Review of Ancient Aliens S21E13 “The Giants”

​The History channel used to love giants. A decade ago, the network’s schedule was lousy with them. They had an entire series devoted to the Search for the Lost Giants. Three episodes of America Unearthed investigated alleged giants and their works. If you count knockoffs on other channels, like Forbidden History, Legends of the Lost, and Unexplained + Unexplored, you couldn’t escape Bible giants on cable TV back then. The spate of giant-themed programming faded during the pandemic and never recovered. Now, they are mostly the province of YouTube videos and Fox Nation pseudo-documentaries. Closer to our topic today, Ancient Aliens itself has done far too many episodes about giants, including “Island of the Giants” (2018), “Giants of the Mediterranean” (2020), “The Giants of Malta” (2023), and “Egypt’s Giant Tombs” (2024), just to name a few that have “giant” in the title. Many more reference giants. And now we have yet another to add to the collection.

​I’m sure that most readers are aware that legends of giants are nearly universal, as are legends of little people, because “big” and “small” are universally recognized and thus appear as storytelling devices the world over. Since Baron Cuvier in the early 1800s, many have argued that the myth of giants arose from misidentified megafauna bones. While it’s more likely that the bones were assigned to preexisting stories born of fantasy, there is no doubt that humans, both ancient and modern, sought to understand their world through mythological stories that bore only a partial connection to reality—kind of like Ancient Aliens itself.
 
Segment 1
The first segment opens with the discovery of a large tomb in the city of Uruk in Iraq back in 2003, which the German archaeologists who found it speculated might have belonged to Gilgamesh. The Iraq War stopped work, and the speculation was never confirmed with evidence. Because Gilgamesh was described a massively tall man, he therefore serves as an entry point to survey of giants and tall beings around the world, ranging from a twelve-foot-tall Buddha to the Tuatha de Danaan from Irish mythology to Baalbek in Lebanon. The segment then rehashes material about giants being associated with the megalithic temples of Malta from the episode about Malta linked above. I covered these claims back then and do not need to rehash them here.
 
After this, we travel to Stonehenge to talk about Geofrey of Monmouth’s story (Historia Regum Brittaniae 8.11) that it was originally constructed by giants in Ireland from African stones, to be used as a bathtub, before being moved to England. Despite showing the actual text of Geoffrey on the screen, the show still manages to misrepresent it, claiming that Merlin had the giants help him build it. We then hear that the skeletons of giants were dug up near Stonehenge, including one fourteen feet ten inches tall. While I found the source the show used, George Lipscomb’s Journey into South Wales (where the height is given wrongly as 14’!0”), his source was Leland’s six-volume, Latin-language Collecteana, which makes no mention of the claim that the skeleton wore a metal disc covered in hieroglyphs. In fact, here is Thomas Elyot’s original passage from his Dictionary of 1538: “About 30 years since I myself, being with my father, Sir Richard Elyot, at a monastery of regular canons (three or four miles from Stonage) beheld the bones of a dead man found deep in the ground, which being joined together, was in length 13 foot and ten inches, whereof one of the teeth my father had, which was of the quantity of a great walnut.” It was, no surprise, the skeleton of a mammoth, like others found in the vicinity.
 
Segment 2
The second segment discusses explorers who claimed to have found the bones of giants. A Captain Besley claimed an eight-foot-tall skeleton in Peru in 1914, which leads to a discussion of the infamous passage in Cieza de Leon about the tribe of all-male homosexual giants who were killed by an angel for being too evil and gay. The show leaves out everything but the supposed existence of giants, and the show attributed Peruvian ruins to giants, following late folklore. We hear an excerpt from Antonio Pigafetta’s journal on Magellan’s voyage in which Magellan’s crew encountered very tall natives in Patagonia. The Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen claimed to find twelve-foot-tall giants in South America with light skin and red hair.
 
Segment 3
The story of the Humboldt Guano Cave / Lovelock “giants” is rehearsed, along with the conspiracy theory that these giants went “missing” and were therefore suppressed by anxious authorities. As I have explained before, the red-haired giant myth was an accidental creation of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, who recorded an oral legend that combined an older story of giants with a newer account of first contact with white settlers. The show takes her account literally, with no critical thinking, instead, calling her story “strong evidence” of giants. As I said years ago:

… the Paiute in general and Winnemucca in particular are best known among fringe historians for their red-haired cannibal giants, the result of the Lovelock Cave archaeological site, where normal-sized human skeletons found in 1911 were mythologized into those of giants because of roadside attractions promising glimpses of Bible giant bones in the 1920s—almost certainly mammoth bones from nearby fossil beds. They gained their red hair and cannibalism because Winnemucca had recorded that a lock of old hair from an extinct tribe of enemies on a dress she owned was red (due to the decay in its black pigments), and that her tribe’s ancient enemies—who were not giants—were cannibals. Adrienne Mayor suspects that the cannibalism claim came from the burnt-flesh smell of the guano deposits in Lovelock Cave. Winnemucca does in fact describe the cave as being filled with a terrible smell after the death of the cannibals.

​The show implies that it is racist and sexist to treat Hopkins’s story critically.
 
Similarly, Native American petroglyphs seemingly showing large creatures with six fingers are taken as images of a lost race of giants. This leads to a discussion of global giants with six fingers—an idea that can more easily be explained by the mythological logic that a big guy has big hands and more fingers than it can by a lost race of giants with no remains to be seen.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment takes seriously Paxson Hayes’ pseudoscientific claims to have found the bodies of a race of giants. Hugh Newman claims that Victorian reports giant bones were suppressed by the Smithsonian, and the conspiracy that the Smithsonian destroyed the bones are repeated, with Vieira calling giants “the ideological enemy of science” because they supposedly prove the Bible true. As I have discussed before, many of these Victorian measurements were done incorrectly based on faulty ideas about how bones could be used to estimate height. When the correct conversion method are used, the giants disappear. Others were mammoth or mastodon bones, and when correctly identified as such also made giants disappear. Some Navajo myths are discussed, but no real connection to giants is made.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment discusses Helena Blavatsky’s claims about Ascended Masters. Why? Who knows. I guess they ran out of giants. Blavatsky mentioned giants in The Secret Doctrine because she borrowed from early mythologies that included giants. There is really nothing worth discussing here other than her borrowings, which identified the Lemurians and Atlanteans with the giants and Nephilim of the antediluvian world. Edgar Cayce’s plagiarism of Blavatsky is then discussed.
 
Segment 6
The final segment, of course, covers the Book of Enoch, which discusses the Watchers and their Giant offspring. The show loves the Nephilim, so this is no surprise. The show claims that the Book of Enoch was “removed” from the Bible, though there is no evidence it was ever considered canon outside of Ethiopia. William Henry says that there is no way humans could possibly have imagined oversized humans on their own, nor could such stories have diffused between cultures. Only giant aliens can account for them. The narrator suggests that “certain groups” are trying to hide the truth about Bible giants from you.