alive on that planet. And one of the big problems with keeping them alive is the radiation. You are a smacked bad on Mars.
Yeah, and you know you mitigate that with you know, a suit of some kind of guys. Are we also thinking that this might indicate there are cave systems on Mars.
That's the hope, right, I guess. So the hope is, oh, and by the way, the hole that was seen by the Mars Or Coronassance orbiter was only a few meters across according to popular mechanics.
Okay, it's like enough. That's not enough for a dwelling.
Yeah, it could be just an entrance, right, it might be really big in the beginning, right, Like have you ever walked into I love the homes that have that mysterious appearance, you know, you you open a door and it seems to be a tiny structure. I was in a place one time. No, it was definitely a bunker. I was called a nice I was gonna call a secret house for some reason. It's definitely bunker. You know, one person, like a little door you would open and all their all you see there is a steep incline of stairs, and when you got downstairs, it was like an entire actually really nice house.
You know. It's interesting. A lot of the big houses in Hollywood or like in like Malibu and stuff. Like from the street view, the facade or the front part of the house that you see looks like a pretty modest home, but the whole the rest of the house is built on the back of this cliff and it just goes down, down, down, down, and continues jutting out, you know, over the sea, and they're insane, but like, if you actually just go out of the street, it looks like a meager, little kind of bungalow.
We're hoping, we're hoping that the humble appearance belies a greater interior, and we're hoping it leads to a cavern system. Like you're saying that it's a radiation from space on Mars. Due to the thin atmosphere, it's forty to fifty times higher than anything you will experience in an environment here on Earth. And this also has a bigger question because it's not just about humans these environments. If the stuff we know about cave systems is similar to what we know about Mars, they could have been the perfect place for maybe a form of Martian life.
Yeah, well, because we don't know how far back the potential for life goes. We do because we estimate how old Mars is right in relation to the star that we all orbit around.
Again, how confident are we in that?
Yeah?
Pretty confident?
I hope. I wait, so you don't have geology.
No, what I'm saying is I hope. I'm I feel so dumb because I don't. No, I do. I don't know, man, I think I get all jumbled up because it just the confidence of knowing how long a star has been around makes sense to me in a weird way that the center of the Earth doesn't. Because we've observed we can actually observe the star. We cannot observe the center of the Earth. We can get hints of it through things, as you're saying, like what.
It's actions and effects.
What sounds, what waves it makes? Right, But we can look out there at the star and we can go kind of spend time backwards in a lot of ways with our models. But just sorry, I'm just still thinking about Mars and this radiation thing. Yeah, because the fact that that planet doesn't have a magnetosphere, and we just experienced a major coronal mass ejection that hit the Earth, and the only reason why we didn't have major problems is because our planet has that handy magnetosphere that that stops things from happening, and that creates that stops the radiation in these bursts from hitting us.
Freaking Goldilock zone stuff. It's wild that these conditions are just so perfectly conducive. Does not frying or dying of radiation point.
But we're like, yeah, man, let's get to this rock that's not shielded at all and hopefully we can be okay and these maybe volcanoes.
Yeah, well doubt what we get there. Did you know you can get a whole hazarmat soup for just one hundred and forty bucks. Ah, the price went down, I guess. So now I will say I was sort of taken a little bit aback because the image on the site mirror safety dot com includes a really dope respirator mask that is not included that is two fifty on its own.
Ah. Yeah, the mask one of the key parts. We also know that there are pits like this on the Moon as well, or similar things, right, And just like that, it's difficult to explore a cavern here on Earth when you can get actual boots on the ground. It's even more difficult to explore something so very far away. But the Moon pit temperatures get this estimated around sixty three degrees fahrenheit, so actually very amenable for human presence. If such, if similar conditions could exist on Mars, then it would go a long long way to making the dream of second human planet a reality or you know, you pick your poison returning to the original planet.
Hey, it's gonna ben. I think you're right, dude.
What was it? Bray, who wrote Hindline wrote Red Planet, right, Yeah, Red Planet. It's just I don't know, I haven't read it in a long time, but it is a I do recall it being a really cool, uh highline novel about colonizing Mars, and I'm pretty sure there are some cave situations and when they kind of get into exploring the you know, the it's a little bit more of a Mars. I think that's been terraformed and that has you know, actual life. It's able to support life to some degree. But probably worth a revisit thinking about this stuff.
Yeah, you know, one of the most recent books about Mars that I really enjoyed was The Strange by Nathan ballingrud. I don't even want to spoil it, man, I'm not even sure what genre it is. Nathan uh who I've spoke with over a few years. Nathan is very much considered a horror writer. Like he he had several things adapted from from his previous anthologies. But I wouldn't call The Strange a horror novel. God, I want to know if anybody else has read that one, because it stays with me. It's like kind of a Western all right, you know what that sounds great?
No, I've I have pledged y'all sit right here out laugh for all to hear, to read a book this year. By end of the year's time, I will have read a book. Damn you. Maybe that'll be the one.
Yeah, okay, So the brief, the brief backstory I want to keep us too long on this is that uh there, it's an altered universe. But people live on Mars now and the project to get humans to Mars has lost steam, it has failed. It's dying civilization and the stressful planet. So I think that kind of Ah, it's so good. I might read it again. Yeah, but as we're speaking of, you know, we've been going for a while now. We said this might end up being two parter. There's several other places we have to go or at least shout out. One of them is the son Dong Cave in Vietnam. It is the largest cave in the world is also the most unexplored. It is super difficult to get in. Only one thousand people per year can visit, and it's three grand per person just for the tour. And this thing, despite its huge size, it wasn't discovered till nineteen ninety one.
Dudes, bro, that's less than the Star Wars Galaxy Star Cruiser, Hotel Debacle situation, fake spaceship five thousand dollars a person for two days. I think you've outlined a pretty solid bargain there, my friend, dude.
Look, please, please, folks, if you have not heard of this before, it's spelled son spaceed doo n G cave, please check out the videos or the three D tours.
It is probably the.
Closest thing humanity is found to a underground world or a hollow earth. The scale is a mint. I want to go so bad.
It's one of my favorite parts about the parts of elden Ring that I did finish, where you'll find some well and then you hit a lever and you just go down, down, down, down down for ages, and then you're in this like I think maybe it's one place in particular, but I bet it happens more than the ones, and you're just in this underground thing where it like has a night sky. It's unbelievable, the scale of it, and then it's inhabited by these like weird crystally people that murder you instantly with impunity. Yeah, you gotta get your levels right, You sure do, buddy, And I never quite got the balance hit that figure. Get good, as they say, Yeah, yeah, I never. I never got good. I stayed bad, oh man bad, like Michael Jack. Well, we can't say that anymore. Bad to the boat. Skyrim is much more on my speed. It's a little it's a little more forgiving.
They also have one of those places, a cave that seems to almost have a sky because of the mycelium and.
Sky re blackreach. I don't think i've gotten there yet. I don't think i've seen it in any of my playthroughs. So that's exciting because I love that. I just started the Dawn Guard and it gives you a whole other set of environments which kick butt. So I love discovering new things because that game can't get a little samy if you're just fast traveling between the villages to sell your stuff. I like it. I love everything about it. It's a great game.
I kept my old PS four entirely because I have one hundred percent play through in there, and sometimes I'll just turn it on and it's weird.
RPG that turned into the SIMS.
Now, I just like walk around and I kid you, not soup, you know, I find I go grocery shopping in this fate whatever, what's your.
Go to soup? I like to make a vegetable stew or vegetable stew's good. Yeah, yeah, it's just got good stats. But Ben, I mean, was it Fallout four? They kind of sim fives the hell out of that game. It's sort of pissed some people off with all of the settlement buildings and stuff like. It's kind of annoying. It's something that I've really ever gotten into. But I love the idea of just exploring the world you've built for yourself. Ben.
It's a weird one, but it's better spending money right going outside. So we also know, all right, there are so many other things we have to get to that will may they may have to be in a second episode. But this cave in Vietnam first got explored in two thousand and nine, and people still don't know how far it goes or where it goes. And then they've got the stories of the burning pits like Centralia, Pennsylvania, the Mouth of Hell, or the Gate to Hell, the Darvaza gas creator in Turkmenistan. Those I don't think are mysterious. We know human error created them. But the biggest mystery is when are they going to stop burning? Even now we're not entirely sure.
I mean that sounds like hell to me. You know, it's just constantly on fire, yeah, all the time. I mean, give me a break.
We also we also have to go back to a great hobby horse of ours over the years, Antarctica. I don't know why I said it, like that Antarctica stuff like the ice cube, neutrino observatory down there in the street.
You say observatory to match your pronunciation of Antarctica. I love it. I love it. But I'm sorry.
We're great, But we remember the ice cube, the neutrino observatory, right, I don't.
Know if I do, but that's I mean, it sounds fancy.
I know.
The neutrino is a real serious, tiny particle, right.
It's literally a giant cube of a bunch of different sensors.
Oh, I got a ray of Yeah, I got you.
And there's a particular individual whose name I cannot think of right now, who is a you know, self styled whistleblower who says he was working there and believes that it is not just an observatory, it's these are not just detectors in the ice. These are also things that can work together to emit some type of energy.
Then Bob Blazar, definitely he's talking about a different thing. I know, I remember what you're talking about. That they were making energy.
Like a sonic we like a sonic weapon like or something like that.
An energy weapon similar to the ones alleged to exist at HARP.
HARP is what was coming to mind, right right.
You can find this, but I've never seen it substantiated by anybody else.
I know. It's Eric Hecker Raytheon contractor, and he claimed that, similar to earlier HARP theories, that the ice cube neutrino observatory actually created some earthquakes.
Yes, and at least do other weird energy.
Could be harnessed, you know, intentionally if if if the mood struck them. So that's the thing.
Check out our episodes on that. You can also check out What's beneath the Antarctic ice that was that was a groovy one for us. In our video days as well, we were talking a little bit off here about just how how weird Antarctica is. We foreshadowed this a little bit. This is a great time for Antarctic science because of climate change. Right, it will ultimately lead to large scale disasters as the ice sheets, as the ice sheets start transforming away from being ice sheets.
But sure it's not a Chinese hoax though, ben ice climate change.
Oh yeah, okay, okay, because I'm fifty to fifty on ice.
That would be a great campaign to mount ice. Isn't real? Show me? The show proved me wrong.
Well, if you want another thing to search about Antarctic ice and Arctic ice, you can look up a thing that is known as the moud rise m a U d ri i s E paulinya, which is spelled p o l y n y a. It is just an interesting thing about well, this one, the moud rise one is a specific hole that opens up periodically in the Antarctic ice pretty near the shore of Antarctica, and scientists, for a long time we're trying to figure out why the heck this thing opens and kind of closes and again this isn't an ice sheet. So if you imagine ice on the sea forming right as a sheet, and then this hole opens up, the thing is the hole is sometimes the size of New zealand sometimes the size of Maine.
It's huge. It's the scale again. So when are we going. Let's just I got to hit up Arii first and get some spelunking gear. But I'm down.
Well, let's do We got to do it in the winter time, so I don't know what winter is in Antarco.
Yeah, isn't it kind of per moment? Does it really change? Yes? Much?
Yeah, the ice sheet forms and like goes juts out into the sea and then recedes back.
I see, I see, I see, I make I see. Uh.
So the uh the slight discoursion here. It is so fascinating. We also had an episode on how murder is handled in Antarctica for crime in general, and it's a.
Gray area kind of right, like it's yeah, it's weird.
Well, who gets jurisdiction, right, because there's so many of.
Those research stations that are under different national whatever. Technically it's like an embassy or something, right.
Right, And despite the earlier ambitions of New Swabia, there is no government that owns Antarctica. And I got so close to being able to travel there, not once, but twice. It's still on the list. It's just kind of uh, you know, not selling cheap skate. It's a little pricey.
But I gotta say, though, Ben, you're quite the adventurer. You've had some adventure Tarctic. We gotta go, man. I'm just saying, yeah, you to your list. You'll be up there with like a Teddy Roosevelt esque kind of you know, naturalists type figure. You know.
I'm just saying, well, let's let's all go. Let's Antarctica.
Paul.
I'm going to assume you're in, so I'll just venmo you for the tickets.
I'll just bring my puffy coat. I'll probably just and Matt, sorry Matt to suffer through that riffing there.
But what I'm bringing my ice climbing stuff so I can get over this ice wall that everybody.
Sp spiky shoes, and what about those those picks, those like pyth looking things, those are sick. Yeah. The carabineers, well, Carbiners is the little clickie boys that connect those for the rope. You gotta have kidding you think We're not going to bring garbineers all the way out here. We forgot the Caribean. How will I clip my keys to my belt? I'll certainly lose them in the Arctic tundra.
I will pitch that I don't love reality TV, but I will pitch this for us as a documentary, as a limited series documentary on Netflix.
It rival of the North. Dude.
No, it'll be the It will be the biggest thing to hit Discovery since ice road truckers. It'll be ice wall climbers.
Yes, there it is amateurs, not even amateur, like what's what's below amateur?
Our qualifications include enthusiasm.
Yes, exactly, that's enthusiasm, naked, frozen, and afraid. Oh man.
Yeah, and look, we also know their deep, deep water filled sinkholes like Elzaton.
Gravity to it, doesn't it looks a beautiful Yeah, the blue hole out there in the water. Man.
We think though, that the most out there question is something we can answer a little bit.
It could there be something like a hollow earth.
Science again seems pretty certain about the nature of the planet's interior, so a fully hollow earth feels like something that either doesn't make sense or we would have heard about before.
But what about eight miles deep?
Exactly? All right?
We never got there about what about a huge, absolutely locked off, self contained subterranean environment that is miles and miles miles and miles long enough or wide enough. The breadth of it is such that if you are a human sized human walking around in there, you'll think, holy smokes, there is a hollow earth.
I'm in it. Even if it's like the size of U.
I'm not going to pick a really big one the size of New Hampshire hm, or forget it, the size of you'd be like, wow, this is real, dude.
What if there's a Texas sized dome that is covered in some kind of heat resistant mineral that formed over millions and millions of years.
And it's so on board, dude.
They're down there and they're just like, uh, well, we're the most people and actually life's pretty great. And the moment that they encounter humanity.
Yes, instant porn addiction, you know, like, well, they probably have their own kind of predilection. That's a good point.
They probably would be like, no, we call ourselves the people, yeah, because that's how those things work.
We actually we call you the dirt walkers. Oh, that's right, because their language would definitely immediately resemble ours one to one.
Right, And you know, the the real question is the size and scale. It's then therefore possible we could even say, plus that there are undiscovered subterranean areas like we're describing, big enough for humans to consider them another world, you know, unless, of course, there's something they don't want you to do.
Yeah, and undiscovered countries of sorts. Shout out to Max Williams for the Star Trek.
Ref And as we said earlier, this is probably going to be a continuing series for us. We would love your help, fellow conspiracy realist. We come to you hat in hand asking you the best part of the show to tell us about the caverns, pits and holes in your neck of the Global woods. Especially you know what, bonus credit if they are include bizarre claims and legends like the tuberculosis camp.
Oh you can find us. We're on the internet and you can hit us up at the handle of conspiracy Stuff, where we exist on Facebook, on YouTube, where we have video content of delightful varieties rolling out every single week. I think they are anyway, and we think you will too. Also on x the social media platform formerly not as Twitter, on Instagram and TikTok, you can find this a conspiracy stuff show.
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