A comment on yesterday’s post reminded me of an old urban legend about another hell hole in Russia, but one which is rather more disturbing. The story goes like this…

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’s manager was quoted as saying they decided that the center of the earth was hollow.  Supposedly, the geologists measured temperatures of over 2,000 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 a recording emerged of the account, and just when you thought the story couldn’t get any better, a man who witnessed the drilling went on record with the description of the 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 or well-meaning religious folk) 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. 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 a simple google to see if it is truth or fiction) and before long fiction is re-labeled 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.  We must remember that Jesus is the Truth, we are followers and carriers of Truth and although we still desperately need the child-like faith, we shouldn’t have child-like intelligence.

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&deg but of 180&deg.  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, I wish to say that although Hell isn’t situated under the snow in Siberia… it is very real, you don’t want to go there, and there is only one way to avoid it. Find a Bible look up John 3 :16 and think about it seriously.

Siberia hell hole aside, is hell really in the Earth’s bowels?  My opinion is again “no”, simply because the Bible says Hell  is eternal, and that the earth is not.  In fact it is going to all go up in flames one day… But not on Dec 22, 2012 (that is another blog post )