There is one urban legend in particular that
creeps out a lot of people. The story goes
that sometime in 1989, Russian scientists in
Siberia had drilled a borehole some 14.5
kilometers deep into the Earth's crust. The
drill broke through into a cavity, and the
scientists lowered some equipment to see
what was down there. The temperature was
about 1,100°C (about 2,000°F), but the real
shocker was the sound that was recorded.
They only got about 17 seconds of audio
before the microphone melted, but it was 17
horrifying seconds of the screams of the
damned:
Convinced that they'd heard the sounds of
hell, many of the scientists quit the jobsite
immediately, so the story goes. Those who
stayed were in for an even bigger shock later
that night. A plume of luminous gas burst out
of the borehole, the shape of a gigantic
winged demon unfolded, and the words "I
have conquered" in Russian were seared into
the flames. As a final touch of weirdness,
medics were reported to have given everyone
on site a dose of a sedative to erase their
short-term memory. Beginning in 1989, the
tale was broadly reprinted in smaller
Christian publications, newsletters and the
such, but was given hardly any notice by the
mainstream media. Some evangelicals and
Biblical literalists cited the incident as proof
of the existence of a physical hell, an
interpretation that seemed to be the
consensus among the publications that ran
the story. The story acquired the popularly
conferred title of The Well to Hell.
The tale appeared just as the Internet began
to rise, and as the legend grew, so did the
number of debunks. By now the Internet is
saturated with at least as many claims that
either the audio or the story is false, as there
are supporting it as fact.
The story's first appearance was in 1989 with
its first large-scale publication by the Trinity
Broadcasting Network. This Christian network
has television shows in addition to a print
newsletter, and they ran the story entitled
"Scientists Discover Hell" in both their
broadcast and print editions in late 1989.
Shortly thereafter, they ran an expanded
version of the story that included the newly
reported detail of the devilish apparition
coming up out of the borehole. Other
Christian newsletters picked up the story,
including Praise the Lord in February of 1990,
and Midnight Cry in April of 1990.
But not everyone was on board. The first
most obvious fact was that there was no
such borehole in Siberia; however there was
one on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern
Russia, called the Kola Superdeep Borehole .
Located only about 16 kilometers from
Norway, the Kola borehole is about as far
from Siberia as you can get and still be in
Russia. Some researchers noted that the
timing of the story was suspiciously close to
that of an article in the August 1989 edition
of Science magazine, titled "European Deep
Drilling Leaves Americans Behind", which
discussed the Kola project and a similar one
in Germany. Science explained the purpose of
the borehole:
To the Soviets, deep holes are not simply
tools for testing geological theory. They
expect more. One additional payoff is
improved drilling technology. Another is
insight into the deepest strata beneath
known mineral resources... And there is
always the allure of the Sputnik effect — the
glory of having the deepest hole in the
world.
And so some competing Christian newsletters
were more skeptical, noting not only the
factual errors in the story, but also Trinity
Broadcasting Network's lack of verifiable
sources for their story. Christianity Today ran
an article debunking the Well to Hell in July
of 1990 (which we'll talk more about in a
moment), as did Biblical Archaeology Review
two months later.
Now, all of this happened without anyone
ever hearing the alleged audio recording.
Nobody ever presented one or broadcast one
anywhere. It wasn't until twelve years later, in
2002, after the story had come and gone at
least twice more in various tabloids, that a
correspondent to Art Bell's radio program
Coast to Coast AM emailed in an audio
recording. The accompanying letter read as
follows:
I just recently began listening to your radio
show and could not believe it when you
talked about the sounds from hell tonight.
My uncle had told me this story a couple of
years ago, and I didn't believe him. Like one
of your listeners who discounted the story
as nothing more than just a religious
newspaper fabricated account. The story
about the digging, the hearing of the sounds
from hell, is very real. It did occur in
Siberia. My uncle collected videos on the
paranormal and supernatural. He passed
away fairly recently... He let me listen to
one of the audio tapes that he had on the
sounds from hell in Siberia, and I copied it.
He received his copy from a friend who
worked at the BBC... Attached is that sound
from my uncle's tapes.
Bell then played the recording, and ever since
then it's been widely circulated. To this day,
the story is still reported from time to time,
now with the supporting sound. It's become a
firmly established urban legend.
But is it true? Not according to Rich Buhler,
who was a radio host for Christianity Today
in 1990, and who wrote the debunking article
mentioned a moment ago. People had been
calling into his show asking about the Trinity
Broadcasting Network story, so Buhler and
his staff did some digging. They worked
backwards and followed all the threads they
could to try and find whether there was a
reliable original source. Here's what they
found.
TBN had said on the air that their source was
a Finnish newspaper called Ammennusastia
which they described as a respected journal.
An evangelical minister in Texas, R. W.
Schambach, had come across it and sent it
to TBN. It turns out that Ammennusastia was
not a scientific journal at all, but was a small
Evangelical Lutheran magazine that was
published in Finland between 1974 and 1989.
When Buhler contacted them to ask about the
story, they reported that a staff member had
written it from memory, having read the story
in the daily Finnish newspaper called Etelä-
Suomen Sanomat in a section that was for
readers to contribute anything they liked,
without verification. That reader had seen it
in a Finnish paranormal newsletter called
Vaeltajat . Buhler contacted Vaeltajat who
reported that the story came from a reader
who claimed to have seen it in a California
newsletter published by Jewish Christians
called Jewels of Jericho. Nobody was ever
able to track down Jewels of Jericho or verify
its existence, so the trail went cold. I'm
amazed that Buhler was able to follow the
trail as far as he did. The whole chain was
made of broken links: stories retold from
memory, unverified sources, and no editorial
scrutiny whatsoever. It is a nearly perfect
example of a story without any solid
foundation.
So if we can't verify any part of the story,
where did that audio recording come from? It
turns out that there is a popular explanation
for it. Many Internet sites assert that it is a
looped and layered version of this audio clip
from the really terrible 1972 movie Baron
Blood:
Personally I'm not convinced that the
screams sound like the same ones; in fact, a
side-by-side comparison serves mainly to
convince me that Baron Blood is not the
source of the audio. However, there's at least
one really good YouTube video where a guy
plays back selected samples from the Well to
Hell audio proving that it is indeed looped.
Listen to this clip from YouTube filmmaker
moscowjade:
Without any doubt, the Well to Hell audio
played on the Art Bell show was created
digitally by somebody looping and further
processing some screaming sounds with a
lot of background noise. That sound file, the
only one known to exist from this story, is a
hoax. There are zillions of recordings of
screams and shouts and crowd noises for the
hoaxer to have chosen from; whether or not
he used Baron Blood is moot.
Further elements of the story have also been
proven to be a hoax. In 1989, Norwegian
teacher Åge Rendalen heard the original TBN
broadcast while he was visiting California.
Shocked at how gullible Americans were, he
wanted to see how far it could be taken. He
returned home, clipped a Norwegian
newspaper article about a building inspector,
and sent it to TBN along with a fake
translation that added the new element of the
figure of the devil coming up out of the
borehole. Rendalen identified the photo of the
building inspector as the Dr. Dmitri Azzacov
(various spellings have been given) whom
TBN had reported was the lead scientist of
the project. TBN rebroadcast these startling
new story elements without even bothering to
do their own translation. Rich Buhler tracked
down Rendalen who happily admitted his
hoax, and all the details were laid out in the
October 1990 issue of the Secular Humanist
Bulletin newsletter.
And yet, the story continued to persist. The
tabloid Weekly World News ran the story on
April 7, 1992, but moved it to Alaska and
added yet another new element of thirteen
workers being killed when the devil came
flaming up out of the hole. Sixteen years
later on October 2, 2008, they ran it again on
their online edition, changed it to an oil well,
and added quotes from then-governor Sarah
Palin and Vice Presidential candidate Joe
Biden. In a subtle touch proving the tongue-
in-cheek nature of their article, they located
the site 400 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska;
which, to anyone with a map, places it
squarely underwater in the Beaufort Sea.
So while we're able to prove that everything
added to the original TBN story is a hoax,
including the audio; all we can say about the
original TBN story is that it was very poorly
sourced and based on second and third hand
accounts including personal recollections. We
have no idea what the Jewels of Jericho
used for their original source, or even if it
existed at all. Certainly no such report of
screams from hell ever made it into any
legitimate geological publications. We know
that all of its specifics are false: there is no
such borehole in Siberia; drilling equipment
can't operate at anywhere near the 1,100°C
reported (the true maximum is less than
300°C), and neither can screaming human
vocal cords.
Somewhere out there is a single anonymous
person who first wrote into Vaeltajat with a
story of fire and brimstone and eternal
torment. That person could scarcely imagine
how far the tale would go, and the extent to
which researchers would puzzle over it more
than twenty years later. The public is always
hungry for a new urban legend, and always
keener to accept that than to verify it.
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