There were giants in the Earth

I remember reacting with honest bafflement when Barack Obama was running for his first term as president in 2008, and one of the criticisms levied against him was that he was part of the "academic elite."

I mean, don't you want your elected leaders to be smarter than you are?  I sure do.  I know I'm not smart enough to run an entire country.  Hell, I'm not smart enough to be mayor of my village, much less responsible for anything grander.  But strangely, that doesn't seem to be the way a lot of people think.  My first inkling that I was in the minority for wanting the president to be brilliant was when George W. Bush was running during the lead-up to the 2000 election, and I heard people say they were voting for him because he was "one of the common folk" and "someone you could sit down and have a beer with."

Never mind that in Bush's case, he was born into money, and his folksy aw-shucks demeanor was a sham; it worked.  He got elected (twice).  "Vote for Dubya, At Least He Won't Make You Feel Intellectually Inferior" apparently was a viable campaign slogan.

The result of this attitude, of course, is that we end up with leaders who are grossly incompetent.  Some of them are genuine lunatics.  And shockingly, for once I'm not talking about Donald Trump here.

Eric Burlison is a member of the House of Representatives from Missouri.  He made a name for himself in 2013 by taking a copy of a gun control bill and using it for target practice at a gun range, then posting a video of the event.  Prior to the Biden/Trump debate in 2019, he informed people in outraged tones that Biden was going to be "jacked up" -- on Mountain Dew.  Last year he was one of 26 Representatives -- all Republican -- who voted against a resolution condemning white supremacy.  He has repeatedly claimed that the January 6 riots weren't incited by Trump, whom Burlison idolizes, but by the FBI, as part of a plot to discredit Dear Leader.

So far, none of this is outside the norm for the GOP these days.  But just a few days ago, Burlison showed that he'd set up permanent residence in CrazyTown with a claim that has a long history,  but that I'd dearly hoped had gone the way of the dodo.

Burlison thinks that the Nephilim are real, and that the Smithsonian Institute has bones of giant humanoids from North America (fossils that are evidence of the truth of Genesis 6:4, "There were giants in the Earth in those days"), but is covering it up.  

For those of you who are neither (1) biblical scholars nor (2) people who frequent the dark corners of Woo-Woo Conspiracy World, the Nephilim are a race of big powerful dudes mentioned in a handful of places in the Bible, and who were supposedly the offspring of humans and fallen angels.  And when I say they were big, I mean abso-fucking-lutely enormous.  In Numbers 13:32-33, we read, "And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight verily as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."

I mean, I'm pretty much of average height and build, but even so it'd take someone mighty tall to make me feel verily as a grasshopper.

A couple of archaeologists in Brazil excavating some Nephilim bones, or possibly a clever use of PhotoShop

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that way back in 2015 I wrote about a guy named Steven Quayle, who did a series of YouTube videos about how not only were there giant bones in the Smithsonian, but there was a program being run by the Evil Deep State to use Nephilim DNA to create a race of giant super-soldiers.  So that'd be pretty fucking scary, except for the fact that to believe it, you'd have to have the IQ of a bowl of pudding.

Which brings me back to Eric Burlison, who is all in on the idea of the Nephilim.  He's so convinced that "giants are real" (direct quote) that he was asked to speak at a conference of true believers called "NephCon 2025," which I swear I am not making up.

And one of the things he promised to do, in his keynote speech at NephCon, was to launch an investigation into the Smithsonian and their nefarious coverup of enormous humanoid bones that came from the descendants of fallen angels.

Your tax dollars at work.

Oh, and I haven't yet mentioned that Burlison is a prominent member of the House Oversight Committee, the main investigative panel in Congress.  Because having a member of one of the most powerful committees in our government giving the impression that he thinks Lost in Space is a scientific documentary isn't scary at all.

Every new thing that comes out of the current administration prompts me to think that we are truly in the most idiotic timeline possible.  Then along comes another elected official who does or says something even more idiotic.  It brings to mind the quip by Albert Einstein, "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

There's probably nothing much that can be done about Burlison; he's pretty well entrenched as the Republican representative from one of the deepest red regions of the country.  In that part of Missouri, a hard-boiled egg could run against a qualified Democrat, and people would vote for the egg as long as there was an "R" after its name.  So I'm afraid we're stuck with him.  At least if he's wasting his time searching for giant bones in storerooms in basement of the Smithsonian, he'll have less time to work toward taking away civil rights from people who are the wrong color, religion, or sexuality, which seems to be the other favorite occupation of the GOP lately.

How people like Burlison get elected has always been a mystery to me, but I'm beginning to think that it's not a fluke, but a systemic problem with the way a great many Americans think.  It all brings to mind the rather terrifying quote from French lawyer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre; "Every country gets the government it deserves."

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There were giants in the Earth

So our conspiracy theory of the day is: the US government is hiding living giant humanoids to create a race of hybrid super-soldiers.

This, at least, is the contention of one Steven Quayle, who in has created a video with the entertaining title "GIANT REPTILIAN MAN-EATING DEMONS IN A CITY NEAR YOU (part 1)" (capitalization his) that was sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  If you choose to watch it, please be aware that it's over two and a half hours long.  I made it through about fifteen minutes, which I think is pretty damn good, although by that time I felt like my brain had turned to cream-of-wheat and was leaking out of my ears.  The opening shows Quayle, interspersed with science fiction movie clips and backed up by atmospheric music, delivering the following scary lines:

I believe that the big lie that is going to be placed, hoist [sic] upon the world, is that the aliens created mankind...  Most people do not understand the evil.  Most people can't even embrace the fact that this isn't about old bones.  When I say mind-blowing, it will also be heart-freeing.  If I start talking about fallen angels having sex with Earth women, they snicker.  Well, that snicker tells me they've already made up their minds.  The super-soldier program is one of the most, well, almost unbelievable, yet so believable, programs that the US military is involved in.

Further along in the video, Quayle assures us that he doesn't believe in alien overlords.  Nope.  That would be ridiculous.  The Annunaki, he says, aren't aliens, they're fallen angels.

Which is ever so much more believable.

Worse yet, they're still around.  "They [the scientists] are starting from the premise that all of the giants are gone.  We're starting from the premise that there are modern-day giants now, and they're not suffering from acromegaly or some pituitary disorder, but they're literally going to fulfill the biblical statement of Matthew 24 where Jesus says, 'Just as in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.'"

The whole thing, Quayle says, is a "multi-thousand-year cover up."

Then, of course, the Smithsonian comes up, because no discussion of archaeological conspiracies would be complete without the Smithsonian being involved.

"It's interesting, Tim," Quayle said to the interviewer.  "There's evidence of the bias of the Smithsonian, and their contempt for out-of-place artifacts -- every time giant bones were found, it didn't matter if it was on the West Coast, the Arctic, the Antarctic believe it or not, the East Coast, the Ohio River Mounds, they always have a fabulous cutoff point, being once the Smithsonian is notified, and those bones are sent to the Smithsonian, they're never heard from again."

A giant skeleton in Brazil, or a clever example of Photoshop, depending on which version you go for

"The point has been to keep this biblically-relevant topic out of the minds of the people," Quayle adds.

Why, you might be asking, would the Smithsonian -- and other scientific research agencies -- go to all of this trouble?  After all, careers are made from spectacular discoveries like these.  If the bones were real, not to mention the Annunaki, you'd think that archeologists would be elbowing each other out of the way to be the first to publish these findings in a reputable journal.

The reason, of course, is that the government is intimidating the scientists into silence so that they can keep secret the fact that these giant dudes are still around, and are being used in sinister genetics experiments to create a race of human/giant super-soldiers.

Shoulda known.

Quayle also tells us that he won't appear on camera unless he gets the final say on video and audio edits, and that "No one has been willing to agree to that."  Which makes it kind of odd that he told us this while on camera.  And that he now has his own video production company and an entire YouTube channel of his own.

Of course, he might have been right to avoid the spotlight.  He says he's afraid for his life, that he's being followed by the Men in Black.

"I'll be lucky not to be killed one day.  People have disappeared, Tim.  People who know about this, who have evidence."

And once again, we could convince ourselves that all we have is a lone wacko with access to recording equipment -- until you start reading the comments, of which I will give you a mercifully short sampling:

• People say that it takes place in the future.  But I think it takes place in the past.  The year is 800 after all.  And it seems to have the message that you can't beat the titans without mixing with them.  Rendering man almost extinct.  No wonder Noah and his sons were the only real men left.
• Do you guys feel the Neanderthals are a creation of fallen angels?
• They are from the Nephilim thats why Neanderthal DNA has only entered the human gene pool through men and why Neanderthal DNA is the source of being white.  Enoch 105 says the children born to fallen angels were white.  Anakim were white blonde giants,  Amorites were white Red heads and some were giants, then the Horites were normal sized white hairy cave men with brow ridges.  Thats why Hitler thought if he just got enough blondes to have children, sooner or later they would get a superman.
• there's stones thousands of years old talking about the ANANANAKI

So there you have it. Giant Anananaki (if I've counted the "Na's" correctly) being hidden by the government so they can have lots of sex with Earth women, who will give birth to a race of immortal super-soldiers, as hath been prophesied in the scripture.

You'd think, though, that if the US has had this super-soldier program for decades (as Quayle alleges), they'd have brought 'em out by now.  Do not try to convince me that if Donald Trump had access to super-soldiers he wouldn't already have deployed them against the DNC headquarters.  This, of course, isn't the most powerful of the arguments against Quayle's contentions; but just based upon that, I think the likelihood of there being ferocious giant half-human, half-fallen-angel dudes is pretty slim.

I think it's much more likely that Quayle and his followers have a screw loose.

But that's just me.  And if I end up being taken prisoner by a troop of white hairy cave men with brow ridges and used in sinister scientific experiments, I suppose it'll serve me right.

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As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]