The Complete Guide To Mysterious Beings - Galaksija

An old book titled History and Antiquities of Allerdale offers this undated description of a giant
found in Cumberland, England, sometime in the Middle Ages. It is supposed to be ”A True Report
of Hugh Hodson, of Thorneway.”
The said giant was buried four yards deep in the ground, which is now a corn field. He was
four yards and a half long, and was in complete armour: his sword and battle-axe lying by
him. His sword was two spans broad, and more than two yards long. The head of his battleaxe
a yard long, and the shaft of it all of iron, as thick as a man's thigh, and more than two
yards long.
His teeth were six inches long, and two inches broad; his forehead was more than two spans
and a half broad. His chin bone could contain three pecks of oatmeale. His armour, sword,
and battle-axe are at Mr. Sand's of Redington, and at Mr. Wyber's, at St. Bees.
A man fifteen feet tall, dressed in armor – a true Goliath! We have no way of knowing what
happened to this interesting find. The bones and armor may have been scattered eventually among
dozens of souvenir collectors.
In those early times the discovery of bones and fossils of prehistoric animals were often misjudged
to be the bones of giants. And there were Hugh Troys in those days who were quite willing to turn
mastodons into ancient giants. One such prankster appears to have been a physician named Dr.
Mazurier who wrote a remarkable pamphlet in 1613, claiming that the tomb of a giant had been
unearthed near the castle of Chaumont. The tomb contained a human skeleton over twenty-five feet
long, with shoulders ten feet wide.
A controversy soon raged over this discovery and other pseudoscientific pamphleteers accused Dr.
Mazurier of buying some big bones from some workmen and hoking up his giant. The bones still
exist in the Musée de Paléntologie in Paris as a part of their mastodon collection.
The best-known hoax of this type took place in Sussex, England, in 1908, when an amateur
archaeologist named Charles Dawson purportedly found fragments of bone near Piltdown. The
fragments seemed to be part of a ”dawn man” dating back hundreds of thousands of years.
Peleontologists at the British Museum of Natural History became quite excited over this ”Piltdown
Man” and it became one of science's most important artifacts. Dawson died in 1916, honored and
distinguished as the discoverer of a vital link to man's distant past.
Thirty-six years passed before a new generation of scientists took a second look at the ”Piltdown
Man's” illustrous skull. They subjected it to carbon fourteen radioactivity tests, and sprinkled it with
the magical chemicals that had been developed since Dawson's time. Their conclusions rocked the
scientific world. The jaw of the ”dawn man” belonged to an ape who had joined his ancestors
around 1900. Even worse, there was evidence that some highly skilled dentist had carefully and
lovingly filed away at the teeth and remodeled part of the bone structure. The ”Piltdown Man” was
a cunning fake!
Had Charles Dawson pulled the leg of science? Or was he, himself, the victim of a prank? If so,
who could have had the knowledge, skill, and motivations to execute such an elaborate hoax? The
discovery of the manipulation created a whole new mystery and raised questions which will
probably never be answered.
As soon as Europeans began to explore the distant reaches of South America, they encountered a
breed of giant men. The southernmost parts of Argentina and Chile were labeled Patagonia by
Magellan because the giants there wore leather moccasins and ”pata” is Spanish for ”hoof.” In June
1520 when Magellan's fleet anchored at Port San Julian on the Argentine coast, a giant appeared on
the beach. Pigafetta, a member of Magellan's staff, later wrote: ”This man was so tall that our heads
scarcely came up to his waist, and his voice was like that of a bull.”
Magellan's men managed to capture two of the giants, intending to take them back to Europe, but
they died in chains en route.
Next, the British explorer Drake docked in Port San Julian in 1578 and had a skirmish with ”men of
large stature” who towered at seven feet six inches tall. He lost two of his men in the battle.