Timothy Alberino Resurrects the "Kandahar Giant" in Joe Rogan Appearance

Joe Rogan was on a pseudoarchaeology and pseudohistory kick this week, with two separate multi-hour episodes devoted to imaginary history, so lucky me: I am making a second bonus post today because so many bad things happened. This time, his guest was Nephilim-hunter Timothy Alberino, who was on to promote his special edition of the Book of Enoch. Alberino related the story of the Kandahar Giant, which I examined a decade ago. I encourage to you to read what I found back at the time, namely that there were at least four different versions of the story Quayle told, one being explicitly a work of fiction (Quayle’s 2006 novel), followed by yet another contradictory account by L. A. Marzulli—all of which find no supporting evidence in U.S. military records from the Afghanistan War. The supposed military member who confirmed the story also refused to give his name, making it impossible to evaluate his story.

​Alberino ignores all of this, even though, as Quayle’s business partner at the time, he was involved in the creation of this fake story. But he is aware that the stories Quayle and Marzulli told are mutually exclusive. So, rather than try to massage the details into one story, he decided to tell Rogan that they all refer to different giants! “It’s not the giant of Kandahar. It’s the giants of Kandahar. There’s more than one.” He said that in recent years, another source told him yet another giant story, that he discussed this with his “friend” Lue Elizondo (they appeared together on tour recently), and that a senator’s chief of staff warned him against investigating Bible giants: “‘What have you gotten yourself into? What are you looking into?’ he said, ‘You need to be really careful.’”
 
I would like to know why high-ranking government officials are always talking to lunatic podcasters who rant about giants and Nephilim. The real question: If everyday Americans can’t get a minute with their representatives and are actively shut out of townhalls and fobbed off with form letters, and if legislators won’t answer questions about UFOs and giants from journalists who express skepticism, why are high-ranking staffers hanging out with people like Timothy Alberino, a Nephilim-hunter, a man who calls gay people “sodomites”?
 
Rogan and Alberino discussed many of the typical fraudulent claims about giants, which they of course accept: that Native Americans reported a lost race of red-haired giants, that the Smithsonian hid all the giants’ bones in its archives, and that academics are suppressing proof of giants because it “contradicts the theory of evolution”—an idea that the Ice Age megafauna whose bones were routinely mistaken for Bible giants refute simply by existing. They discuss familiar stories about giants from Sardinia and Peru, and the traditional claim that big rocks used in ancient buildings were so large only giants could move them. He tells stories—which of course lack evidence even in the age of cameras—that the Catholic Church or the Italian government seized the bones of Sardinian giants when workmen uncovered them years ago. He calls the gay giants of Peru “sodomites.” (I used it ironically in referring to old Spanish documents about gay giants, but not seriously.)
 
I still find it odd that Alberino endorses the Book of Enoch, since mainstream Christian churches (with the rare exception of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church) consider its teachings to contradict Christian doctrine. But the Watchers and Nephilim story is the core of all pseudohistory and occultism in the West, so I suppose it is inevitable. Alberino claims we have documents where the Amorites summoned the Rephaim, another group of Bible giants, though this is not strictly speaking true. Amorite and Ugaritic documents refer to the Rp’um, cognate with the Rephaim, but in context an Amorite term for the spirits of deceased royal ancestors. (In the Bible, Og of the Amorites is the last of the Rephaim.)
 
Alberino, you see, thinks the Book of Enoch contains the oldest and most accurate account of prehistory:

I think actually the oldest story is the story of Enoch. It’s the Enochian story. I think that’s the original story. And maybe some of this strangeness, maybe some of the bizarre things that we see and the stories of the Flood and of the giants and all of that, maybe something like the Book of Enoch is actually an accurate account of affairs of things that happen in the antediluvian world. And certainly, the writers of the biblical narrative believe that. I mean the writer of Genesis, and then obvious in the New Testament, you have references to what I call the Enochian tale. And so when you think about this the antediluvian world the cataclysm that that destroyed it seemingly overnight the great civilizations that existed back then. Um, you see a you see a series of parallels in all the stories, all the ancient stories. Uh, whether it be the Sumerians, whether it be the ancient Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, there are parallels in certain details. 

​He even claims that Enoch was a Sumerian king and actually wrote the first version of the book under his name with his own pen in those days. There is no evidence of the Watchers myth prior to, at most, 500 BCE. Earlier stories that have some similarities are likely the Mesopotamian source material the writer inverted and transformed to make his story, as decades of scholarship and academic inquiry has shown.
 
He even brings in Atlantis, and while noting that Plato was explicitly modeling the destruction of Atlantis in the Critias on the Near Eastern Flood Myth, he takes it as further proof the story is true.
 
Alberino subscribes to a modern version of Arkism, the belief that all religions derive from misremembered accounts of Noah’s Ark. What Alberino stumbled upon is the notion that Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures shared a common Flood myth, first recorded by the Sumerians, which accounts for the similarity in their stories. It’s like asking why languages from Spain to India share words in common without considering their shared Indo-European heritage.
 
Elsewhere, Alberino falsely claims that American elites are part of a Satanic Baal cult, based on the Epstein Files, which he again falsely claims include references to Baal worship. The word “Baal” does appear, but only in financial spreadsheets as an abbreviation—and it is actually “Baa1” (with the number 1), which the OCR in the Justice Department search engine misread as Baal. “Baa1” is a Moody’s investment-grade credit rating. (“Baal,” with the letter L, is referenced once, in an article about David Bowie copied in the files, which mentioned a painting with that title.)
 
Alberino later stated on social media that he was wrong to repeat the Baal claim, which he claims to have heard secondhand, without researching it.
 
When confronted with the question of whether giants’ bones are just the bones of megafauna or even hoaxes, Alberino admitted that many, if not most, were, but he insisted that some were not, but could not say how he knows this other than trusting his storytellers to have correctly identified those bones that best confirm Bible stories.
 
Most of the stories Alberino tells about North American mounds are familiar from repetition over decades of cable TV shows, fringe history books, and podcasts. I covered many of them in my book The Mound Builder Myth, and they were hoary with age and long debunked with the Victorians promulgated them in the 1800s. And he and Rogan try to identify the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis with Noah’s Flood and the death of the giants.
 
After name-checking a bunch of fellow fringe-history all-stars like Graham Hancock, the conversation ends with a lament that humans are degenerating, that male sperm counts are declining, and we are falling into sin and decay and losing touch with God. That, of course, is the real underlying issue that percolates unspoken across the manosphere and right-wing podcasting space: American men just aren’t super-manly giant studs like they used to be in the good old days of racism and hierarchy, and we need to sell some supplements, tan our testicles, and get that old time religion so men can go be masculine again and breed more white people.