(ORDO NEWS) — In all cultures of the world, legends have long existed about giants living among us, about colossal creatures that our ancestors saw and even worshiped as gods.
But these creatures seem to have been lost in time and are now considered merely myths.
Is there a possibility that a race of giants really once existed among humans?
There are many theories and even alleged evidence about this, which from time to time are dug up from the earth in the form of bones or even complete skeletons of giants.
rue, none of these skeletons, for one reason or another, has survived to this day or was hidden somewhere in museum basements. One such case is the mysterious blond giants from Catalina Island.
One of the most sensational claims of its time was made on a tiny island off the coast of California, where people of unusually tall stature once lived.
Off the coast of the US state of California, about 22 miles southwest of Los Angeles, is the island of Santa Catalina, also known simply as Catalina.
The island, measuring 22 by 8 miles, is part of the Channel Islands archipelago, is part of Los Angeles County and has a rather colorful history.
The island was originally inhabited by the Gabrielino (Tongva) Indians around 7000 BC, in 1542 it was captured by Spain, then passed to Mexico and then to the United States.
For a long time, Catalina Island was used as a base for various nefarious activities, including smugglers and otter poachers, until tycoon William Wrigley Jr. turned it into a tourist resort in the 1920s.
Discovery of the Giants of Catalina Island
In 1896 the Glidden family arrived here with their teenage son Ralph. At first, Ralph Glidden was interested in carpentry, but then his interest in Native American artifacts began to grow.
He began to search the island for the remains of an ancient Indian culture, including Indian burials.
After accidentally discovering an ancient Indian skull by simply stumbling upon a piece of bone in the sand, he became obsessed with the pursuit.
He soon became an amateur archaeologist who began excavating Indian burials on Catalina from 1919 to 1928.
During these excavations, he discovered 800 secret Indian burials and many Indian artifacts and relics, as well as thousands of bones. These bones and artifacts were mostly sold by Ralph Glidden to various museums and collectors.
When William Wrigley Jr. bought the island in the 1920s, he banned the sale of the bones and artifacts, declaring them the exclusive property of the Fields Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
However, the Heye Foundation, to which Glidden had previously sold a large number of such remains and relics, contracted the museum to carry out all excavations on Catalina Island and succeeded in taking first place in this activity, allowing Glidden to continue excavations without restriction.
Unfortunately for Glidden, in 1924 the Heye Foundation stopped funding the excavations, and he was forced to work alone, opening his own museum of his findings in the city of Avalon on Catalina Island, which he called “The Catalina Museum of the Island Indians.”
There he showed his discoveries to anyone who was willing to pay an entrance fee. The whole museum was quite gloomy, it had a lot of Native American skeletons on display, and it looked creepy, but it attracted a lot of curious people.
However, Glidden became known in history not as the owner of a museum with Indian skeletons, but as the one who stated that giants lived on Catalina in ancient times.
In particular, he stated that during the excavations he came across several skeletons (in different parts of the island) that were much taller than ordinary people.
According to him, these skeletons belonged to people ranging in height from 7 feet (210 cm) to 9 feet (270 cm). Moreover, Glidden received information from somewhere that these giants were fair-haired and blue-eyed people.
Such a statement, of course, aroused wide media interest, and in one of the issues of The Ogden Standard-Examiner of November 10, 1929, it was written as follows:
“He (Glidden) claims that this is irrefutable evidence that fair-skinned, fair-haired and very intelligent people of enormous stature lived on Catalina Island, off the southwest coast of California, perhaps three thousand years ago.
And that his excavations uncovered a huge hoard of skeletons , household utensils, urns, wampums (shell beads), etc., which is a completely unusual class of Indian things. – a completely unusual class of Indian things.
He found the skeleton of a young girl, apparently of high rank, in a large burial urn, surrounded by skeletons of sixty-four children, and more than three thousand other skeletons were found in various parts of the island, almost all male, averaging 7 feet in height, one seven feet eight inches from head to ankle, and the other a mind-boggling 9 feet 2 inches in height.
Oddly enough, Glidden’s announcement of the discovery of giant skeletons was neither the only nor the first in the Channel Islands region.
There is information that back in 1913, a German doctor named A. Furstenan discovered on Catalina Island a human skeleton 8 feet (240 cm) tall, which was found among unusual artifacts, including a flat stone with strange unrecognizable symbols.
This particular skeleton was supposedly found in the hard black sand of Avalon Bay and was reported to have largely disintegrated when it was brought to the surface and exposed to the air. Only the skull, jaw and foot remained of him.
Later excavations were also reported on nearby Santa Rosa Island, where in 1959 several 7-foot-tall skeletons were allegedly found with red-painted skulls, double rows of teeth, and 6 fingers and toes instead of five.
On another of the Channel Islands, San Nicolás Island, a number of taller than average human remains have also been found, believed to be of an enigmatic race, distinct from the local Indian group, who were of quite normal human stature.
Given that many of Catalina Island’s alleged giant skeletons were supposedly buried in ceremonial fashion in elaborate urns, Glidden suggested that they were worshiped as gods by the locals.
Of course, these conclusions of his were received with open skepticism and even contempt by the mainstream scientific archaeological community. Scholars and academics have called this Glidden’s last attempt and a publicity stunt to secure funding for new excavations.
Therefore, no professional archaeologist wanted to go to Catalina Island at all, just to look at the skeletons. Some locals also expressed doubts about the finds, such as one 89-year-old elderly Avalonian and local historian named Jean Hill:
“It (the museum) was scary, very scary. Bones were piled everywhere. There was light in one skull.”
One of the main problems with Glidden’s fantastic discoveries is that there is very little conclusive evidence that everything he said was true. Over the years there have been those who have claimed to have personally seen the skeletons of Glidden, but these stories are circumstantial at best.
Some bones from the Glidden collection were sent to the University of California and the Smithsonian Institution, but these institutions repeatedly denied having such specimens in their collections when asked about it.
However, there is speculation that they are indeed there, locked in top-secret vaults along with field reports and photographs. True or not, none of the alleged skeletons have ever been formally presented as evidence, and it is not known what happened to all of these alleged remains.
You may also think that Glidden took a lot of photographs during his work, but in reality there are very few of them. Glidden himself justified this by the fact that he carelessly kept the photographs, and some of them were completely lost.
The most significant discovery in recent years was a dusty box found in the archives of the Catalina Island Museum in 2012, which contained numerous documents written by Glidden and photographs of some ancient relics and remains of indigenous people, including those that allegedly depicted giant skeletons.
However, both documents and photographs contain very little information to give them any context.
Although the accuracy of the photographs of the Glidden giants is most often disputed, one paranormal researcher named L. Marzulli claims that a detailed analysis of one of the photographs showed that the skeleton depicted in it is similar to the real one and that in life he would have stood 8.5 feet tall.
However, others claim that the photo is fake. Marzulli also stated that 6 fingers are clearly visible on one of the giant skeletons.
Despite understandable skepticism about Glidden’s findings, there are those who have used his alleged findings to support their theories, in particular Hollow Earth conspiracy theorists who believe in the existence of another world within our planet that can be accessed through several portals. located all over the world.
At the time of Glidden’s discoveries, Hollow Earth theorists speculated that one of these portals might be on Catalina Island and that local giants were assigned to guard the gates.
This idea was so widespread that several expeditions of so-called “hollowers” were launched to Catalina in the 1920s, but it is not known what, if anything, they found.
Late in life, Glidden himself sold his entire collection of artifacts and skeletons to someone for as little as $5,000 in 1962, and in 1967 he died at the age of 87.
It is possible that in dying he took with him many of the secrets of his work and possible answers to the mysteries surrounding him. We can only guess how much truth they contain.
Was Glidden just a hoaxer who only cared about money?
Or did he actually make what would become one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time, if true?
Most likely, we will never know for sure.
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