Sounds From HELL

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.