Speaker 1: Have you ever wondered, like, what's the absolute limit of
human exploration? You know, we always look up at the stars,
we look out to the vast oceans, but what about
going down, not just into caves or mines, but like
miles and miles beneath the ground we stand on.
Speaker 2: It's a fascinating question, isn't it This primal urge to explore,
to push the boundaries of what we know? And today
we're going to delve into a story that touches on
this very curiosity.
Speaker 1: A tale that's kind of a twisted mix of scientific ambition,
the lingering paranoia of the Cold War, and a sound
well some say it came straight from the Abyss itself.
Speaker 2: Welcome to our deep dive, where we're going to dissect
the story of the will to.
Speaker 1: Help this supposed super deep drilling project that supposedly unearthed
something truly extraordinary.
Speaker 2: Now, for those of you who like to get to
the bottom of things quickly and efficiently, our goal today
is really drilled down into the facts and the fiction
surrounding this very compelling narrative.
Speaker 1: So to understand the story, we need to take a
trip back in time to the Cold War. It wasn't
just about you know, nuclear weapons and military might, right.
Speaker 2: It was this underlying tension that permeated almost every aspect
of life, and that included science.
Speaker 1: It was a race for knowledge, a race for technological superiority,
and both sides, the US and the Soviet Union, were
determined to outdo each other absolutely.
Speaker 2: I mean think about Operation paper Clip in the US
and Operation also Vacant in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: Both of these were essentially covert operations to recruit German
scientists after World War Two.
Speaker 2: It just goes to show how much emphasis was placed
on scientific and technological advancement during that period.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course the space race is a prime example.
Speaker 2: Sput nigarrein the moonlanding.
Speaker 1: These were huge milestones that captured the world's attention.
Speaker 2: But there was another, less publicized race going on at
the same time, a race to the center of the Earth.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the US had Project.
Speaker 2: Mohole, ambitious plan to drill through the Earth's crust under
the ocean floor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, off the coast of Mexico.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, it faced a lot of fun problems and logistical nightmares,
and it was eventually abandoned.
Speaker 1: The Soviets on the other hand, had the Cola Super Deep.
Speaker 2: Warhole situated on the Cola Peninsula way up in the
Arctic Circle.
Speaker 1: And they managed to drill down over twelve kilometers that's
almost seven and a half miles deep.
Speaker 2: And incredible feet of engineering.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and these were the public projects, right, But the
story we're about to discuss suggests that there may have
been other, far more secretive endeavors going on behind the
Iron Curtain.
Speaker 2: And this is where the legend of the Well to
Hell takes hold.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty nine, right in the midst of a
rapidly changing Soviet Union, a story emerged about a secret
drilling project somewhere in Siberia.
Speaker 2: Now the claim, attributed to an anonymous whistleblower, was nothing
short of extraordinary.
Speaker 1: They claimed that Soviet scientists had drilled so deep that
they had broken through into well, for lack of a
better term, hell itself.
Speaker 2: I mean, you hear something like that and you have
to wonder, is it just a spooky story or is
it something more too?
Speaker 1: And this is where doctor dimitri Osakoff enters the narrative.
Speaker 2: According to the story, doctor Osikov and his team were
working on this ultra deep drilling project in Siberia when
their drill bit, after reaching an astounding fourteen point four
kilometers that's over nine miles down, suddenly went haywire.
Speaker 1: They had hit a massive, unexpected cavern.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine the shock They had punched through solid
rock and into what seemed like a void.
Speaker 1: It's like something out of a Jules Vern novel.
Speaker 2: And what happened next is even more bizarre. When the
drill bit was pulled back up, it was glowing red hot.
Speaker 1: Glowing red hot. That's insane.
Speaker 2: Now we know that the Earth's temperature increases as you
go deeper, this is the geothermal gradient, but at that
depth fourteen point four kilometers, it should have been hot,
but not red hot.
Speaker 1: So what are we talking about here? What kind of
temperatures would cause metal to glow like that?
Speaker 2: Well, to get something that hot, you need temperatures well
over a thousand degrees celsius. It just doesn't make sense geologically.
Speaker 1: So either the story is completely fat fabricated, or something
truly unexplainable happened down there.
Speaker 2: And it gets even stranger. The crew on the surface
started hearing these bizarre noises coming from the borehole.
Speaker 1: Noises like what.
Speaker 2: At first, they thought it was just equipment malfunctioning, so
they shut everything down, but the sounds persisted. They were
coming from the depths of the Earth.
Speaker 1: Okay, now this is starting to sound like a horror movie.
Speaker 2: You know. It's interesting because one of the goals of
the actual coal a super deep borehole was to study
the Earth's crust using specialized microphones to record seismic activity.
Speaker 1: So basically, they were listening to the Earth's heartbeat.
Speaker 2: Exactly so, according to the legend, the team at this
Siberian site decided to lower one of these microphones down
into the hole.
Speaker 1: To see if they could capture these strange sounds.
Speaker 2: Right, and these microphones are designed to a stand extreme
heat and pressure, but this one's supposedly overheated and malfunction
within seconds.
Speaker 1: But not before capturing something truly terrifying.
Speaker 2: The sounds of human screams and suffering echoing up from
this superheated cavern nine miles below.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: And what makes this part of the story so chilling
is the visceral nature of the sounds. It wasn't just
random noise. It was like the sounds of agony and torment.
Speaker 1: It's like they had tapped into some kind of subterranean nightmare.
Speaker 2: Doctor Azakov, the lead scientist, is even quoted as saying
that they could discern thousands, perhaps millions, in the background
of suffering souls.
Speaker 1: It's as if they had inadvertently drilled into some kind
of infernal realm, a literal hell beneath our feet.
Speaker 2: And as if the horrifying sounds weren't enough, the story
takes an even more fantastical turn.
Speaker 1: Wait, it gets worse.
Speaker 2: Well. Later that night, a plume of gas is said
to have erupted from the borehole.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's not unusual, right, gas eruptions happen.
Speaker 2: Sure, but this wasn't just any gas eruption. It allegedly
took the shape of a giant bat or a winged demon.
Speaker 1: A demon.
Speaker 2: Come on, and within this gaseous apparition, three words supposedly materialized.
I have conquered.
Speaker 1: This is going from unsettling to completely unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Right, It's like the storytellers were taking every element of hell,
fire and damnation and throwing it into the mix.
Speaker 1: I can only imagine the pandemonium at the site.
Speaker 2: According to the account, the entire job site descended into chaos.
Speaker 1: People were panicking, fleeing, and then the story gets even
more conspiratorial.
Speaker 2: Right, the medical staff on site received a call allegedly
from the KGB.
Speaker 1: The KGB, what did they want?
Speaker 2: They ordered the medics to administer a powerful sedative to
everyone present. Sedative, Yeah, one that was specifically designed to
erase short term memory.
Speaker 1: They wanted to wipe everyone's memories of what they had
seen and heard.
Speaker 2: That's the claim. Anyway, the story goes that one of
the medics later broke their silence and revealed what had happened.
It's like something out of a spy thriller.
Speaker 1: So for years, the story of the Siberian Well to
Hell circulated mostly as an urban legend.
Speaker 2: Passed around in hush tones on the Internet and late
night radio shows.
Speaker 1: But then in nineteen ninety eight, something happened that gave
the story a whole new level of notary.
Speaker 2: V Art Bell, the host of the paranormal radio show
Coast to Coast AM, claimed to have received an email.
Speaker 1: Art Bell that guy was a legend. He loved all
things strange and mysterious.
Speaker 2: Absolutely so. This email claimed that despite all attempts to
debunk the story. It was absolutely true. The sender said
that their uncle had a friend who worked at the BBC.
Speaker 1: Oh so, now the BBC is in fulve right, And.
Speaker 2: This friend supposedly had a copy of the actual audio
recording from the Siberian borhole.
Speaker 1: And of course, Art Bell, being Art Bell, played this
audio on his show.
Speaker 2: He gave his listeners a very strong warning about the
disturbing nature of the content before playing it, but of
course that only made everyone more eager to hear it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, forbidden knowledge and all that. So what did this
audio sound like?
Speaker 2: It's difficult to describe. It's this chaotic mix of distorted sounds,
guttural noises. Some people say they can hear human screams
and whales.
Speaker 1: It sounds terrifying.
Speaker 2: It is quite unsettling, and the fact that it's so
ambiguous only adds to its power.
Speaker 1: People can project their own fears and interpretations onto it exactly.
Speaker 2: But here's the thing. We have to ask ourselves, where
did the story actually originate. It's easy to get caught
up in the sensationalism, but we need to trace it
back to its source.
Speaker 1: So who did the digging?
Speaker 2: A radio host named Rich Bueller, who worked for the
Christian publication Christianity Today, became fascinated by the well to
health phenomenon. He was getting so many questions about it
from listeners that he felt compelled to investigate.
Speaker 1: So he reached out to the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
Speaker 2: TBM right, a Christian television network that had given a
lot of airtime to the story, and they were adamant
that it was true.
Speaker 1: They claimed to have gotten the story from a reputable
Finnish scientific publication called a Meno Sastia.
Speaker 2: They presented this as proof that the story had been
vetted by the scientific community.
Speaker 1: But there's a catch, isn't there there is?
Speaker 2: Rich Bueller dug a little deeper and discovered that Amno
Sastia wasn't a scientific journal at all. What it was
a small evangelical Lutheran magazine, not exactly a bastion of
scientific rigor.
Speaker 1: Oh boy. So what did Demnosastia say when they were
confronted about this.
Speaker 2: Well, they admitted that one of their staff members had
written the story based entirely on their memory of having
read it in another magazine sometime in the past. And
this other magazine it was a publication known for accepting
reader's submissions on all sorts of topics, including the paranormal.
There was no fact checking, no verification process whatsoever, so it.
Speaker 1: Was basically hearsay piled upon hearsay.
Speaker 2: And each retelling of the story likely added more embellishments
and exaggerations.
Speaker 1: It's like a game of telephone gone wrong exactly.
Speaker 2: But the most revealing part of the story is what
happened next. A Norwegian teacher named Ogden Rendon heard the
original TBN broadcast about the Well to Hell.
Speaker 1: He must have been skeptical.
Speaker 2: He was. He couldn't believe that a supposedly credible news
outlet would present such an outlandish story as fact, So
he decided to conduct an experiment.
Speaker 1: An experiment, what kind of experiment?
Speaker 2: When he returned to no he found a completely ordinary,
boring newspaper article. He then sent this article to TBN,
but he included a fake translation.
Speaker 1: A fake translation.
Speaker 2: Yes, the fake translation was full of sensationalized details that
fit perfectly with the Well to Hell narrative.
Speaker 1: He was trying to see if they would just accept
anything that confirmed their biases exactly.
Speaker 2: And amazingly, TBN took the bait. They incorporated these fabricated
details into their ongoing coverage of the Well.
Speaker 1: To Hell story without even bothering to verify the translation.
Speaker 2: It was a brilliant yet somewhat disheartening demonstration of how
easily misinformation can spread, especially when it confirms pre existing beliefs.
Speaker 1: So the image of the batwing demon and all those
dramatic details were essentially a product of this teacher's prank.
Speaker 2: It's a stark reminder that even sources that appear authoritative
can fall victim to sensationalism and a lack of proper
fact checking.
Speaker 1: So the Well to Hell's story is basically a hoax.
But what about the audio that Artbell played. If it
wasn't from a real borehole, where did it come from?
Speaker 2: Well, the audio has also been debunked. Really, it's believed
to be a carefully edited and looped segment taken from
the soundtrack of the nineteen seventy two Italian horror film
Barren Blood.
Speaker 1: Barren Blood. So they took sounds from a horror movie
and passed them off as genuine evidence of Hell.
Speaker 2: It's ironic, isn't it.
Speaker 1: It's more than ironic. It's kind of sad that people
would go to such lengths to perpetuate a hoax.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it speaks to the power of belief
and the human need to make sense of the unknown.
Speaker 1: So the Well to Hell's story is a fabrication, a.
Speaker 2: Compelling one, but a fabrication.
Speaker 1: Nonetheless, it's a shame because the real story of deep
drilling projects like the Cola Super Deep Borehole is fascinating
enough on its own.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, they didn't find any demons or screaming souls, but
they did make some significant scientific discoveries, like what they
found fossilized plankton at incredibly deep levels, suggesting ancient microbial
life far below the surface. They also discovered large amounts
of mineralized water trapped within the rock.
Speaker 1: For me, so the real discoveries, while maybe not as sensational,
are far more meaningful.
Speaker 2: They give us insights into the Earth's history, its composition,
and the potential for life in extreme environments.
Speaker 1: So we've gone from a terrifying tale of a Siberian
hellhole to the fascinating reality of scientific exploration.
Speaker 2: It's been quite a journey, and I think it highlights
the importance of critical thinking and healthy skepticism.
Speaker 1: Especially in this age of information overload. We need to
be able to discern between fact and fiction, to separate
the genuine from the fabricated exactly.
Speaker 2: And I think the story of the Well to Hell
serves as a valuable reminder that even the most compelling
stories can sometimes be nothing more than elaborate hoaxes.
Speaker 1: So to our listeners out there, keep questioning, keep exploring,
and never be afraid to dig a little deeper to
uncover the truth.
Speaker 2: And remember sometimes the most fascinating discoveries are the ones
that are grounded in reality, not in sensationalized fiction.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. Until next time,
keep those minds curious.