Catchy title.

Geologists working somewhere in remote Siberia had drilled a hole some 14.4 kilometers deep when the drill-bit suddenly began to rotate wildly. The project manager was quoted as saying they decided that the center of the earth was hollow.  Supposedly, the geologists measured temperatures of over 2000 degrees in the deep hole. They lowered super sensitive microphones to the bottom of the well, and to their horror they heard the sounds of thousands, perhaps millions, of suffering souls screaming.

The plot thickened when an audio recording emerged of the account, and just when you thought the story couldn’t get any better, a man who witnessed the drilling gave an eye-witness account of a bat-like creature coming out of the same hole.

The story and it’s additions were made famous by supermarket tabloids (and by the gullible people who read them) of the early 1990s and it has now entered the halls of infamy thanks to the Internet (and by the gullible people who…).

Is there any truth to it?  Snopes says “no”, truthorfiction says “no”, my common sense says “no”, and I tend to agree with all three.

Before I continue, let me digress for a moment…

There is something about human nature which yearns to believe the unbelievable.  There is the child in all of us which still is innocent enough to believe in fairy-tales. The problem is we simply don’t do the research, or use our God-given brains.  We hear, then re-tell the incredible stories without hesitation (or even a simple google-search) and before long fiction is re-told as fact.  That is until the truth is discovered and we get egg on our face.  Unfortunately many of us Christians are the worst culprits, and not only does our character lose credibly… our faith loses credibility as a result.

God is supernatural, and experiencing the supernatural should be a normal part of our lives as followers of Christ.  However, God did give us brains for a purpose. While we are called to have child-like faith, we shouldn’t have child-like intelligence.  Jesus is the Truth, we are followers and carriers of Truth, not tabloid sensationalism.

With that in mind, back to the story…

The truth:  In 1984, an experimental well in Russia’s Kola Peninsula which reached 12 kilometers into the earth.  Scientists discovered rare rock formations, flows of gas and water, but no damned souls, no hollow center, and not temperatures of 2000 degrees but of 180 degrees.  You can read all about the Kola Well here, all factual and very interesting.   The origin of the recording? unknown. The bat-out-of-hell creature addition?  A simple lie designed to see whether a religious television program would accept the story at face value without checking it out, which they did (unfortunately).

In conclusion, although I’m pretty sure that Hell is not situated under the snow in Siberia… Hell is still very real, you really don’t want to go there, and there is only one way to avoid it.

“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.  God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.” (The Bible – John 3:16-17)