The Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole Ever

In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was said to have successfully drilled straight to Hell. This bizarre claim featured on the evangelical television program Praise the Lord, which reached around 5 million viewers daily. According to the story, a Soviet deep drilling project accidentally tunneled into a cavern where they recorded the wailing of damned souls.

The Russians found the lamentations to be around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and reported it to the world. However, the story soon unraveled as it was discovered that the project was actually taking place on Russia's Kola Peninsula, not in Siberia, and the recordings were just a loop from a 1972 horror movie. Despite the debunking, the myth of the "Well to Hell" persisted and is still cited online today.

In reality, the Soviets did drill a very deep hole—the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which is the deepest on Earth. It plunged over 40,000 feet into the earth and took more than 20 years to dig. The project aimed to reach the boundary separating Earth's crust from the mantle below, offering a chance to study the layer that drives plate tectonics and shapes continents.

While the project didn't succeed in its original goals, it transformed the way geologists view the deep continental crust, providing a direct look at the unknown world below.