AI Summary
5 min readIn the winter of 1990, a man named Jack Hutchinson was working as a babysitter at a remote drilling site somewhere in the frozen north. While repairing water damage in the bunkhouse, he found a technical logbook hidden behind the drywall. The logbook contained a journal written thirty years earlier by another worker named Jack Hutchinson—the same name—detailing a discovery that began with a blown pressure tank and ended with a door marked "home" at the bottom of a 3,200-foot shaft. The story inside the logbook is the episode's entire content: a first-person account of what Jack and his partner, Vlad, found beneath the permafrost.
The Partner and the Hole
Jack's monitoring partner was a retired deep earth isolation miner named Vladislav, who insisted on being called Vlad "like the impaler." DEI miners are a rare breed: they descend alone into mines too deep for conventional equipment, operating hand tools and small excavators for days or weeks without sunlight. Vlad was a small man, barely five feet tall, with enormous hands and feet, pale skin, and a lifetime of stories about being trapped underground for days at a time. He was exactly the kind of person you would want with you in a crisis—and exactly the kind of person whose behavior could become unsettling without warning.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:03) **Setup: A Remote Drilling Site and a Strange Discovery** - The narrator describes his job at a remote, semi-classified drilling site in a cold, desolate location, and how he found an old technical logbook hidden behind damaged drywall in the bunkhouse.
- 2 (03:27) **Introducing Jack and Vlad** - Jack's log begins, describing the arrival of his monitoring partner, Vladislav, a retired deep earth isolation (DEI) miner from Ukraine with a disturbing past.
- 3 (05:24) **Strange Behavior Begins** - Vlad disappears for four days, then returns without explanation, and soon begins sleepwalking to a specific spot near a pressure tank, muttering in Ukrainian.
- 4 (09:11) **An Explosion Uncovers a Mystery** - Vlad fails to perform pressure releases, causing a tank to blow out a massive crater, which he later investigates in a trance, revealing a hidden iron cover.
- 5 (15:56) **Opening the Lid** - Jack and Vlad, now both excited, work together to pry open the heavy iron cover, revealing a deep, dark hole with a ladder.
- 6 (20:15) **First Descent: A Tunnel and a Pictograph** - Vlad and Jack descend into the hole, discovering a narrow, hand-chiseled tunnel with a ladder and an ancient pictograph telling a story of beings arriving from space.
- 7 (24:58) **The Depth is Revealed** - Vlad drops rocks to test the hole's depth, and they never hear them hit bottom, revealing the tunnel is incredibly deep and dangerous.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
How far would you be prepared to descend into the unknown?
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