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GIANTS AND MYTHOLOGY

A Global Story

We must not remind them that giants walk the earth.

FRANK MILLER, BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, 1987

Even though human memory fails to penetrate the true mysteries of our remote past, mythology provides us with a framework by which we can glean a semblance of humanity’s origins in prehistory and come to an understanding of who we are as a species. The many myths of giants, gods, and other advanced beings whose power supposedly once ruled this planet today remain the strongest nonarchaeological evidence we have to support the idea that a race of giants once peopled the Earth.

In this chapter we will explore many of these myths, which are more than nebulous accounts concocted by unsophisticated humans—much more than metaphors or stories bearing symbolic or religious significance. They are what survive of our history prior to the great age of cataclysms, which destroyed the global civilization and changed humanity and this planet for the subsequent eight millennia. Now, for the first time, the truth about giants and our past is finally coming to light.

SEMANTIC DERIVATION OF THE TERM GIANT

In our remote past, giants were worshipped as gods. Indeed, almost all of the gods and goddesses of antiquity were of gigantic stature. Why is this so? Part of the answer may be found in an examination of the semantics involved: The roots of the word god can be traced back to the Germanic word Gott, and prior to the introduction of this particular title, there existed the Latin deus and the Greek theos. In ancient times, even in the Hebrew tradition, it was widely known that these words—those signifying a power greater than oneself—applied not to a single omnipotent being but rather “beings from the sky” (always denoted in the plural). In the annals and chronicles of ancient times, both gods and giants have been categorized as “advanced beings” or “sky gods.” This is a very interesting point in and of itself, but it also raises an important question: What difference, if any, exists between gods and giants?

Who were these giants described in ancient times? Were they mere fantasies, or do they represent a very real, very tangible link to our prehistoric ancestors? Mainstream science teaches us that creatures such as giants, ogres, and other monstrous beings are merely mythical icons from our remote past and have no basis in reality. Our ancestors, terrified of a world they did not understand and could not control, devised these myths to bring order and predictability to a chaotic, primeval world. Such are the conclusions of academia, but these simplistic views of an ignorant and credulous human race is in its final death throes. Through a study of ancient mythology, combined with advances in archaeology and technology, we are coming to understand that the ancients were actually highly advanced and may have possessed technologies comparable to or even surpassing our own. They were, for example, excellent record keepers, and had a significant knowledge of astronomy, medicine, and engineering. Thus we ought to take seriously their seemingly extraordinary tales of Titans, frost giants, and Cyclopes.

THE FEATS AND WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS

In order to show that the giants of antiquity were not the product of an unsophisticated imagination, it is necessary to first establish as fact the feats and wisdom of the ancients. This inevitably leads into to a discussion of their premodern technological achievements, some far more advanced than those of today. Once their sophistication has been demonstrated, we can more objectively address the issue of the existence of giants.

What we have found is that the civilizations of the ancient world were far more advanced than many archaeologists are prepared to admit. A deceptively small device found in 1900 on the island of Antikythera, twenty-five miles northwest of Crete, lends credence to this assertion. Retrieved from the submerged wreckage of a Greek galley by fishermen and sponge divers, the device was actually a working computer, intricately devised not by Apple or Dell, but by the Greeks during Hellenistic times (circa 323–146 BCE). David Childress, author of Technology of the Gods (2000), rightfully boasts of its discovery as being “tantamount to finding a jet airplane in the tomb of King Tut.”

Hints of other technological feats from antiquity have survived into the twenty-first century as well. For example, texts and detailed drawings of flying craft called vimāna in the Sanskrit writings of India give us at least some indication that in the remote past, someone—or something—flew the skies above Earth.

Let’s assume for the moment that the ancient traditions of the gods imparting knowledge and wisdom to the early human race are not mere fantasy, but based on eyewitness accounts of actual events. This, then, would not be a misinterpreted record of an ancient alien visitation, but a direct account of an early race of giants passing on what it had learned from the gods to humans in a form of succession, passing the torch to another generation of ancient Terrans, or earthborn beings.

One of the many tribes of humanity that were passed the torch of civilization very early on from the primeval giants of old were the Chinese. Confucius records that in China, during the reign of the Five Monarchs, from 2852 to 2206 BCE, “flying carriages” existed in that country. However, it is difficult to ascertain the full extent of the technological wonders the ancient Chinese may have possessed because, prior to his death circa 210–209 BCE, Emperor Chin Shih Huang Ti ordered the burning of hundreds of thousands of books, including all those in the royal libraries (Childress 2000). A few lucky tomes, however, escaped the wrath of the imperial torches, and from them a few accounts of advanced technology possessed by the ancient Chinese have survived to this very day.

The ancient Chinese, in addition to the invention of flying craft and military technology, also developed practical innovations for mass consumption. An individual named Bi Sheng introduced the technology of movable type in 1045 CE, more than four centuries before the printing of the first Gutenberg Bible. And to resist earthquakes, quite common in China, the Chinese are rumored to have invented the first earthquake-resistant houses. Moreover, around 725 CE two Chinese inventors are credited with developing the first mechanical clock. In addition, gunpowder was common to the Chinese, which they employed beginning in the ninth century or earlier. Gunpowder was used for fireworks and as a means to frighten opposing armies or to announce the coming of an invading force rather than as a weapon.

According to Childress:

The Chinese have always had great scope and vision regarding their projects; not only was the Great Wall a colossal endeavor, but the Grand Canal of China, which connects the Yellow River with the Yangtze, is twenty times longer than the Panama Canal—yet the Chinese constructed it without modern equipment starting over 1,300 years ago! There are other mammoth projects that are still unknown or waiting to be discovered, such as the largest pyramid in the world, near Xian. Even the Chinese version of the typewriter, called the Hoang typewriter, has 5,700 characters on a keyboard two feet wide and seventeen inches high! (Childress 1998, 396)

Chinese armies also employed the use of poison gas more than 2,500 years before it was invented and used by the West in World War I. They also developed cast iron in the fourth century BCE, more than 1,700 years before it was first used by Europeans, and created steel from cast iron in the second century BCE—more than 2,000 years before Westerners manufactured it.

How is it that the Chinese were so technologically advanced at such an early stage of their culture’s development? Renowned British scientist, historian, and sinologist Joseph Needham of Cambridge University echoes this very question when he writes (with regard to the splendor of early Chinese inventions): “First, why should they have been so far in advance of other civilizations; and second, why aren’t they now centuries ahead of the rest of the world?” (Childress 1998, 397) David Childress implies that the answer lies in inherited knowledge from an older civilization. “Its discoveries,” writes Childress, “like ours, are just the re-discovery of ancient technology from the roller-coaster ride of history” (Childress 1998, 397).

I posit that this was because Chinese civilization may have been jump-started by an extramundane source during the time when the primeval giants passed on knowledge to the chosen people of the new era. As you will see, we will argue for this theory throughout the book, as it is one of the foundational tenets of our research.

GIANTS AS PART OF OUR COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Since they first walked the Earth eons ago, giants have become a part of our collective unconscious, a terrifying Jungian archetype that captivates the imagination. They form the cornerstone of the myths, legends, and traditions of almost every culture on Earth, and in many cases, these narratives have remained unchanged for millennia. Such myths often depict a civilization ruled by giants that is destroyed by a global deluge and eventually forgotten.

These myths and legends help us to decode the secrets of that forgotten chapter in human history. Indeed, these gigantic inhabitants of our imagination are not mere figments, but rather the cultural phantom “residue” from our past experiences as a species. They are, in fact, imprints or echoes of a remote but very real Dark Age that we have mostly long since forgotten—until now. As with all mythological accounts, they are but blurred images of a far more profound reality.

Let’s look at some specific examples of giants mentioned in the myths and legends of the world, beginning with the Inca civilization.

• Inca myth describes the Ayar-aucca race, which includes four twin giants who hold up the sky. In this myth (as in many others like it) the human race becomes unruly and ungrateful. Angered by this, the four giants agree to let the sky tumble down and crash into the sea. The result is a global flood that obliterates much of humankind (Joseph 2005). (The idea of the sky crashing to Earth and destroying virtually all of civilization resonates with Plato’s Atlantis and some of the more recent speculation regarding its demise. Some theories suggest that a comet or asteroid may have impacted Earth sometime during our remote history, causing the destruction of these ancient and advanced cultures.)
• In Irish mythology, we learn of the Formorach, a giant sea people. Their leader, Balor, guides them to the shores of Ireland following the Great Flood. They then become the native inhabitants of that island. While some scholars locate the Formorach’s point of origin in Spain or North Africa, others claim that the original homeland of these pre-Celtic giants was Atlantis, thought to have been located two hundred miles west of Gibraltar (Joseph 2005).
• The Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland is also linked to giants in that its natural geologic formations consist of massive basalt columns that were claimed to have been the work of the giants.
• In the third millennium BCE, the Hurrians were the dominant race of Anatolia. The Hittites, who conquered the Hurrians around 2000 BCE, absorbed many of their religious beliefs and mythological traditions, including the myth of Alalu, the first king of heaven—a giant god who thrived on a mountainous island situated in the Western Ocean, which was often referred to as the sea of the setting sun. (The Western Ocean was an earlier name for the Atlantic Ocean.) Author and historian Frank Joseph believes that this tradition of giant gods and the island in the Atlantic is a Hurrian memory of the mountainous island of Atlantis. Alalu’s son was the mighty Kumarbi, the mythic personification of the Atlantic Ocean and the Hurrian equivalent of the Greek Titan Kronos. Kumarbi placed the world on his mountainous neck. In this, in addition to being the equivalent of Kronos, he also was the Anatolian equivalent of the Greek deity and Titan Atlas, the founder of the mighty Atlantean empire (Joseph 2005).
• The Kai of New Guinea recalled a race of demigods, or giants, called the Ne-Mu. They were said to be taller and stronger than the mortal race of today, but they were lords of the Earth before the Great Flood. They taught the Kai ancestors the fundamentals of agriculture and house construction. The Ne-Mu were wiped out during the Deluge, but their bodies were transformed into blocks of stone. “This final feature of the myth,” Frank Joseph writes (2005), “betrays the Kai’s reaction to megalithic structures found occasionally in New Guinea, often composed of prodigious stonework they identify with the pre-Flood Ne-Mu.”
• The natives of the Fijian islands believe that their ancestral land, called Burotu, sank long ago into the Pacific Ocean. This ancestral realm was obliterated when the “heavens fell down,” and fire and water melded together to produce the islands of Samoa. The survivors, known as the Hiti, were thought to be a race of giants: the children of Atlantis. They built a monumental arch standing almost twenty feet high (Joseph 2005).
• Arabic myth describes a race of giants known as the Adites. These beings are the equivalent of the Atlantean Titans of Greek mythology, and are described as superior architects and builders. Since their earliest recorded history, Arabs in the Middle East have associated all immense structures with these great giants of antiquity. (We will read more about the building and civilizing skills of ancient giants in the following chapter.)
• Bochica is a figure in the myths of the Chibcha peoples of present-day Colombia. A bearded, white-skinned giant similar to Atlas, he supports the sky on his shoulders. When the people forsake his teachings, he eventually drops the sky, causing a series of floods and conflagrations that decimate the planet. This event also destroys the giant’s own home, forcing his children to flee and seek shelter elsewhere. In the end, they settle along the coast of Colombia, eventually becoming the country’s native Indian inhabitants (Joseph 2005).

As you can see from this small sampling, the sheer number and variety of giant myths and legends is staggering. Indeed, they can be found in almost every culture on Earth. As stated above, many of these mythologies include beings closely related to the Titans, who supposedly once ruled Atlantis. And of course there is also the recurring narrative of a great cataclysm that destroyed a civilization sometime in the remote past. Such common themes and motifs lay the groundwork for an even broader discussion. Let’s examine some additional accounts of giants now.

GIANTS IN INDIA

In the spring of 2000, in a virtually uninhabited desert region of northern India, an American team of archaeologists uncovered the ancient skeletal remains of a human being of phenomenal size. An elite team of excavators from the American government made the discovery, with support from the Indian military, which holds jurisdiction over the area.

Along with the gigantic bones, the team discovered tablets bearing ancient inscriptions. These tablets detailed a story from Indian mythology regarding the supreme god Brahma, who existed in the beginning and created the cosmos as we know it. This deity, according to the inscription, created creatures of gargantuan size in the remote past and commanded them to bring order to chaos. They soon became the rulers and guardians of humans. But they were constantly combating each other and engaging in profuse military engagements along with fits of aggression and territoriality. They eventually failed their purpose and had to be destroyed.

Some sources claim that the American team and the Indian government secretly believe that these cyclopean relics belong to the vanished race of giants that Brahma created. Following the initial excavation, the Indian government sealed off the area, allowing access only to Indian government officials and authorized representatives of the American government.

In the Sanskrit writings of India we learn of the Daityas, or water giants. They are mentioned in the Vishnu Purana and the Mahabharata, two of the most ancient and highly revered Hindu sacred texts. The Daityas are the offspring of Vishnu. These water giants are the East Indian equivalent of the Titans of Greek mythology, which include Atlas and the other kings of Atlantis. These writings describe how Vishnu’s mother conquers the Earth for the gods and becomes the first of the mighty Daitya. This ultimately makes her the upholder of the sky—what Frank Joseph describes as “the moral order of the cosmos”—therefore identifying her with the Greek Titan Atlas, who creates the island of Atlantis and holds the burden of the world on his shoulders (Joseph 2005).

According to the Vishnu Purana, these water giants reside in Tripura, the Triple City. This metropolis, now a sunken island, located far across the impenetrable Western Ocean (the Atlantic Ocean), echoes Plato’s own descriptions of the lost civilization of Atlantis. The immortal Greek philosopher wrote that this submerged landmass was beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In addition, the Triple City of the Vishnu Purana is clearly emblematic of the trident of Poseidon, the patron god of Atlantis. In a final war, both the Daitya and Tripura are destroyed, which is yet another similarity to the myth of Atlantis (Joseph 2005).

The Rakshas are also worthy of recognition, if only for their gruesome and diabolical reputations. Hindu belief maintains that the Rakshas were thoroughly wicked humans in previous incarnations and that their reincarnation as one of these hideous giants was punishment for past sins. According to the Ramayana, these giants were born from Brahma’s foot. Other myths trace their bloodline back to the demon Pulastya or to other devils, such as Khasa, Nirriti, or Nirrita.

Rakshas are described as mean, vicious creatures, exceedingly ugly, gigantic in stature, and black as soot. Unequaled in their ferocity, they interrupted sacrifices, desecrated burial sites, harassed priests, and took possession of impressionable young humans; in fact, their crimes are too numerous to describe here in full. They were often depicted with two fangs protruding out of their mouths like vampires, with sharp, nail-like claws, prowling through the night like wandering beasts. Due to their obvious connection to the mythology of vampires, Rakshas have also been associated with the undead. Further emphasizing their venomous, beastlike persona, they were also portrayed as cannibals.

But descriptions such as these are consistent with ancient folk custom and Hindu lore. In the world of the great epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Rakshas have greater significance. According to the great epics, the Rakshas are a populous race of supernatural humanoid giants. Some Rakshas follow the path of righteousness; others have simply degenerated into evil. They have proven themselves in battle as supreme lords of war, and they are also gifted magic-users and skilled shape-shifters. They are known to gulp down the blood-drenched legs and torsos of fallen soldiers on the battlefield, and thus are employed as rank and file combat soldiers to keep them from obtaining any true prominence. But sometimes Rakshas would attain distinction and be considered heroes.

GIANTS IN ANCIENT GREEK MYTHOLOGY

The earliest known Greek deities, the Titans, ruled the primordial universe before the coming of the Olympians. (This parallels the biblical Nephilim, who ruled the Earth until their age ended, giving rise to humans.) Atlas, perhaps the most well known of the Titans, was the ruler of Atlantis and, as Frank Joseph notes in The Atlantis Encyclopedia (2005), the founder of astrology and astronomy. Atlas^*3 is often depicted in illustrations as a gigantic, bearded man crouching on one knee and bearing the sphere of the heavens upon his massive shoulders. Given this, and perhaps not surprisingly, the Sanskrit word atl means “to support or uphold.” Such imagery has come to signify the Atlanteans’ stalwart dedication to celestial and planetary sciences.

The later Olympian Greeks had their own giants, the Gigantes—grotesque, humanoid creatures with serpentine legs. In the myth narratives, they attempted to overthrow Zeus and the other gods of Mount Olympus, but ultimately failed. The Greek saga The Agronautica describes these giants in the following manner: “Their bodies have three pairs of nerved hands, like paws. The first pair hangs from their gnarled shoulders, the second and third pairs nestle up against their misbegotten hips” (Däniken 2010).

The Gigantomachy is the story of the battle between the giants, led by Alcyoneus, and the Olympian gods, led by Zeus, and it is perhaps the most widely depicted struggle in Greek art and literary tradition. In this battle, the giants bombard the gods with boulders and the flaming trunks of burning trees. According to the oracle, the gods would be unable to destroy the giants unless a powerful mortal aided them. Of course, in ancient Greece this could be only one individual, the legendary Heracles (Sacks 1995, 92).

Subsequent Greek gods were also giants. Unlike the Gigantes, however, these gods were blond-haired, fair-skinned, and Nordic in appearance. This is consistent with the fact that Caucasians (some of whom were depicted as giants in contemporaneous reports) were once dominant and prevalent in areas long thought to be the sole domain of non-European peoples (Sacks 1995, 92).

Greco-Roman literature is full of stories of giants, which we will explore in greater detail in the next chapter. We will visit the intriguing accounts of the renowned fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus as well as the commentaries of other classical writers. Let’s turn now to Western Europe to see what their literature, with regard to the existence of giants, may yield.

THE NORSE DEITIES AND THE GIANTS

The Germanic peoples have a rich mythological tradition filled with supernatural creatures, gods, trolls, elves, half gods, and, of course, giants. As such, many parallels can be drawn between Teutonic myths and legends and those of other cultures. Take, for example, the striking similarities between the Norse god Odin and Olle, the tribal god of North America’s Tuleyone Indians. Like Odin, Olle is a colossal giant with a horned helmet who is both a god of war and a savior. Olle rescues his people from a fiery demon named Sahte (Joseph 2005).

These Teutonic myths and legends tell us of the earliest beliefs and cosmologies of the ancient Norse and other Germanic peoples of northwestern Europe. In them are visions of the frost giants and Jötnar. According to the Eddas, an ancient collection of Norse stories, there are two races of giants: the children of Thrud, who descend from the frost giant Ymir, and the children of Bor, who include the Aesir. Although tremendous in size, the Aesir are distinctly Nordic in appearance. Later, in chapter 4, we will explore some of these Nordic stories in greater detail.

MADAME BLAVATSKY’S LEMURIAN GIANTS

As Scott Corrales rightfully put it in his 2010 essay “The Persistence of Giants,” “Any discussion of the role of giant-lore in cryptoarchaeology would be incomplete without mentioning, at least in passing, the Lemurian giants conjured up by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the guiding light of the Theosophical movement at the turn of the last century.” The Theosophical Movement was Blavatsky’s own concoction of Far Eastern mysticism and esoteric knowledge. It combined Judeo-Christian tradition with crude social Darwinism.

According to Blavatsky, “the giant Lemurians stood some 10 to 15 feet tall, had skins resembling alligator hide, faces with protuberant mandibles, small eyes on the sides of their skulls and elongated, double-jointed limbs.” Scott Corrales explains:

By her description, Mu was a far cry from the halcyon Atlantis: it was a barren land covered in the emanations of active volcanoes, which caused its colossal inhabitants to live in crude huts made of hardened lava. But Madame Blavatsky improved her creations’ lot considerably by adding that with the passing of eons, these towering monsters evolved into the ancestors of the Australian aborigines and other Melanesian peoples.

Blavatsky has become one of the most controversial figures of the last century, and has even been viewed as a forerunner of the Nazi movement, due to her introduction of the Aryan myth as the superior fifth root race of humankind. (It might be noted that the Aryan is also depicted as being a race of light-skinned giants from the lost continent of Atlantis.)

CHINESE MYTHOLOGY: THE STORY OF THE GIANT P’AN KU

As in the Nordic and Celtic myths, a giant was the first living being in Chinese mythology. According to their traditions, in the beginning the entire cosmos was encapsulated by a single egg. Within this egg was a state of utter chaos. The boundaries that distinguish heaven and Earth did not yet exist, and utter darkness reigned, without a sun or moon or stars. From this internal chaotic matter, the first being, the giant P’an Ku emerged. Finding himself trapped in perpetual darkness and chaos, P’an Ku decided to bring order to chaos and create the known universe. His first act as creator of this new cosmos was to break through the egg that surrounded him. “The lighter part of the egg (yang) rose and became the heavens, while the heavier part (yin) fell and became the earth” (Rosenberg 1994, 360).

P’an Ku stood upon the Earth for eighteen thousand years, preventing the sky from crashing to earth by bracing it with his forehead. Eventually P’an Ku lay down and fell asleep, during which time he died. According to mythologist Donna Rosenberg (1994): P’an Ku’s head and his eyebrows formed the planets and stars. His left eye formed the sun and his right eye the moon. His flesh formed the soil of the Earth and his blood the oceans and rivers. His teeth and his bones formed rocks, minerals, and gems. His breath formed the clouds and the wind, while his voice became lightning and thunder. His perspiration formed rain and the dew. The hair on his body formed trees, plants, and flowers, while parasites living on his skin became animals and fish.

The similarities between the events of P’an Ku’s mythology and the death and dismemberment of Ymir of Nordic literature, and the subsequent creation of the world from his body, are quite apparent. Indeed, even the account of the parasites on P’an Ku’s skin becoming animals and fish harkens back to German legend wherein the maggots inside of Ymir’s stomach transformed into a race of dwarves.

CHINESE MUMMIES AND THE WATCHERS

In their book Uriel’s Machine, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas discuss the so-called Watchers, a race of fallen angels who mated with mortal women and produced the giants who came to rule the antediluvian world. Some researchers theorize that these entities were also the progenitors of both the Celtic and Germanic peoples of Western Europe.

The Watchers are featured in the Book of Enoch, where they and their offspring implore Enoch to represent them: “All the giants [and monsters] grew afraid and called Mahway. He came to them and the giants pleaded with him and sent him to Enoch [to speak on their behalf]” (Knight and Lomas 2001, 84). They then beg the god of Newgrange to spare them and the world from the comet about to strike and bring about the mighty deluge. The god responds: “All the mystery had not yet been revealed to you. . . . You have no peace. . . . Behold, destruction is coming, a great flood, and it will destroy all” (Knight and Lomas 2001, 294). Knight and Lomas believe that this culture of Watchers—the giants of biblical fame—knew of the coming catastrophe and felt that they would find safety and salvation only in the Tarim Basin, a high plateau guarded by the mountain ranges of Tibet and Mongolia.

Interestingly enough, a series of Chinese archaeological excavations in the late 1980s revealed hundreds of very tall mummies along the western border of China, the human remains of which exhibited clear Caucasian traits. These are known as the Tarim mummies. One of the taller ones, called Chärchän Man or the Ur-David, was about 6.5 feet in height—and some were even taller. Knight and Lomas assert that, to the Asians who first recorded their encounters with these yellow-haired barbarians, they truly must have seemed like giants, and in this they may have contributed to or given rise to some of the rumors of giants and strange yellow-haired peoples. They do not, however, explain the ancient accounts of monstrous and imposing beings that possessed near-supernatural or even extraterrestrial strength and abilities.

Other ancient corpses discovered in Mongolia, Siberia, and Central Asia display the same European characteristics. While a fair number of these mummies date back to at least 3500 BCE, others are even older, dating to around 5000–4000 BCE. In addition to having European features, they wore Western-style clothing, including plaid twill and the world’s earliest known pair of pants. Carbon-14 dating provides perhaps the best estimate of the mummies’ age, placing them at 3,500 years before the birth of the Han Chinese civilization in 206 BCE. Evidence suggests that they are related to an Indo-European–speaking group of Caucasians known as the Tocharians (Baumer 2000, 28). These prehistoric Chinese remains were unknown to much of the outside world until a security breach led to the announcement of the discoveries in 1994.

Were these mummies found in Tarim the remains of the Watchers of biblical renown? It’s an intriguing question that may never be fully answered. We will elaborate on the mysterious Watchers in chapter 8 because there is much more to be said about these cryptic figures about whom so little is known but about whom much speculation exists.

GIANTS IN THE NEW WORLD: FROM MYTH TO HISTORY

In the earliest written accounts of almost every culture we find descriptions of fierce light-skinned people who were once the central force of a lost civilization. Science writer Terrence Aym, in an e-mail message to the author on January 22, 2011, describes the following series of events in addressing the presence of giants in ancient North America. He also discusses some of the encounters between European explorers and various gigantic Caucasian aborigines in Central and South America.

According to Aym, the Paiute tribe of present-day Nevada tells of an ancient war they waged against a primordial race of white-skinned, red-haired giants. The Paiute claim they were as tall as twelve feet in height and called the imposing Caucasians the Si-Te-Cah. (Si-Te-Cah literally means “tule-eaters” in the language of the Paiute Indians. Tule is a fibrous plant that the giants used to construct assault rafts.) According to tribal lore, this very tall race was already living in North America when the ancestors of the Paiute arrived fifteen thousand years ago. The modern scientific dogmatism dismisses such reports as sheer fantasy, but there has to be more to it than just a case of overactive imagination. And indeed, in the United States, hundreds of excavations, including sites in Virginia, New York state, Michigan, Illinois, Tennessee, Arizona, and Nevada, support the Paiute account.

Hard scientific evidence specifically buttressing the legend of a war with giant red-haired Caucasians first came to light in 1924 at Lovelock Cave in Nevada. According to the legend, during the pitch of battle, the Paiute pursued the giants into a cave, where they took sanctuary and continued to resist the tribe, ignoring their demands to exit the cave and face the tribe head-on. The enraged tribesmen covered the cave with brush and then ignited it into flames, hoping to burn their enemies out. A small number of the stalwart giants ran from the cave entrance and were immediately pummeled by a barrage of arrows. Those who remained in the cave were overcome by intense fumes and perished.

In 1911, skeletons and fossils were found in the area dating to the time of the legend’s origin. More than ten thousand artifacts were unearthed, including the mummified remains of two red-haired giants. One of them was a female, 6.5 feet tall, and the other a male that towered over 8 feet. These relics proved once and for all that the Paiute myth of a war against a race of white-skinned, red-haired giants was not fantasy, but was in fact a stark reality. Evidence in the form of broken arrows that had been shot into the cave and a dark layer of burned material confirms the description of the climactic battle scene that concludes the legend.

Two very large skeletons were then unearthed in the Humboldt dry lakebed near Lovelock, Nevada. Among the human remains was one skeleton wrapped in a gum-covered cloth not unlike those found in Egyptian mummifications, and measuring some 8.5 feet tall. The other was an astounding 10 feet tall.

The Book of Mormon, which also speaks of giants, calls these original inhabitants the Jaredites, often considered the Olmec of Central America (but it is more than likely that the Olmec were just a single part of a much more widely distributed population). In Ether 15:26, the Mormon scriptures claim that they were “large and mighty men as to the strength of men.” The sixteenth-century chronicler Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl wrote:

In this land called New Spain there were giants, as demonstrated by their bones that have been discovered in many areas. The ancient Toltec record keepers referred to the giants as Quinametzin; and as they had a record of the history of the Quinametzinm they learned that they had many wars and dissensions among themselves in this land that is now called New Spain. They were destroyed, and their civilization came to an end as a result of great calamities and as a punishment from the heavens for graves [sic] sins that they had committed. (Allen and Allen 2008, 124)

From the evidence, it seems irrefutable that a real race of red-haired giants dominated the Americas at one time, perhaps tens of thousands of years before the arrival of the ancestors of today’s Native Americans across the Bering Strait some thirteen thousand to fifteen thousand years ago. In defense of this statement, one must concede that race is a mutable thing, and that the physical appearance of New World humans during the Ice Age may have been quite different—perhaps they were part of a line that left no known descendants. By the same token, the presence of a forgotten Caucasian population in Asia that could have walked across Beringia with the other Asiatics is also a possibility. This would explain some of the unusual results from recent genetic testing, which has confirmed the presence of Caucasoid genes in some of the existing ancient remains.

Western European explorers such as Ferdinand Magellan, Sir Francis Drake, Hernando de Soto, and Commodore Byron (the famous poet Lord Byron’s grandfather) all reported encountering living giants all across the North American continent, remnants of a once proud and noble race of Caucasian “superhumans.”

Later, in chapter 6, we will explore more accounts of giants in the New World, but first let’s examine what may have been one of their early roles in the history of the human race. We will then attempt to define a viable scientific explanation for the genesis of giants. Where did the giants come from? If not the stars, did they evolve on Earth and, if so, how? We will examine both topics in the following chapter.