Are the Illuminati Controlling the News for the Nephilim? Plus: Giant Skeletons in Western New York State

Generally speaking, I don’t post very much about topics where there isn’t much to say. Scott Wolter appeared at the Paradigm Symposium the other day, and he delivered a lecture that contained the same material he always says about the Kensington Rune Stone and Templar-Jesus conspiracies, clocking in at around 90 minutes, or half the length of an average radio appearance. There’s a great summary and reaction by a flabbergasted skeptic over at the Pharyngula blog, and I recommend you check it out. The “facts” and claims, such as they are, I’ve covered many times before, so I don’t really have anything to add. Instead, I’ll move on to a topic where I can add a little bit to the discussion.

Are you worried that the “Midas touch of the Illuminati” is making your Drudge Report experience less satisfying? Do you worry that conservatism is under attack from demonic liberals who are enacting Satan’s agenda? If so, you might be Nephilim theorist Steve Quayle, who joined televangelist Jim Bakker yet again to shill for his books about giants and Nephilim. In a segment making the rounds of the internet this past week but apparently shot back at the end of January, Quayle alleged that the Illuminati are controlling the news in order put all humanity under the yoke of the Nephilim: “They’re releasing the information that will ultimately enslave us,” Quayle said.
 
“The hybrid situation is relative to the giants,” Bakker said. “It’s in the Bible! Over and over in the Bible!”
 
Bakker and Quayle endorsed the interpretation of Genesis 6:4 that would identify the “Sons of God” as Fallen Angels, fathers of the Giants, and Quayle also endorsed the extra-canonical Jewish legend that demons are the ghosts of the Nephilim-Giants. Quayle adds that the ghosts of the Nephilim possess human beings.
 
“The reason it’s important is because science wants to do away with the last vestige of Adam, the last man on Earth,” Quayle says. “And Jesus said that if it were possible, even the elect, there would be the destruction of all flesh.”
 
Quayle adds that “people don’t understand” that the Giants were once the predominant species on the Earth, in the days before Noah, and he cites as proof evidence that his film crews obtained by taking pictures of “large stone structures” in South America and Bulgaria. Quayle recognizes that he is walking a fine line in accepting pagan legends of these buildings’ giant builders as true, so he reminds viewers that legends can contain truth even if Satan has filled them with lies. Quayle alleges that South American structures are built with “thousand ton stones” that are fit together with precision impossible for humans and so large we cannot move them today. The largest stone blocks ever used are those of the Trilithon at Baalbek, and they weigh only 800 tons. He is presumably conflating this with the enormous blocks of the Wall of the Six Monoliths at Ollantaytambo, which are among the largest used in South America. They weigh only 50 tons each.
 
Quayle stated that the Bolivian government is “covering up” evidence of the Nephilim, presumably at Tiwanaku and Puma Punku, but he did not offer evidence of this other than his assertion that the film crew he sent to Bolivia ran into trouble with the Bolivian military while trying to film at the sites. He attributed this to a conspiracy.
 
I was thinking about Quayle’s misrepresentation of South American architecture when reading the Saturday posting of the Nephilim Chronicles blog, which posts old news reports and book excerpts about giants. If Quayle misinterprets and misremembers information in ways that enhance the Nephilim, the Nephilim Chronicles of Fritz Zimmerman happily accepts old reports at face value with little interest in the reality behind them. Take this account given on Saturday from an 1878 book called The History of Niagara County, New York. I won’t bore you by pasting in the entirety of the discussion of a supposed mass grave of four thousand souls found in Cambria, New York in 1824 and dating back to the early colonial period. Zimmerman quotes part, but by no means all, of the report, but for our purposes the most interesting lines are these, from page 51:

“…One hundred and fifty persons a day visited this spot the first season, and carried off the bones. They are now nearly all gone and the pit ploughed over.” The remains of a wall were traced near the vault. Some of the bones found in the latter were of unusual size. One of these was a thigh bone that had been healed of an oblique fracture. One was the upper half of a skull so large that that of a common man would not fill it.

The quotation marks refer back to an earlier account, which is the primary source our later author used. When we turn back to one earlier account, published in the official records of the New York State Senate in 1846, we see that there are some key differences that the later author papered over in adding what seems to be a later accretion of lore:

One hundred and fifty persons a day visited this spot the first season, and carried off the bones. They are now nearly all gone, and the pit ploughed over. Will any antiquarian inform us, if possible, why these bones were placed here! To what tribe do they belong? When did such a massacre occur? None of the bones of the men were below middle size, but some of them were very large. The teeth were in a perfectly sound state.

Oddly, the “large” bones aren’t taken to be exceptional in size in the earlier account. This Senate report was reedited and republished that same year as an appendix to Henry R. Schoolcraft’s Notes on the Iroquois, for even though the text is by multiple authors Schoolcraft served as editor.
 
The point, of course, is that the early report—still twenty years after the fact—made no mention of exceptionally gigantic remains, implying that such a story emerged only in the intervening half-century. So the large skull report must have come from the anonymous History of Niagara County’s acknowledged source, Chipman P. Turner, a local newspaper owner and editor. This Turner undoubtedly provided our author with material from O. Turner’s Pioneer History of the Holland Purchase from 1850 in which that Turner reminisced about his participation in the 1824 excavation, though he gives the date as 1823. There we find the source for one of the added claims:

A thigh bone of unusual length, was preserved for a considerable period by a physician of Lockport, and excited much curiosity. It had been fractured obliquely. In the absence of any surgical skill, or at least any application of it, the bone had strongly re-united, though evidently so as to have left the foot turned out at nearly a right angle.

Turner, though, doesn’t mention an over-sized skull. He also doesn’t attribute the thigh bone’s size to giants, or even anything unusual. Rather, his interest in it is due to the healed fracture. That didn’t stop later writers from immediately exaggerating his report. In 1860, for example, the Gazetteer of the State of New York already wrongly attributed to Turner the claim that the bones “apparently belonged to men of almost giant size.” All that from one thigh bone! The author clearly conflated this account with Turner’s quotation of hearsay from attorney, state assemblyman, and future U.S. Rep. Silas M. Burroughs (1810-1860) that in Shelby Center in Orleans County “giant” skeletons were unearthed sometime in the past in a grave exactly like the one Turner described seeing in 1823.
 
This gets a little confusing because Lockport, Cambria, and Shelby Center are all right next to each other, so conflating the stories is quite easy. According to the Gazetteer the “Giants” were located 1.25 miles west of Shelby Center, which is to the east of Lockport. The “unusual” thigh bone was located near Cambria, six miles to the west of Lockport. These mass graves are not the same, no matter how much their descriptions resemble each other. Those writers who are not natives of upstate New York seem not have paid much attention to the distinction of geography and assumed that the two sites near to Lockport were one and the same.
 
Oddly enough, Turner is apparently also the primary source for the Shelby Center giant skeleton claims, and all later accounts—including those of the Gazetteer, Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments, the Pioneer History of Orleans County, the Bulletin of the New York State Museum, and Mormon fringe historian Wayne May’s This Land: They Came from the East—all derive from Turner. It appears no one ever tried to independently confirm the story that Burroughs told Turner.
 
I wasn’t able to find any other author before or after 1878 who referenced the oversized skull cap. This leaves us with the possibility that it was a local legend, an old newspaper account, or a mistake. Notably, when New York State took up the matter again in the Senate’s 1901 session, they quoted Turner but made no mention of the later claim about an oversized skull. Known later as “Burial Place No. 38” in Niagara County, the site was visited again in 1908, and many bone fragments were still to be seen on the surface. No giant bones, however, were visible.