When he returned to Norway, Rendalen sat down and fabricated the graphic story of the bat-like creature and sent his letter to the television network. His prediction was that they would use the story without investigating it. To make an investigation easy for them, he included his name, address and telephone number on his letter. He also included what he claimed was an article on the story from 'Norway's largest and most reputable newspaper'. In fact, the article, which he falsely translated, was a piece in his local community paper about a building inspector.
Rendalen also included the name and telephone number of a pastor friend based in Southern California. This pastor knew about the hoax and was prepared to reveal the truth if someone called to research it further with him.
However, as predicted, Trinity Broadcasting Network ran the story without contacting Renalden or the Californian pastor, and it appeared on television, radio and in a large number of publications. None of those who used the story attempted to research it before going public.
'2000 PEOPLE HAVE FOUND CHRIST!'
On 6th February 1990, a listener of mine sent me a letter. She had videotaped and documented all three occasions when this story was discussed on the Christian TV show put out by the network. On 29th January 1990, the show host is documented as saying:
Let me just say, all of you that have written me all those nasty letters about the 'hole in hell', let me tell you I finally got the newspaper article which is from 'The World Weekly'. This is an international newspaper that has been translated into English from Finnish. 'Scientists fear they've opened gates of hell! Geologists drilling nine-mile hole hear human shrieks.'
I got a letter today from a geologist in Oklahoma and he's really giving me a rough time. He says that there isn't anything that could drill that deep. Folks, I'm just reporting what people have been sending to me and I don't know if this is true or not. I know one thing, if this is a trick of the Devil, he sure has blown it, because I know of about 2,000 people that have found Christ because of it!
True or false, I'll tell you what I'm doing, though. We're now going to do some investigative reporting of our own and we're going to check with the Finnish government and the Department of the Interior and we're really going to follow this up and see if they really did drill a hole nine miles down there, if they really did have a microphone down there, if they really did hear human shrieks of agony and pain as this newspaper article and as did many letters I have received from over there have indicated to us. If I'm wrong and they're right, I've got nothing to lose. But if I'm right and you're wrong, you've got everything to lose.
Unfortunately, the investigation by the show took place too late to prevent the damage of a widely spread rumor in the Christian community.
Rendalen has now issued an official statement about his actions and the whole incident, which says: 'The story is nothing more than a Christian "urban legend" without basis in reality.'
There are a couple of postscripts to this incident. One is that the respected magazine, 'Biblical Archaeology Review', printed a story about the Drilling to Hell story, thinking it was so outrageous that readers would get a kick out of it. Many of the readers took the article seriously, however, and either started passing it around as substantiation of the story, or wrote to the magazine to complain that it shouldn't have given it respectability.
Secondly, in August of 1990, I was contacted by the pastor of a small church in Flagstaff, Arizona, who informed me that he had proof that this story was true. Apparently, a man from his church, who was believed to be a PhD in Physics from MIT, came forward in private to claim that he was a scientist who had been on a secret mission in Russia for the past year and had met with Mikhail Gorbachev several times. He verified that the Drilling to Hell story was indeed true. He claimed:
A hole was drilled deep into the crust of the earth in Siberia and a large cavity was found. Unfortunately, news of this was leaked to the press and was distorted. It is true that a recording was made of the sounds from deep in the hole, but the intense heat destroyed the microphone in spite of special cooling material around it, so that only seventeen seconds of sounds could be captured. At the present time, scientists are drilling a second hole to confirm what was found the first time. And a better system is being developed for cooling the microphone.
The scientist went on to claim that he was helping to design this microphone and was returning to Siberia shortly to further document the phenomenon. He planned to return in about a year with more confirming information on this amazing phenomenon.
Six months later, I got a letter from another member of the church saying that this man had turned out to be neither a graduate of MIT nor a scientist. In fact, he had skipped town with over $20,000 collected from church members who wanted to help finance his expedition.
How did this story originate? Again, we will never really know. It is possible that somewhere in the world there has been a spooky experience during deep drilling operations. I don't know. According to an August 1989 article in 'Science' magazine, there is a Russian deep hole drilling project in Kola, near Murmansk, about 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Another German deep drilling experiment in north-east Bavaria has discovered warmer temperatures than were expected at certain drilling levels, although nothing even close to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Characteristic of many urban legends, this story was alleged to have occurred in an obscure part of the world where it would be virtually impossible to track down the facts. And once the story got started, people began quoting one another's newsletters to validate their own. This is the stuff of which tabloid newspapers are made.
