Kenneth Glad
For years, a chilling claim has echoed across media and folklore: A scientific drill that went so deep it uncovered something terrifying. The story spoke of human-like cries rising from the Earth’s depths. What actually happened is a mix of ambitious science, confusion and a myth that proved hard to contain.
The story surfaced in the late 1980s through Finnish religious magazines such as Ammenusastia and Vaeltajat, which described alleged recordings from deep underground. According to those reports, scientists had lowered microphones into a borehole and captured eerie, human-sounding wails.
“We tried to listen to these sounds using sensitive microphones. What we heard literally ‘broke’ logically thinking scientists,” a supposed project leader named Dr. Azzacov was quoted as saying, according to Onet. “It was a human voice howling in pain.”
The Polish outlet writes that the claims moved beyond small publications and reached wider audiences through networks like TBN in the United States. At a time when Soviet research was largely inaccessible to outsiders, such stories found fertile ground.
These accounts grew more elaborate as they spread, with some versions describing flashes of light and supernatural figures. Before long, what began as a niche report had turned into a widely discussed mystery.
A clearer picture, however, emerges when looking at the actual project behind the claims.
Digging deep into the science
The Kola Superdeep Borehole was a Soviet scientific initiative launched in 1970 to examine the structure of the Earth’s crust.
Onet reports that the goal was to reach unprecedented depths and thus better understand ancient geological layers.
By 1979, the drill had reached nearly 9.6 kilometers, setting a global record. The site, near Zapolyarny in the Murmansk region, became a flagship example of Cold War-era scientific ambition.
“Watching the drilling process is impossible, but you can imagine what is happening by looking at the instruments,” engineer Viktor Pavlovich said. “At the tip of the column there is a turbo-head with ‘teeth’ made of very hard materials…”
Conditions underground became increasingly difficult. At depths beyond 12 kilometers, temperatures climbed to around 180 degrees Celsius, far higher than expected.
Rock instability added to the strain, forcing engineers to abandon sections and rethink their approach rather than simply pushing deeper.
What remains today
The dramatic claims about “voices from hell” were eventually traced back to a fabrication. Norwegian teacher Aage Rendalen later admitted he helped create the story as a test of how easily sensational claims could spread through media channels.
Even so, not everything encountered during the project was fully understood. Dawid Mironowicz Huberman, who oversaw the research, acknowledged unusual events:
“As an honest scientist, I cannot say that I understand everything that happened there. Indeed, a very strange noise was recorded, and then an explosion. In the following days, nothing similar happened again…”
The drilling project ended in 1992 in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, as economic turmoil drained funding for large-scale scientific research, and the site was later abandoned.
The persistence of the myth highlights a familiar pattern: dramatic claims travel faster and farther than their corrections.
In the information gaps of the late Cold War, speculation filled the void, and even now, the story endures, less because of evidence and more because it captures a deep-seated human fascination with what might lie beneath our feet.
Sources: Onet
