The Legend and Its Basis
The legend holds that a team of Russian scientists led by a certain Mr. Azzacov in an unnamed place in Siberia had drilled a hole that was nine miles (14.5 km) deep before breaking through to a cavity. Intrigued by this unexpected discovery, they lowered an extremely heat tolerant microphone, along with other sensory equipment, into the well. The temperature deep within was 2,000 °F (1,100 °C) — heat from a chamber of fire from which (purportedly) the tormented screams of the damned could be heard. The recording, however, was later revealed to have been a cleverly remixed portion of the soundtrack of the 1972 movie Baron Blood, with various effects added.
The Soviet Union had, in fact, drilled a hole nearly eight miles deep, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, located not in Siberia but on the Kola Peninsula, which shares borders with Norway and Finland. Upon completing the borehole in 1989, some interesting geological anomalies were found, although they reported no supernatural encounters. Temperatures reached 180 °C (360 °F), making deeper drilling prohibitively expensive.
Read more about this topic: Well To Hell Hoax
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