The Kandahar Giant
Cryptozoologists and conspiracy theorists would have you believe that in 2002, Special Forces engaged with a giant whose corpse was summarily covered up by the government. It sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but there’s just enough wiggle room that you can’t conclusively say all of it is untrue. Let’s step back and look at a few other giants around the world to prime our brains to receive this information.
Ubiquitous as it is, the Bible is a significant cultural document, and as such many people have heard of the Nephilim. But right out of the gate, everything gets wonky and definitions are wibbly. Popular belief holds that the Nephilim, or Giborim, were the offspring of angels and human women, cited in the books of Genesis, Numbers, and by certain interpretation, Ezekiel.
When humans began to increase upon the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, certain divine beings saw how beautiful the human women were, and so they took wives for themselves from among them, whomever they chose. YHWH said, “My spirit will not remain with humans forever, for they are but flesh; their lifetime will be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the divine beings procreated with human women. They bore children to them; they were the heroes of old, famous men.
Some Biblical scholars believe that the word Nephilim comes from the Hebrew for “fallen,” and they may have been an analogy for a population of righteous people who fell from grace. It’s true that giants have been used in ancient texts to represent anything from the force of nature to an undesirable past battling the present. This is demonstrated in the Greek legends of the gigantomachy and titanomachy, where the Titans rose up to rebel against the gods in their kingdom of Olympus, an analogy of the sins of the past threatening the order of the present. For that matter, King David’s first political act was to slay the giant Goliath of Gath in the Valley of Elah, setting the Israelites to defeat the Philistines. And then 2 Samuel 21:20 describes four more battles against gigantic Philistines: Ishbibenob, Sibbechai, an unnamed brother of Goliath, and an unnamed giant who possessed six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. Remember this for a bit. These four were listed as kin to someone named Harapha, referred to as the father of the giants. This family of Philistine giants persistently stands in the Israelites’ way, it seems.
And there’s even a school of Biblical study that holds that the Nephilim were the descendants of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third child. Abel was slain by Cain, and Cain’s children were wiped out in the great flood, but Seth was granted to them as one more chance, and all of humanity supposedly descends from him, more immediately the Nephilim. However, they enjoyed the righteousness of Seth’s lineage but also suffered the fury of Cain’s genetic heritage (which was really their parents’), and it’s possible that any allusion to size was an analogy for their prowess as fierce warriors. Indeed, another translation of Nephilim is “heroes of old,” linking them both to the powerful warriors of Seth’s offspring and that ancient people who fell from righteousness. Whether it’s their disgrace in action or the disgrace of being impure creatures born of angels and humans, the Bible states that God required the giants to be destroyed, so that He may rule, so they were only an obstacle to Him. When the Israelites scouted out Canaan as a place to live, they found themselves up against another Philistine tribe of Nephilim who needed to be exterminated before Israel could come into its own.
The books of Genesis and Numbers don’t actually state how large the Nephilim were supposed to be, though it’s worth noting that around 1996 two female skeletons measuring seven feet in length were excavated in Jordan and carbon-dated to the 12th century. That’s interesting.
In the United States, specifically Nevada, the Paiute tribes tell stories of gigantic people, the Si-Te-Cah, who migrated to their land and tormented the smaller people. These giants had red hair and were reportedly cannibalistic, and they were defeated only when the Paiute unified all the regional tribes to chase them into Lovelock Cave. There, they smoked the giants out with fire and slew them with volleys of arrows.
A mining engineer, John T. Reid, who heard these stories from the Paiute decided to go looking for himself in Lovelock Cave in 1886, but his exploration was interrupted by capitalism. A mining company run by David Pugh and James Hart plundered the location in 1911 for its huge guano deposits, a valuable source of fertilizer. In the course of all this digging, the mummified remains of a 6’6“ woman and an 8’-tall man were discovered with red hair, though simple biology tells us that hair pigment is not stable after death, and the discoloration could be due to environmental factors. These discoveries, plus a number of strange artifacts, prompted official excavations in 1912 and 1924, led by the University of California.
Later in 1931, another trove of artifacts was discovered in this location, including sandals that were 15” long, about the length of the shin on a 6’-tall man, from ankle to knee. Around this time two more giant skeletons were discovered, buried in a dry lake bed not far from Lovelock Cave. These mummified bodies were measured at 8’6“ and 10’ tall, preserved in a manner that appeared similar to the style of ancient Egyptian mummies. Finally, a human’s painted and imprinted handprint was found on a wall of the cave in 2013, a hand at least twice as large as that of a normal man’s.
This legend of the Si-Te-Cah is not isolated, as there are many myths in North and South America of giants sailing from distant lands on boats made of reed or tule, also called hardstem bulrush, common to freshwater marshes throughout North America. The name Si-Te-Cah means “tule-eaters,” a testament to their toughness if they could eat that plant. There’s also a Peruvian legend of the same thing, giants sailing to their territory on reed boats, and the story tell us that “…some of the men were so tall that from the knee down they were as big as the length of an ordinary fair-sized man.” Even considering that many native Mesoamerican people centuries back were just over five feet tall, that still makes these giants considerably large.
Now, back to Operation Enduring Freedom. The supernatural story that thrives, to this day, in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan holds that in 2002, an Army infantry unit—possibly from 10th Mountain Light Infantry—disappeared in the Kandahar mountain range. Troops were always eager to check back in with base, let them know things were all right or that they were about to engage in a conflict, so it was highly unusual for an entire squad to disappear without a radio signal. In later investigation, many Army officers recalled that many squads of US soldiers disappeared in the caves throughout the region, in the early 2000s. This could be for any reason, of course, like an ambush by the Taliban.
But for this incident, a squad of Green Berets were deployed to search for the infantry. Among these was an individual calling himself Mr. K, who broke his NDA to speak about this. The Green Berets flew out discreetly, examined the area around the mountains for days, then decided to explore a winding goat path up the mountain. Here they found pieces of military equipment and shreds of military uniform bearing the unit patches of the missing squad, as well as broken bones of indeterminate origin. They began to explore a large cave, large enough to hold all of them, when Mr. K says he saw indistinct movement, seconds before a large spear flew out of the darkness to impale his fellow soldier, only known as “Dan.”
By this report, a large humanoid emerged from the darkness, howling balefully and moving to retrieve its spear for another attack. The height of this being was between 12 and 15 feet tall, with wild red hair and beard. It apparently had two sets of fangs in its jaws—by some accounts, double rows of teeth—six fingers and six toes on each hand and foot, and was dressed in animal pelts and a form of moccasins. The soldiers’ impression was that it stank like a corpse. The soldiers were armed with full-auto M4 semi-auto carbines, known as recon carbines, and M107 Barrett anti-materiel .50 BMG rifles, a bipod-mounted firearm used to take down vehicles. They fired upon the being for a full 30 seconds to kill it and radioed the conflict back to base, struggling to explain what had happened.
Two Chinook helicopters flew out, one to retrieve the troops and the other to haul the giant away, after struggling with loading it into cargo netting. The second helicopter, however, rendezvoused with a C-130 aircraft to haul the giant away to Germany. The unnamed pilot of the C-130 corroborates this story, testifying that he personally saw the giant body. However, another anecdote says that it was a C-17 crewchief who witnessed the body in Bagram Air Base in Kabul, measured and weighed it before loading it on a flight to Wright-Patterson AFB outside of Dayton, Ohio.
In the after-action review, however, the Green Berets reported the incident as clearly as they could, but they were informed by their officers that this was clearly unacceptable. They were coerced to rewrite their story to sound like a regular skirmish with enemy units, and were made to sign NDAs that they would never discuss this with anyone else again. Yet on August 16, 2016, Mr. K came out of the shadows to stage an interview with L.A. Marzulli. Marzulli is a right-wing self-described “supernaturalist” with an agenda to prove the existence of Nephilim and therefore substantiate the truth of Biblical prophesies. This interview existed briefly on YouTube before being taken down, and in fact-checking this story, Snopes contacted the Pentagon for details. A spokesperson from the Department of Defense predictably denied any record or knowledge of any such incident.
Yet this story of the Kandahar giant persists on the Afghan air base, and in multiple accounts no one questions its veracity. One of those “guess you had to be there” circumstances. In his own investigation, Marzulli cited a second source, a “shooter” stationed at that base who assured him that everyone on the base regards the story as true. When a military pilot reached out to radio host Steven Quayle (who took over Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM) with his own story of flying a giant body away, he was put in contact with the shooter, but in conversation they realized they were involved with two different giants in two different locations in Afghanistan! YouTuber and former Navy SEAL “MrBallen” says that he personally felt the mountains and caves of Kandahar were strange enough to house anything, and commenters on his video about the Kandahar giant also attest they saw similar things or later worked with the Green Berets who encountered the giant.
On a final note, Nick Orton has written a series of books called Tales from the Grid Square that compiles military encounters with the supernatural. One of these is the Giant of Kunar—a valley between Afghanistan and Pakistan—who was seen by an infantry team leader around 2008, as well as an Air Force drone operator who found, by infrared, three giants tending to chores around their camp. In his words, “The only interesting thing was the size. The goats looked like cats next to them.”
I hope you enjoyed this crash course into yet another phenomenon of this big, crazy world of ours. I wouldn’t admire anyone who swallows it without question, and I wouldn’t respect anyone who dismisses it out of hand. Where do I stand? Life has shown me many things are possible (as well as the military’s propensity for cover-ups).
If you’re looking for more Size-related material, please listen to my new podcast, zHeightgeist, and subscribe to it wherever you listen to podcasts or on YouTube. In it, I explore the various creative facets of macrophilia and Size Fantasy. You can also pore through my personal website, loaded with exciting and erotic stories of giantesses and shrunken men and sprinkled with complaints about censorship and the writing process.
In Her Shadow,
Aborigen
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