What do you think about this?
Picture this. It is 1911 and miners in the desert outside Lovelock, Nevada are hauling guano out of a cave that the Paiute would not enter.
They are not looking for skeletons. They are looking for bat droppings, which were valuable as fertilizer at the time. But fifteen feet down, under tons of compacted guano, the bones started turning up.
Some of them were not human. At least, not human like we are. Skulls a third larger than our own. Femurs that put the living owner well past six feet, in some accounts closer to seven. And the hair. Strands of distinctly reddish hair, dried out and woven into ancient sandals so massive they could have only fit feet the length of your forearm.
The Paiute already knew. Their oral tradition, passed down for hundreds of years, told of a race of cannibalistic red-haired giants called the Si-Te-Cah. The ancestors of the Paiute had pushed them into a cave and burned them alive. That cave was at Lovelock.
The artifacts went to the University of California, the Nevada State Historical Society, and the Smithsonian.
Today most of those remains are unaccounted for. The skulls that did make it to museum displays are quietly listed as “unusually large.”
Makes you wonder how many other inconvenient bones are sitting in basement drawers, just waiting for someone to ask the right question.
What if the legends were right all along?
What do you think about this? The Dropa Stones, 716 grooved stone discs said to be found in Chinese caves in 1938 beside small bodied skeletons, telling of a crash 12,000 years ago. The 1978 book that spread the story was admitted to be a hoax. Pure fiction, or a truth wrapped in lies?
What do you think about this? The Paiute of Nevada told of red haired giants they trapped in a cave and burned, written down in 1883. In 1911 miners near Lovelock opened a cave and found red haired mummies and a layer of ash. Legend that matched a cave, or memory of real enemies?
What do you think about this? In 1987 a Wisconsin family bought a used bunk bed. Within weeks their kids were sick, a radio changed stations by itself, and a chair rocked with no one in it. They fled in the night in 1988 and burned the bed. Old house, or something that came with it?
What do you think about this? In 1904 an American dredged the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá and pulled up gold disks, jade, wooden idols and the bones of more than 200 people, many of them children. The Maya called such wells doorways to the underworld. Prayers for rain, or an open door?
What do you think about this? Norse settlers lived in Greenland for nearly 500 years, with farms, a cathedral and a bishop. The last record is a wedding at Hvalsey church on Sept 16, 1408. Then nothing. The church still stands, roofless and empty. Starved out, or walked away?
What do you think about this? In 1615 a Spanish pearl ship is said to have sailed into an inland sea that then dried up. In 1870 a Los Angeles paper reported its hull found in the desert near the Salton Sea. Every searcher since has lost it to the sand. Mirage, or a galleon in the dunes?
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