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Now, onto Afghan giants!
There Aren’t Giants in the Hills, But There Were*
Since the completion of my last Afghanistan deployment, a strange phenomenon has occurred. A small but noticeable proportion of people have asked if I heard about the military’s battles against giants. At first, I was dumbstruck. However, after time I realized they were not imagining things but inquiring about a conspiracy theory.
The conspiracy of Afghan giants has morphed and branched, which for many reasons is sad, but one of them is that it replaces real cultural folklore.
The “Giant of Kandahar”
The Stories
The basics of the tale are that in the mountains of Kandahar Province, the United States discovered a twelve foot (about 3.5 meters) tall giant that had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. A short battle erupted and the Americans killed the giant. The military then transported the monster’s corpse to a top secret base.
The reason the above story is vague is that there are competing claims about the alleged event.
The first claim of the Kandahar Giant came from radio host and author Stephen Quayle in 2005. In November 2005, Quayle was on Coast to Coast AM and stated an anonymous Air Force officer said Marines stumbled across the giant. The story involved the Marines thinking villagers were protecting terrorists only to find a thousand pound (around 500 kilograms) plus monster, the villagers revering the giant like a god, and a gun battle in which no Marines were killed. After the giant’s death, its body was taken to Europe. However, by 2008, the story had grown. On another episode of Coast to Coast AM, Quayle appear along with the alleged Air Force officer. The so-called officer - who refused to identify himself - claimed the giant’s body was transported not to Europe but to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, which was also the alleged location of alien bodies from crashed UFOs. In 2015, Quayle changed the story, with the Air Force officer being the one who killed the giant, who was now just nine to twelve feet (2.7 to 3.6 meters) tall, and claimed the government ordered the corpse’s destruction. As a side note, in 2006 Quayle and co-author Duncan Long published a novel about giants called LongWalkers: Return of the Nephilim. The admittedly fictional work was about a U.S. military unit that fought Nephilim (which Quayle and some others think we're the children of women and fallen angels) giants.
A second person picked up the story in 2016. Filmmaker L.A. Marzulli interviewed an alleged member of the Army Special Operations force, the Green Berets, known as “Mr. K” on Marzulli’s YouTube series “Watchers.” According to the alleged operator, the Army special ops unit clashed with the Giant of Kandahar in 2002. Mr. K claimed his unit was sent to search for a missing patrol in the remote mountains outside Kandahar. They found scattered gear, bullet casings, and a cave with human remains. Then, the twelve to fifteen foot (3.5 to 4.5 meters) tall giant emerged from the cave and attacked the Green Berets, killing one of them with a spear. After thirty seconds of non-stop shooting, the soldiers killed the giant. An Army helicopter then airlifted its body out. Marzulli claimed the giant wasn’t technically a pre-Noah’s Flood Nephilim but a post-flood Rephaim giant.
Later, Nephilim and UFO promoter Tim Alberino became an additional source for the story. In 2026 on the Michael Knowles show, Alberino branched off Quayle, saying he and Quayle met the original source together, but added he had his own sources in the government and military. Alberino stated the incident occured not in 2002 but in 2005. He went on to state Special Forces killed the giant and that there was a giant hunting unit in Afghanistan that battled an entire tribe of Nephilim (which just so happened to be the plot of LongWalkers). He stated the government shipped the giant’s body to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to conduct necromantic rituals and experiments on it, because the spirits of dead Nephilim are actually demons.
Other Nephilim-believing Christians and post-Christian New Ager believers of the Secret Space Program have latched onto the Giant of Kandahar story. Multiple sites have tied the Kandahar Giant with belief in a full scale war against the Nephilim giants, including the belief that President Trump used the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast “MOAB” bomb against the giants in Afghanistan in 2017.
My Thoughts on the Kandahar Giant
During my time working with tribes in Afghanistan, including in Kandahar Province, none of the special forces or regular military I met mentioned anything about the Kandahar Giant. Special Operations forces and Marines love to brag while also honor their fallen. If the story of the Kandahar Giant were true, we would have Marines and operators left and right talking about it. Heck, think how many leaks there were about the bin Laden raid in various books and podcasts.
The conflicting yet ever deepening details of the story resemble stories of alien abductions, alleged religious prophecies, and other conspiracy theories that seek to one up one another, going deeper and deeper into lore. The facts that year, combatants, and amount of dead differ along with the lack of evidence that could be checked like the unit’s name and name of the dead, exact dates, etc. should be enough to bury belief in the Giant of Kandahar. Like I wrote about UFO false prophets in my Disclosure Flop post the day the first Pentagon UFO files dropped, this should disqualify believing people like Tim Alberino. They are selling air, and they and those who promote them can be discounted.
The science doesn’t work either. The website Skeptoid did the math and showed how the weight and height ratio of such a creature wouldn’t work in the real world, while also pointing out such a large human-like creature would have extreme medical problems.
Additionally, in a conversation I had with film maker Elizabeth Mirzaei - who made the tearjerker documentary Three Songs for Benazir, which is available on Netflix - she pointed out that there were no Afghan sources about the Kandahar Giant. In my personal opinion, if the United States killed a giant, the Taliban would have launched a propaganda campaign claiming the giant was a faithful Muslim and about to go on the Hajj to Mecca. I joked with Elizabeth that the Taliban would have found a woman and some tall kids, saying they were the good, faithful Muslim giant’s family. As the conversation went on, I gave my belief that the claim the villagers revered the giant “like a god” was insulting to Afghans’ faith. Afghans are a strongly Islamic people, passing off a story of them having something on par with their devotion to Allah just goes to show the complete ignorance of those who made the claim.
During my multiple deployments to Afghanistan, I heard stories about jinn as well as the infamous story about the Germans wanting to kill a dragon who guarded a diamond, and the Pashtuns who fought for the dragon so that the world wouldn’t fall into darkness. In this region with unique stories and folklore, the Giant of Kandahar was missing.
Finally, the fact some stories of the Giant involve a dead soldier, the tall tale offends me. We lost many good people there, let’s not cheapen their deaths with fake giant attacks.
The Real Giant Story
This isn’t to say there are no stories of giants in Afghanistan. In at least one Shia Hazara location in central Afghanistan, there is a grave for an alleged giant. Dr. Kathleen Reedy, formerly of a Human Terrain System team, documented her encounter with what locals considered a giant’s grave. Her write up in her old blog Marking Time ~ The Afghan and Iraqi Wars as Seen by Those Who Live Them is reproduced below because it tells the tale so much better than I ever could.
While out on a patrol with some local policemen, we came across this grave marker:
It was about 20 meters (about 65 feet) long. One of the policemen pointed at it and said, “This was a famous giant. He was almost 20 meters tall, that is why his grave is so long.”
“A giant?” I asked, perhaps a touch skeptically.
“Yes!” chimed in a second one. “As recently as 80 years ago, there were giants all over in this area!”
“Ah, so maybe just really tall people, like 2.5 meters (8-9 feet). That happens sometimes,” I replied.
“No, no!” a third guy insisted. “Not just tall people, real giants. This man was a small one at only 20 meters. Some were as tall as 30 meters (almost 100 feet)!”
I continued to be somewhat cynical, thinking they were pulling my leg and trying to suggest that if the grave marker was any indication of his size, he had been 20 meters tall, but really, really, really skinny.
Not only did my sarcasm fall on deaf ears, it actually insulted the Afghans. Before I knew it, I had a whole squad of Afghan police who were pretty angry and yelling at me. My interpreter, who had a university education and had lived abroad, was no exception–he was vehemently supporting them. As I stood there somewhat flabbergasted, one of my colleagues stepped in with our stories about giants, such as David and Goliath, and came across as much more open-minded. That mollified the crowd somewhat, and they explained that people’s grandparents had seen the giants and had told their grandchildren about them, so it must be true. In the end, the Afghans knew that giants had roamed the earth within living memory and nothing some disbelieving (female) American could say was going to change the truth.
In my defense, my interpreter later admitted that Afghans do get a kick out of misleading people, especially Americans, about goofy things like this, and had they been doing so, I would have earned super cool points for calling them out. It just happened that the one time I thought they were joking, they weren’t.
What I love about the Afghan’s belief in the giant’s grave is how more magical it is. The Afghan giant is ten to twelve times taller than the Giant of Kandahar, and much thinner. It is more fairy tale-like than the American conspiracy theory of a believable-ish, muscular superman giant. It is an honest reflection of local lore vice modern Nephilim-fans trying to spin and latch onto things. In the end, true folklore is much more fantastical than the modern Western mind that tries to reenchant itself while being held down with modern ideas.
Want more Afghan stories from me?
Check out my post concerning my encounters of Afghan jinn stories.
True Tales of Afghan Jinn
Visiting a village full of jinn and my translator's family run in with one. (AI generated image for thumbnail)
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Seeking solace in a remote mountain cabin in northern Maine, haunted by the recent loss of a comrade during an operation in Afghanistan, Special Operations Operative, Hal Bennet questions his sanity when awakened in the middle of the night by what appeared to be a medieval knight.
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Until Next Time
Next time, I will take a look at how to use critical thinking to examine real world sci-fi related topics like UFO conspiracies, Bigfoot, etc.
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Considering some of the fellow vets I know who were over there, the "giant" story would have read more like a, ahem, human tripod.
On old Afghanistan, with links to entertaining history of its late 19th c. and the autobiography of the the only man who ever really ruled it: https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/terrifying-afghan-genius-king-abdur-rahman/4871