finally cornered in the cave. When they refused to surrender, the Indians filled the entrance with brush and set it afire. The giants who tried to escape were shot with arrows and the others suffocated in the cave.
Beginning in 1911, the cave was worked for its bat guano to be used in making gunpowder, and most of the remains were destroyed. But an expedition in 1924 did recover the mummified remains of two giants—a female six and a half feet tall and a male more than eight feet tall. Reportedly, artifacts from the cave, but not the mummies, may be viewed at a small natural history museum in Winnemucca, Nevada.
How strongly are we to believe that races before our own were actually much larger than we are today, especially when supporting evidence has been wiped from textbooks? Another episode illustrates Smithsonian suppression of historical artifacts. The late naturalist and author Ivan T. Sanderson told of an incident during World War II on the Aleutian island of Shemya in which engineers building an airstrip uncovered the remains of gigantic humans. One cranium measured almost twenty-four inches from base to crown, compared to the normal eight inches. Oddly, all the skulls showed evidence of trepanning (poking holes in the skull with crude tools to release evil spirits). The remains were reportedly sent to the Smithsonian, which, despite the seeming importance of such a find, never released any further information. Sanderson asked, “Is it that these people cannot face rewriting all the textbooks?”
The Smithsonian has been involved in several other controversies over eyebrow-raising discoveries, such as the objects found in 1944 by German hardware merchant Waldemar Julsrud at Acámbaro, Mexico, located about 175 miles northwest of Mexico City. In 1923, Waldemar was a codiscoverer of an archaeological site first thought to be of the Tarascan culture. This discovery brought worldwide attention after it was found to actually be a whole new Indian culture—the Chupicauro civilization, which flourished in Mexico about a thousand years before the Tarascans.
Julsrud’s 1944 find consisted of more than thirty-three thousand ceramic and stone objects, including statues and obsidian knives. The amazing aspect of the statuary was the fact that the carvings depicted humans in association with large reptiles resembling dinosaurs. Along with other weird creatures, there were representations of Sumerian and Egyptian motifs, as well as bearded Caucasians, Africans, and Polynesians.
Although radiocarbon and thermoluminescence testing indicated that the objects could be dated as far back as 6,500 years, Smithsonian officials quickly proclaimed the entire episode a hoax. In recent years, when researcher John H. Tierney filed a Freedom of Information Act request, it was learned that all of the Julsrud case files at the Smithsonian were missing.
Dennis Swift, on his website Dinosaursandman.com, has written of visiting Acámbaro. He noted, “Waldemar, in print [his book was published in 1947], theorized that the colossal collection of ceramic and stone artifacts had been buried by a people who had experienced catastrophes. He conjectured that there had been a period of catastrophes that had changed the face of the earth, and that there must have been ancient civilizations wiped out by the catastrophes. His most radical suggestion that clashed violently with scientists was that man had existed contemporaneously with the dinosaurs. Although there was sound evidence that Julsrud was on to something of major scientific importance, he was ridiculed by the authorities when his book was published.”
In 1955, Charles Hapgood, then professor of history and anthropology at Keene State College of the University of New Hampshire and author of Earth’s Shifting Crust and Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings , spent several months in Acámbaro studying the Julsrud collection. To eliminate the possibility the collection was merely a modern hoax,
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