Here There Be Giants (Maybe)

Several months ago, I had been watching a series about the search for giants, meaning, I suppose, a race of extra-large humans. I saw some newspaper articles from decades ago suggesting that an extraordinary tall man had lived and died in a small town. The doctor suggested he was, maybe nine feet, maybe eight feet tall. The point is that there seemed to be some evidence for the existence of this man that included measurements made by the doctor.

I also noticed that there were those who rejected the idea, saying that there were no giants. It was a wild goose chase, not unlike the search for treasure on Oak Island (okay, they didn’t say Oak Island, I just mentioned that because it seems to be me that Oak Island is/was a wild goose chase).

But, I wondered, just how tall was the tallest human who had ever lived. Anyone who had a computer can learn about Robert Pershing Wadlow, who, according to the documentation available was nearly nine feet tall when he died. He was huge. He was, dare I say it, “A giant.”

The Long and the Short of It.
Photo courtesy Roswell Yearbook.

There was also Angus MacAskill who was nearly eight feet tall, which would have qualified him for the NBA, had it existed in the nineteenth century and who was mentioned on some lists because he was what they called a natural giant. That meant, simply, that his size was not the result of a malfunction of his pituitary gland.

And, because the program had focused on giants in antiquity, I thought I would mention Maximinus Thrax, a Roman emperor, who died sometime around 238, and was claimed to have been just over eight and a half feet tall. In other words, in the Roman world of the time, he would have been considered a giant.

I thought, there is some compelling evidence that there had been some very tall people throughout history. They were so tall that they would be considered giants, especially in a world where people might not have averaged much over five feet tall. We don’t have to look for evidence that there were giants. That seemed to be established fact by the proper documentation.

But, of course, that wasn’t the point of the search for giants. They weren’t looking for the individual who suffered from a glandular problem, but for a race of humans who would have been considered giants. They weren’t really looking for someone pushing nine feet tall, but a race that was twelve or fifteen feet tall. They wanted to prove that there had been giants at one time, living among, or near the smaller humans.

In fact, there was a report not all that long ago, in December, 2014, in the World News Daily Report that claimed the Smithsonian Institution had destroyed thousands of giant human skeletons at the beginning of the last century. In a legal case that supposedly made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, the Smithsonian was required to release documentation about all this, proving that these skeletons had existed and that those at the Smithsonian had destroyed them.

The allegations came originally from the American Institution of Alternative Archeology which claimed that the skeletons, which would have called the theory of evolution into question had been ordered by high-ranking administrators at the Smithsonian destroyed.

So, I have moved from the idea that there were individuals who might have been considered giants but that there was no race that would be considered giants, to a point where evidence of giants had been systematically destroy to preserve a specific idea. Evidence and documentation that was required to be released by the Supreme Court.

Frankly, the article made little sense to me. I don’t know why the Smithsonian would have classified documents about administrative details, I don’t know why they would have destroyed “tens of thousands” of skeletons” of what would have been historical significance, nor do I understand why the Supreme Court would have been brought in on this… and if they had, wouldn’t their ruling not only be of  interest to the media, but wouldn’t I (or a lawyer) be able to retrieve information about such a ruling because it would be in the public record?

I couldn’t find any information about this American Institution of Alternative Archeology. Anytime I see something like “alternative archaeology,” I become suspicious. The alternative suggests that it is not a recognized organization. But, in this case, I couldn’t any references to it, other than from the original article. All references ended up there.

Or, in other words, I don’t buy any this story, and it seems that while there is some very good information out there debunking it, not to mention some logical and internal inconsistencies, there still seems to be way too many who believe it. After all, the government is hiding the evidence of giants, or so they believe.

Here’s the truth about all this as I understand and my research, quick as it might have been, tells me about it. Yes, there have been some very tall people and I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a couple who exceeded nine feet in height. Wadlow came very close at just over eight feet, eleven inches. However, they weren’t part of a separate race of giant humans, but individuals from the human race who grew very tall.

There is just no independent, corroborative evidence that a race of giants ever co-existed as a separate body from the smaller human race. (Yes, I know about Gigantopithecus but that is classified as an ape and not human,) The best evidence available to us today is that some people grow very tall, some just tall, some fit into the average, and some people are short. Other than that, this has become a non-story that is based on a bogus article about a non-existent organization and that is driven by those who make what we laughingly call documentary television.