What do you think about this?
In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition was anchored in a harbor on the southern coast of South America, on what we now call Patagonia, when a man came out of the woods who reportedly stood taller than the tallest sailor in the crew by more than a foot. Magellan’s chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian scholar who kept a careful and otherwise reliable journal of the voyage, wrote that some of these people were nearly nine feet tall.
The crew called them Patagones, big feet, because of the size of their footprints. The name stuck. Patagonia is named for them.
That should have been the end of it. One eccentric report, easy to dismiss.
Except other expeditions kept seeing them. Sir Francis Drake’s crew in 1578 described people of extraordinary height in the same region. Anthony Knyvet in 1592 measured corpses he claimed were twelve feet long. The Spanish ship Saint Peter in 1614 reported the same. Commodore John Byron’s crew on the HMS Dolphin in 1764 described, in sworn testimony to the Royal Society in London, encountering a tribe whose smallest members were seven feet tall.
We have these accounts in English, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, from Catholic clergymen, naval officers, scientists, and merchants, spanning two hundred and fifty years, all describing the same general region of southern Argentina and Chile.
By the time European settlement reached Patagonia in the nineteenth century, the people there were of ordinary height.
The truth may be far stranger than we have been told.
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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