Shocking Discoveries of Giants You Will Not Believe!!!: Conspiracy Belief and Archaeological Interest in YouTube Videos about Biblical and Other Giants

This article explores content on the YouTube video platform claiming to reveal evidence that giant humans existed in antiquity. In some cases, this content relates all manner of giants to biblical traditions, largely from Genesis 6:1–4, while in other cases the biblical tradition serves as a theological or ideological background for speculation about non-biblical giants. After describing this YouTube content, I offer two directions for analysis: First, to de-exoticize and culturally frame these videos, I suggest that they are a digital instantiation of a longstanding attempt to display giant bones and related artifacts by way of antiquarian interest. Second, I make a claim about the genre of these videos regarding their inclusion within a discourse category that can be properly labelled “conspiracy,” with a focus on theories of conspiracy rhetoric that highlights the value of this content as an aesthetic experience with its own allure as entertainment and even as a form of re-enchantment for digital communities. More generally, and given the fact that few have tried to analyze YouTube giants in video format, I hope that the basic descriptive elements of this study help us understand the ways digital communities are engaging with and transforming biblical content for broad audiences.

Indeed, the rising contemporary obsession with the Nephilim and other biblical giants is finding expression in a wide range of avenues more or less properly labelled “popular culture,” such as internet websites, professional and homemade videos, TV series, biblical fan fiction, video games, creation science museums, film, comics, and more (e.g., Thomas 2012, 2015; Bosman and Poorthuis 2015; Galbraith 2015; Ziegler 2021). For the purpose of this study, I propose no novel definition of the phrase “popular culture,” but rather refer generally to the problems typically raised in the field, such as the intractable discussion of quantity (how many “views” or what kind of consumer pattern counts as “popular” as opposed to the “unpopular”?) and quality (whose culture counts as the baseline against which expressions of lower, popular quality might be measured; Storey 2015, 5–16; Clark 2012, 6–8). Most obviously, even if not always precisely, the line marking studies of biblical giants in the “popular” mode runs along the boundary of the formal scholarly academy and its attempt to understand giants in terms of folklore patterns, misinterpreted archaeological or fossil remains, medical anomalies, literary and historiographic motifs, or even spiritual meaning in academic theological circles—versus pop-culture attempts to understand giants in terms of real-world apocalyptic scenarios, genetic “seeds” and spiritual bloodlines, historical-fantasy-fiction, straightforward history, history in the “conspiracy” mode, pure entertainment, and in a newly popular niche genre we might call “Nephilim Spirituality” that combines attempts at history, conspiracy, apocalyptic, science, spiritual advice, and biblical theology to place the Nephilim at the center of a world of cosmic spiritual warfare and personal devotion.¹

On YouTube, giants have the potential to find an audience as voracious and large as themselves. A recent and widely reported Pew study clarified the dominance of the platform for teen internet users:² far and away the usage leader among younger demographics, 95% of teens reported engagement with it—compared with TikTok at 67%, Instagram at 62%, and Snapchat at 59%. Twenty percent of teens “visit or use YouTube ‘almost constantly’” according to the Pew study. Thirty-six percent of teens admit to overusing these social media apps in question, while 55% of teens say they spend “the right amount of time” doing what they do. Owned by Alphabet, the same company that owns Google, in 2022 YouTube featured over 2.7 billion unique viewers monthly, with 80 million premium subscribers and 30% revenue growth for four years in a row (through 2021, before a significant revenue drop in 2022). Slightly more males than females visit the site, in a ratio of 11:9.³ Religious communities reacted quickly to the explosive popularity of YouTube and its possibilities for and against their communities by creating rival platforms, such as “GodTube” and “CatholicTube” (Campbell 2012, 91), though these rivals quickly faded in favor of straightforward adoption of YouTube and the creation of niche channels to promote content.

Thus it is clear that the YouTube platform occupies a unique place in the media landscape for us to consider the way its users create and engage with religious ideas. As Faddoul, Chalot, and Farid point out (2020, 7), the fact that YouTube has a near monopoly on the market of social video creation of its type, combined with the fact that an entire generation of young people now turns to the platform as its primary site of information, means that YouTube has become the central media source of our time. A growing number of studies have attempted to address the phenomenon of conspiracy belief on YouTube, highlighting the subcultures of conspiracy aesthetics that may emerge (Reyes and Smith 2014; Landrum, Olshansky, and Richards 2021; Allington, Buarque, and Barker Flores 2021), the powerful role that YouTube’s algorithm plays in deciding which pieces of content get pushed to viewers (Campbell 2021, 29–33; Faddoul, Chalot, and Farid 2020), and the way YouTube’s immersive and compelling content drives user belief in a way that is more significant than other social media avenues (e.g., Jennings et al. 2022, 10).

We would be hard-pressed to catalog the extent of YouTube content in the genre I propose to examine here; we must be aware that links on the site may become inactive, content and accompanying descriptions can be deleted or edited at any time, and engagement metrics (comments, likes, views, etc.) change daily. Thus, the links and numbers we provide capture a moment in time for analysis (in this case, as of November 2023, with an updated check on some links and statistics in November of 2024). At the time of this research, the platform hosts hundreds of discrete artifacts that could be classified under the heading of “videos purporting to show evidence of biblical or other giants,” the most prominent of which feature photos of excavations of giants or other visual evidence, often serially or in rapid-fire sequence, set to pulsing, mysterious background music. Although the most-viewed content in any category on YouTube features an extraordinary amount of engagement—dozens of top videos have over a billion “views”—we should not discount the influence of less popular content. Several of the most popular ancient-giants videos boast views of between 750,000 and 3,000,000, putting them in a truly notable category—one source estimates that only 0.33% of all YouTube content has 1,000,000 or more views, over 50% of YouTube’s content has fewer than 500 views, and a large amount of content is not viewed by anyone.⁴ Regarding the ancient-giants content, I will organize the content within three differentiated types: (1) fully professional television content published on YouTube alongside other venues; (2) professional content, neatly produced, narrated in professional or semi-professional format; (3) “homemade” style, with copied material, photos, and amateur narration. A review of representative content in each area will help demonstrate the range of material and document recurrent themes.

Professional Television Content. The most visible content in this genre by view count comes from the History Channel, particularly from the series Search for Lost Giants (SLG) but also sporadic episodes on other popular series such as Ancient Aliens, America Unearthed, and other less popular shows.⁵ SLG premiered in 2014 on television and in 2021 on YouTube over a series of six episodes, and follows the investigation of two brothers in North American contexts.⁶ In the third episode (“Huge Skeleton Buried in Mysterious Tunnel”; 896,000 views), one of the hosts says he is a “salesman for The Church of Giantology,” underscoring the quasi-religious quest that generally infuses ancient-giants content on YouTube. Largely, however, this series is devoid of biblical content, despite the pilot episode (“Giant Skeleton Tomb Unearthed”; 1.2M views) beginning with an evocative quote on screen: “THERE WERE GIANTS ON THE EARTH IN THOSE DAYS…-Genesis 6:4.” The Hebrew term here rendered “giants”—which in terms of commercially available translation history comes exclusively from the KJV/NKJV Bible—is Nephilim, a rare and disputed word that has been understood in terms of giants but which at any rate does not clearly refer to beings of giant stature by etymology.⁷

The SLG series pilot proceeds by citing stone structures in Massachusetts that may predate the colonial period and moves quickly to archival (but uncited) newspaper accounts from the nineteenth century describing the discovery of giant bones. This leads viewers to one of the main lines of conspiracy thinking about giant bones in North America, viz. that the putative giant bones are either (a) “a royal class of giant Native Americans” that “radiated out from the Ohio River Valley” or (b) those of “an ancient enemy [of indigenous people]…portrayed as a cannibalistic race of giants” (as narrated in the episode). As to where the bones from these discoveries have gone, the episode also conveniently summarizes conspiratorial themes that appear in many other videos, viz. (a) the bones were repatriated to indigenous peoples, or (b) presented in a more sinister fashion in the episode’s narrative, that twentieth-century scientists deliberately concealed evidence of the giant bones because “they are not matching up with somebody’s version of human history,” as one of the hosts puts it. To be sure, this claim is the main conspiratorial current across all content: the discovery of giant bones has been suppressed. Often, this claim is buttressed by appeals to anti-evolution and creationist timelines that attempt to account for the historical existence of giants (a theme emphasized and visually depicted at the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum; Ziegler 2021). Academics, however, will not touch the issue because “the whole topic is radioactive,” one of the show’s speaker’s claims.

The narrative setup thus presents the brothers as those who are unafraid, spending their own money and using “cutting-edge technologies” and neglected records to go where others fear to tread. Unnamed professionals allegedly mock the brothers and their blue-collar background. The main investigation, framed by the use of electronic tools, heavy excavation machinery, animations, pregnant stares between characters on screen, evocative questions, and the music of intrigue, focuses on the “Goshen Cave” in rural Massachusetts, a spot popular for its mysterious background throughout several decades where the brothers believe an ancient giant may have been buried in a hidden chamber. The episode’s climax offers no discovery of giant bones but propels viewers forward to a continued search. The pilot ends with a clip from a future episode, where a man pointedly asks the brothers, “Do you believe in giants?” “I do,” both reply.

The other five episodes follow a similar pattern—and end in cliffhanger disappointments. The show’s most popular episode, “Massive Humanoid Bones Found in the Ozarks” (over 3.5M views), describes lurid acts of cannibalism by giants that may have occurred in some past period—cannibalism and overeating being themes often associated with giants (e.g., the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey, and some material from Qumran; Goff 2010)—and reviews a textual account from the 1930s of an eight-foot giant that had been reportedly uncovered in a Missouri burial cave. The show explicitly compares the alleged Missouri giant with the biblical “Goliath,” and the narrator wonders aloud whether the giant figure was slain by “a David of the Missouri hill country.” The search for physical evidence from the giant comes up empty, but we are tantalized with an empty spot in a cave where a giant may have been laid to rest. The crew does find an archival photograph of a man lying next to a tall skeleton, partly excavated, that breathes life into the search for the bones themselves (see Figure 1).

Whether the man lying next to the “giant” is actually six feet tall, and whether the skeleton is an eight-foot tall human, are not completely clear. Here it is crucial to point out the definitional slippage that can occur in discussions of giants—how tall, exactly, does one have to be for the “giant” label to apply? Are current NBA basketball players “giants”? Would a seven- or even eight-foot skeleton constitute a true “giant” on the biblical model without being part of a “race of giants”? The apologetic value of the “smaller giant” becomes apparent for those trying to prove the historical reality of biblical giants (e.g., Heiser 2015)—we would not need to find legions of fifteen-foot-tall monsters littering the land of pre-Israelite Canaan but only a few suggestively tall individuals, such as the Dead Sea Scroll (4QSam^a) and Septuagint (Greek) reading of the “shorter Goliath” who measures something more like 6’6” (“four cubits and a span”) rather than the 9’6” Goliath of the (later) Masoretic Hebrew traditions (Richey 2021, 346). Even if one does gain some historical credibility for “giants” by reducing their height and thus avoiding the need to explain a lack of verifiable giant bodies in the archaeological record, what is crucially lost is any sense that the biblical giants were truly extraordinary—at least enough to have been the literal, genealogical offspring of the mysterious scene in Genesis 6:1–4 (Num 13:33 states that the Anaqim, a group of giants encountered by Hebrew spies exploring the land before attempts to conquer it, are “from the Nephilim”; see Doak 2012, 79 on the use of Hebrew min- [“from”] as a genealogical cue). Perhaps, however, the demonic giant DNA is what really matters, that is, something “internal” and not outstanding height, and conspiracy-themed accounts of giants have begun to focus on precisely this DNA-level analysis to discuss something sinister that has survived throughout the centuries and affects our world even today (on which see more below).

The newspaper clipping and photo reveal a further point, which takes us into the details of the most prominent conspiracy theme associated with ancient giants—an official cover-up. Specifically, the newspaper article from the Steeleville Ledger (as read in the episode) mentions an official letter from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, requesting that they “ship the skeleton to Washington for study by the experts, as they think it is that of a giant of prehistoric times.” The episode continues with a brief history of the Smithsonian, focusing on the museum’s multi-decade director of anthropology, Aleš Hrdlička, who dismissed theories of giant bones based on several obvious hoaxes that were propagated at the time. The brothers do eventually find what they think could be a giant human incisor tooth in the cave, and the episode ends with a suspenseful diving sequence that leads to ambiguously interpreted pictographs. In the end, a New York University professor of anthropology flatly tells the brothers that, if the Smithsonian had exotic skeletons, they would be on display. The show highlights the perils of academic involvement in popular media of this type, as at least one professional academic archaeologist, Stephen Mrozowski of UMass Boston, has written about how he had been misled by his participation in the show.⁸

The series continues on through several additional episodes as the brothers travel back to the Goshen Tunnel, to Mexico and Catalina Island and Tennessee, interviewing people and hearing local legends, and finally back to the Goshen Tunnel for the finale, where, alas, no giant bones are uncovered.

Professional Media Companies. Seemingly the most popular single giants-themed video on YouTube, “Giants Emerging Everywhere—They Can’t Hide This” (over 12M views), was produced by a Channel called Universe Inside You, a grey-checked “verified” YouTube content provider with nearly 2M subscribers. The channel content varies but includes numerology, psychic content, civilizations living under the ocean or within the earth, suppressed histories and technologies, and in the case of the present video, evidence of ancient giants. The first third of this example moves through nineteenth-century news reports, noting that such reports were common and implying that more modern media have grown embarrassed of such things or that the media have effectively suppressed more recent discoveries (but without providing any of the American cultural background that might illuminate the public’s ongoing fascination with “monstrous” fossils that can be traced back to the colonial period and burned bright among culturally prominent individuals in the United States for generations; see Semonin 2002).

The narration turns to familiar conspiracies in broad form, including the Smithsonian issue as well as the association of Native Americans with giants, and offers speculation on various discoveries, including the San Diego giant, allegedly discovered in 1895 and declared a hoax by the Smithsonian (Figure 2). Further evidence comes in the form of massive stone structures, which allegedly could not have been built by any known ancient technology or by normal-sized humans, as well as a litany of quotes from colonial explorers who describe encounters with giants. The video employs a barrage of visual techniques, including illustrations, images of skulls, and highlighted newspaper extracts. For the most part, the video avoids brazenly misleading graphics, though it does show video footage of a Japanese giant and claims the footage is real even though the footage is well-known to be the CGI creation of a 2007 film (Big Man Japan, discussed below).

Taking a turn not often found in material of this type, “Giants Emerging Everywhere” ends with a claim that giants may still exist today, offering a strange example first popularized on a “Coast to Coast” radio episode in which it is claimed that in 2005 United States special forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan, encountered a twelve- to fifteen-foot-tall adversary.⁹ According to the story, the cave-dwelling, cannibalistic, six-fingered and six-toed Kandahar giant killed one service member before being shot, loaded onto a cargo plane, and taken back to an American base (all participants were forced to sign nondisclosure agreements, etc.; see Figure 3). Another popular YouTube video, “Special Forces ATTACKED by unidentified creature” narrates the same incident with essentially the same details.¹⁰

A stand-alone sixty-minute video entitled “The Most Fact Based Documentary in Support of the Existence of Real Ancient Giants,” from a channel called Ancient Secret Discoveries, has over 1.2M views and premiered in February of 2022 (note that this video, which was visible throughout 2023, now appears to be deleted from YouTube). The video features television-style professional production, managed by a company called Zohar Entertainment Group International, and employs narration (but no live acting), b-roll, and images from a range of sources. The opening screen displays the Genesis 6:4 passage on screen in stark fashion, on point for the genre, and the documentary has a biblical and even apologetic flair. The aesthetic tactics of the video sacrifice depth for breadth: Suffused with pulsating, dramatic music, the narration offers dozens of examples, all in quick succession and with suggestive narration that gives few details and certainly no evidence for the claims other than unattributed statements of belief (“it is believed…some believe…”). The visual cues range from thematically linked images (e.g., a photo of an ancient carving depicting the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh when discussing his gigantism and asserting that he was a historical figure), to charts of evolutionary human developments and various illustrations, to photographic examples of giant footprints and bones and other archaeological contexts. Unsupported generalities abound, such as claims that “all” European explorers to the west Atlantic encountered giants, and “all” Native American groups told of the “exact same” encounters with giants, and so on.

“The Most Fact Based Documentary” proposes two core conspiracy motifs observed in the Search for Lost Giants TV series regarding giant bones from Native American contexts and the role of the Smithsonian in collecting and then suppressing this evidence, but then takes the Smithsonian idea farther. Here, the narrator reports that “several [unnamed] investigators today” claim that the very founding of the institution had as its original purpose the suppression of giant skeletons during a period when Darwinian evolutionary theory was in its early stages and was too delicate to withstand the stunning evidence of alternate bodies and subtypes of humans that the giants allegedly uncovered from native burial mounds represented. These giants, it is often claimed in such videos (as in the current example), feature physical anomalies besides height, including double rows of teeth and six fingers/toes (parallel to the giants in 2 Sam 21:16–22 // 1 Chr 20:6–8; see Donnelly and Morrison 2014, 87, who attempt to account for these anomalies as historical realities related to the Bible). The video further states that the tracks of giants found in New Mexico cannot be accepted by mainstream science because they would show humans coexisting with dinosaurs. Indeed, allegedly coterminous human and dinosaur prints have long been a theme of creationist arguments about human development, though most creationists seem to have abandoned these claims (see Kuban 2022; Ziegler 2021, 477). In “The Most Fact Based Documentary” and other examples, the heyday of giant bones discovery in the 1800s and early 1900s seems to dry up completely in the second half of the twentieth century (though this video mentions one alleged example from the 1960s), thus offering the inferential hypothesis that the Smithsonian was completely successful in their collection and cover-up, and despite thorough excavation of many native sites in America throughout the past few decades (and ongoing today), there are no more giants to be found.

“The Most Fact Based Documentary” features several of the most brazenly misleading (if not comical) and characteristic motifs of giant-conspiracy visual culture: digitally altered images that use real photos of human skeletons from burial sites juxtaposed in the same scene with shrunken images of humans or excavation equipment that make the skeletons appear to be enormous (see Figure 4, taken from a video discussed below). However, in a twist on this motif, this video takes these “photos” and uses a simple filter to turn the image into something that looks more like a pastel drawing. These images appear repeatedly in the video to accompany and (as if to) “illustrate” the narration, though in fact there is no specific claim regarding how the images illustrate the video’s content (see Figure 5 for one example).

What are the motivations for compiling and displaying these images—a joke? satire? an air of mystery and aid to imagination? a visual hook to retain engagement or drive clicks? something else?¹¹ On the side of the digital community of engagement: How many viewers truly believe photos like this are authentic? What is the driver of what appears to be high and positive user engagement with these kinds of (obviously?) altered photos?

I will return to these questions shortly in an analysis of recent theory on the motivations for conspiracy belief. For the moment, I want to make the simple observation that user experiences with this type of content varies, and our assumptions about what should count as “compelling” or “evidence” or “proof” or “obvious” may fail us. One source of data we do have on this issue—bewildering though it is—comes in the form of YouTube user comments beneath the videos in question. To date, little research has been conducted on how we should think of such comments in social-scientific perspectives (see Murthy and Sharma 2019; Day 2018), but nevertheless it is the case that “the comment section”—on YouTube, blogs, news articles, social media, etc.—is one of the most vibrant and voluminous sources for tracking reception history in contemporary popular culture. Beyond other screen or video platforms, such as Netflix-style streaming services, network television, or movie theatres, YouTube’s comment section in particular, connected as it is in such a direct way with the videos themselves and also combined with the power of Google’s algorithm to suggest additional content, offers unique insight into its users’ reactions.

Surprisingly, for example, of the 2,800+ YouTube user comments (in 2023) beneath the “The Most Fact Based Documentary,” almost no one questions the digitally-altered-photo motif. (By contrast, the History Channel’s Search for Lost Giants videos feature a healthy dose of user disappointment in the comments about the lack of physical giant-bones evidence.¹²) On the contrary, most openly laud the video. Many call it one of the better examples of the genre that they’ve seen. The most common comment type by volume features users affirming the contents of the video and adding their own examples, data, or experience. The Smithsonian conspiracy angle resonated with many in the comment community of the “Most Fact Based Documentary”:¹³

A few seem genuinely perplexed about the conspiracy angle:

The fact that the comments are overwhelmingly positive could, of course, suggest comment moderation by which criticism of the contents is deleted (or even AI-generated comments?); though if this is the case, then the moderation is far from absolute:

Out of the 2,800+ comments on “The Most Fact Based Documentary,” only approximately fifteen seem to be negative (0.005% of the total). We might also see the highly positive engagement as a function of community self-selection, but other comments make clear the fact that even motivated users who approve of conspiracies are not always pleased with the content:

Some seem to engage with no particular angle other than whimsical personal reasons:

Homemade examples. Our third category falls loosely into the category of “homemade” or found-footage examples. These range from self-produced slide narrations of varying quality set to ominous music to clips appropriated from other sources and pushed to an individual’s channel with a provocative title and description. Anecdotally, based on my own engagement with this content over the course of the past year, this “less professional” content seems increasingly difficult to locate, as the platform’s algorithm may de-emphasize these videos as part of an effort to suppress misinformation, or as a feature of my own personal algorithm and the results it senses I want to see based on my viewing history or what it otherwise knows about me. Still, examples of this type abound and can offer some of the most interesting “payoff” for viewers.¹⁴

Though not biblically oriented in particular, the video “20 Shocking Discoveries of Giants You Won’t Believe Exist” invokes the Quran and also the Bible (only to set the latter aside as an inferior historical source, which is something of a surprise given the Christian orientation of much of this type of content). This video, like “The Most Fact Based Documentary,” uses the tactic of rapid-fire examples and vague phraseology to present giant bone discoveries. Several of these examples seem to be from real excavations and cite ancient humans whose height may qualify as “giant” in the sense of towering above their contemporaries but not in any fantastical or conspiratorial sense; indeed, this particular video is not combative and does not propose any particular conspiracy example (though it gestures toward the Native American burial mound theory). Of all the giants content on YouTube, this video is notable for featuring the most liberal use of the altered image of an excavation motif, which the creator repeatedly uses as b-roll over the narration for almost every example, for example, Figure 6, shown on screen to illustrate the discovering of an alleged ancient Chinese “giant” who measured 6’2” tall from Shandong, China (from c. 3000 BCE).

Similarly, and with particular visual incongruity, during a brief example of the (historically real) rediscovery of the bones of the 7’10” tall nineteenth-century Spanish farmer Miguel Joaquín Eleizegui, the content creator illustrates the example of the tall Spanish man with the bones of what appears to a 100-foot-tall (?) giant skeleton next to a tiny archaeologist with the text “7 FT” emblazoned across the top of the screen (Figure 7).

In the face of all this, the same narrator of “The Most Fact Based Documentary” does surprisingly mention a digitally altered photo of the type shown elsewhere in the video in an example of an alleged Mexican giant and openly acknowledges that the image is fake. All told, this video is a solid example of content made with low effort, solely for clicks—and it achieves over 1.2M views. Of the nearly 1,000 user comments, one can find only light mockery; almost all comments are positive, with nearly 100 invoking the Bible, some two dozen citing the Smithsonian conspiracy, and many others professing what reads as sincere belief and adding their own details or asking questions for clarification.

Another video, “Giant of Japan military parade” (2.2M views), is a type of “found footage” artifact and presents a grainy clip of a giant walking and standing with average-sized people (Figure 8). The final thirty seconds of the video features a computer-generated voice narrating a claim about the footage—affirming its reality and displaying text on screen: “This is a testimony, and evidence, to what the Bible says, about nephilim. So, you got your proof. Now, for your own sake, please save your soul from hell, by believing in our, living God and Savior, Lord Jesus Christ.” The content creator, “GeorgeHollicke,” has less than a dozen videos on their channel, all with some religious theme relating to “evil Talmudic quotes” or Psalm 22 (and alleged rabbinic “distortions” of the text of Psalm 22). Though not explicitly connected to the giants content, and garnering very little viewership, GeorgeHollicke’s “evil Talmudic quotes” series on the same YouTube channel raises the spectre of antisemitism in the form of something that resembles, at worst, the “deicide myth,” that is, the accusation that through treachery Jews distorted the words of Jesus and plotted to malevolently kill Jesus.¹⁵ Though not a clear trend in the giants conspiracy materials at this time, it is worth noting that one semi-popular recent book (Sanger 2020, reviewed below) makes a spurious attempt to connect the racist trope of Jewish “banking elites” with demonic biblical giant themes.

The purported giant footage from “Giant of Japan military parade” is actually taken from a 2007 mockumentary film titled Big Man Japan, as pointed out by many of the thousands of commenters on the video.¹⁶ Accordingly, this video has invited the largest percentage of comment jokes and mockery of any of the giants content on YouTube. Undeterred, many commenters still engage positively with the footage and treat it as authentic (even in multiple responses beneath a hyperlink to the Big Man Japan film where the scenes in question can easily be located). In some cases, one observes a theme common in the comment communities—something to the effect of, Maybe this particular piece of evidence is real, and maybe it is not, but all of this helps us see that in fact there is a cover-up and the material in question is real. For example, “Tom McDonough”: “I’ve never seen the intro part before, but you can bet there is much more video out there being hidden from us…” Some users display crossover knowledge of other giant conspiracy motifs, such as the six fingers/toes anomaly and Smithsonian issue, and propose that the “Giant of Japan military parade” clip has intentionally mixed authentic and fake footage:

This footage prompted a formal “debunking” attempt, from a series on the popular “billschannel” (2.6M subscribers) entitled “GIANT MAN Caught on Camera—real or fake” (4.5M views).¹⁷ The debunker reveals the origin of the footage from the 2007 film and also takes on the motif of the digitally altered archaeological giant excavation photos.¹⁸ Strikingly, however, several of the higher-rated user comments on this debunking video are from giant believers who counterclaim that the footage is actually real:

Finally, returning to the question of the Smithsonian conspiracy: one of the more involved YouTube discussions—though not widely viewed—on this topic comes in the form of a podcast episode (showing only a static episode image) from the “Talking With Shadows” podcast (One Candle Society, “The Smithsonian Conspiracy”; 649 views). The hosts discuss many of the classic motifs, such as the relationship between giants and indigenous people, the double rows of teeth and six fingers/toes, and so on. One particular book is cited as their primary authority, The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America: The Missing Skeletons and the Great Smithsonian Cover-Up (Dewhurst 2014; note also Vieira and Newman 2015, not mentioned on the podcast), where it is argued that the conspiracy began in the Civil War period and turned into a full-blown and intentional obfuscation campaign in 1879 under the watch of Major John Wesley Powell, an explorer and Bureau of Ethnology director at the Smithsonian. The hosts reveal their belief that the Smithsonian is only a “tool” being used by others, and engage in a series of freewheeling claims about Native Americans, the Vatican, and other groups. Attempting to tackle the bedeviling question of why the Smithsonian would hide such findings, the hosts claim that the bones may contain mysterious or spiritual qualities (an idea raised in the History Channel’s Search for Lost Giants series finale)—the idea here being that the government would have an interest in hiding mysteriously powerful objects from the public for some unknown purpose.

Thus far I have attempted to categorize a range of YouTube video materials regarding ancient giants to show how popular they can be, trace the variety of their contents and the evidence they present, and offer a glimpse into their audience’s reaction. In doing so, I have implied a set of questions for analysis that I now want to make more explicit: Why are we seeing what seems to be a surge of interest around Nephilim and biblical giants in popular culture? Is there a particular driver to this interest, or has it always existed in its current form? Is there something inherent to this material itself that drives the interest? How does this type of material function as an identifiable “conspiracy theory” (terminology I have so far used without formal definition)? And if many of these videos feature obvious visual and narrative incongruities and other easily debunked content, what accounts for the enthusiasm and continued belief in the face of compelling counterevidence? What I want to now offer in response to these questions are two tracks of preliminary considerations that can help us think about this content at the intersection of academic research on the Bible, popular culture, and the psychology of conspiracy belief.

The archaeology of the historical giant. Lest the content we are examining seem unnecessarily novel, we do well to acknowledge the fact that a fascination with giants—and more specifically, with the archaeological discovery of giant artifacts and the display of giant bones—has been a recurrent theme throughout centuries of biblical reception history and has roots in the Bible itself. At the source of all this stands Genesis 6:1–4, which offers a genuinely shocking moment—a rare instance of something approaching polytheism or “mythology” under a certain definition in the Hebrew Bible that also introduces the tantalizing concept of sex with divine beings:¹⁹

Divine beings of indeterminate kind—some presume “angels” but this is not clear in the text—mate with human women to produce figures called “Nephilim.” Alternatively, the Nephilim could be identified with the divine beings who mate with women to produce the “heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (i.e., the Nephilim are the “sons of God”). Yet another possibility: the Nephilim could be a proper name for the “heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.” Interpretations spin off in several directions on this point. Already in the Bible itself, we find a narrator identifying the native inhabitants of the land as “Nephilim” (Num 13:32–33):

Regardless of whether from a historical-critical perspective we see either this text or Genesis 6:1–4 as historically primary, the story cryptically suggests that the Nephilim survive the flood event to birth later generations of giant adversaries to Israel. After this point, however, the Nephilim are never mentioned again by name (except perhaps by wordplay in Ezekiel 32; Doak 2013) until we find them in the post-biblical traditions of 1 Enoch and the Dead Sea Scroll materials.

In review of Israel’s post-Exodus journey, the opening chapters of Deuteronomy take up arcane aspects of the names and artifacts of giants in pre-Israelite Canaan. Deuteronomy 2:10–11, 20–21 comments on the habitation history of various parts of the land, offering new names for giants that had never or seldom appeared earlier, such as the “Emim” (see Gen 14:15), “a large and numerous people, as tall as the Anakim” who had formerly inhabited the land and who “are usually reckoned as Rephaim” (i.e., another group of giants), as well as telling us that these “Rephaim” are actually called “Zamzummim” by the Ammonites. The pièce de résistance of this material appears in Deuteronomy 3:11:

Biblical scholarship has focused on the problem of whether the “bed” (Heb. ‘eres) is a traditional bed or something else—such as a tomb or coffin (Lindquist 2011). Either way, the object may imply that Og was around thirteen feet tall, and whatever the case, the narrator takes a moment to obsesses about this detail, as if to substantiate the reality of Og’s spectacular physique and actual, historical existence for the audience. I cannot think of a reason for any of this except that the author (and audience) was simply intrigued by it and had a genuine antiquarian interest in it. One could make a similar assertion about details given for Philistine giants encountered by David and his men, such as the following:

• The technical overview of Goliath’s armor and weaponry (1 Sam 17:1–7);

• The fact that David takes Goliath’s head to Jerusalem and deposits Goliath’s armor in his own tent (1 Sam 17:54);

• The gratuitous narrative detail about how Goliath’s sword was taken to the Nob sanctuary and was kept wrapped in cloth behind the sanctuary’s primary cult object, the “ephod” (1 Sam 21:2–10);

• The body notes about an anonymous six-fingered / six-toed giant in 2 Sam 21:16 // 1 Chr 20:6.

I do not intend to give the impression here that biblical narrators are obsessed with the minutia of giant bodies and names and artifacts, but there is a notable impulse at specific points to engage with this minutia, to wonder at it, and to tantalize the audience with it. We find in these texts elements of pre-modern ethnography, literary fascination, and an archaeological impulse to place the giant body and its artifacts in some particular place and time.

The fascination with these creatures, who seem to have passed away completely as a “historical” reality by the end of David’s reign, makes a stunning comeback in early Jewish literature of the third or second century BCE (e.g., Goff 2010; 2015; 2021). In the opening chapters of 1 Enoch, for example, we find a type of interpretive “fan fiction” based on Genesis 6:1–4, making some of what was ambiguous in the source material clearer: Divine “Watchers” have sex with human women, producing Gibborim and then Nephilim (all giants). Later in the book, these giants receive judgment from God but live on as “evil spirits” who dwell explicitly on earth and not in heaven, sowing strife among themselves and humans. 1 Enoch thus suggests the sinister idea that wicked giant lineages may still be among us—an idea taken up in a spate of recent conspiracy-themed publications and even scholarly-adjacent materials reviewed below. Two oblique New Testament references to Enoch (or Enoch-like traditions) in 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 presumably offer Christian audiences a slim but notable warrant for integrating the spirituality of the Enoch world into their own lives.

In the Common Era, the fascination with giants continues, often in the form of narration recounting the excavation of bones or other anthropological musings. As Walter Stephens (1989, 58) points out in his review of the prolific giant traditions that spread all over medieval Europe, the giant played a central role as “a historical touchstone of ancient and medieval anthropological discourse.” The second century CE Greek geographer Pausanias (1913, 1:412) gives generous space in his Guide to Greece (VII.29.1–3) to describing a process of human-size degeneration from the heroic period of Homer until his present day and offers an account of a giant corpse uncovered within a giant coffin. Augustine of Hippo (fourth–fifth centuries CE) cites multiple instances of giant-bone discoveries—including his own first-hand experience with a giant tooth—in his monumental City of God (XV: 9, 23). The historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor (2011) speculates that the fossils of dinosaurs and other large animals could have served as real-life fodder for legends about giant creatures. Similarly, monumental architecture from the Bronze Age in Israel-Palestine that would have been visible during the period of biblical composition may have inspired references to groups such as the Anakim that were associated with large buildings (Num 13:28; Deut 1:28; 9:1–2; Josh 14:12), and archaeologists and biblical scholars have recently elaborated an “ancient ruins” theory for the origins of biblical giant traditions (i.e., that the observation of abandoned giant structures inspired stories of giants who created them; Hendel 2021, 273–282; 2022, 54–58; Maeir 2020). And we know that giant bones have been discussed by famous Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—such as the colonial preacher Cotton Mather, who mistook ice age elephant bones as those of a giant (Levin 1988; Semonin 2002, 15–40), and Abraham Lincoln (1848), who alluded to (native burial?) “mounds” filled with the bones of a “species of extinct giants.” Only in the early twentieth century did we see a thoroughgoing non-mythical view of giants emerge as a major interpretive option (e.g., Luanois and Roy 1904; Wright 1938)—and given some of the material we have been reviewing, that view is not clearly the dominant or only view even today.

My suggestion here is that YouTube has provided a digital community for the revival of an amateur historiographic and visual culture around giants, and that this community displays characteristics that we find associated with the giant in many contexts, for centuries: a desire to engage with a mysterious past, a longing to see physical artifacts associated with the biblical world, and a desire to demonstrate the literal historical reality of the early chapters of Genesis (if not also other texts). Visual awe is crucial to these longings, and the video format is uniquely situated to engage in that longing for contemporary audiences. The use of the Nephilim as a touchpoint for spinning out these ideas is particularly helpful because of the sheer mystery and provocation of the Genesis 6:1–4 passage; the possibilities presented there allow for a foot jammed into a mostly shut doorway of mythological thinking, which inspires certain readers.

Giant conspiracy theories. Although I cannot provide a rigorous review of the vibrant research now taking place around the definition of “conspiracies”—the last several years of American politics having created a virtual tsunami of popular conspiracies and concomitant interest in their causes and adherents²⁰—we need to justify and situate our use of the “conspiracy” language to describe elements of the ancient giant bones videos at hand. Douglas, Sutton, and Cichocka (2017, 538) define a proper conspiracy in terms of three elements: The events in question must be important, the plots at hand must be secrets, and those using secret plots to influence these important events must be powerful. On the broadest level, conspiracies are characterized by their sweeping explanatory power to explain a hidden reality behind all things. For example, in their analysis of a YouTube conspiracy in support of the 2012 Mayan calendar apocalypse, Reyes and Smith (2014, 400) take up Hofstadter’s (2008, 29) famous characterization of what the latter calls “paranoid” rhetorical style, marked not by the intrusion of merely piecemeal conspiratorial events but by a consideration of all history as a “‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events.” Though still not clearly a dominant motif to serve as this prime motive force in history, there is evidence emerging in popular culture beyond YouTube videos to suggest that the biblical Nephilim can play this role in compelling ways for believers.

For example, consider a recent book by a self-identified Christian author named Jennifer Sanger entitled The Roots of the Federal Reserve: Tracing the Nephilim from Noah to the U. S. Dollar (Sanger 2020). A rare female author in a giants-conspiracy world dominated by male voices, Sanger tells a complex story about the origins of the Federal Reserve that involves, among other things, well-known conspiracy lines regarding the Jekyll Island meeting that created the Fed and antisemitic tropes about elite Jewish banking families, all of which prompt her to ask if there is “a hidden agenda of the central banking system intertwined with the Nephilim agenda” (Sanger 2020, 7).²¹ These tropes are not only historically preposterous but actively dangerous, as antisemitic hate crimes have been on the rise in major U.S. cities.²²

Predicated on the concept of a “seed war” between Eve and the Serpent—in Genesis 3:15, as part of the punishment for eating the fruit of the tree, God declares that he will “put enmity between you [the Serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring [Hebrew zera, ‘seed’] and hers”—Sanger proposes that not only did the terrible interbreeding between demonic forces and humans occur as a historical, physical reality in Genesis 6:1–4, but that the Nephilim have continued to find “host bodies” in which to live. She proposes a set of criteria for determining whether one has a Nephilim host body, including negative moral qualities such as dishonest trade, sexual perversion, cannibalism, and bloodlust (2020, 128–31), as well as physical characteristics such as excessive strength, polydactyly (six fingers/toes), and red hair (2020, 215–16). She devotes ample space to the Smithsonian theory and details how that institution covers up evidence of giants in North America (2020, 237–55). In her telling, Nephilim have travelled through human DNA, to the point where some of their descendants came to settle in Jekyll Island, thus influencing our national monetary system: “The spiritual DNA released upon Jekyll Island releases a sound of dissonance that attracts spiritual darkness. The Nephilim agenda was deposited into the soil of Jekyll Island” (Sanger 2020, 349). The book ends with an exhortation to pray against these dark spiritual forces, summarizing the Nephilim agenda today in terms that bear striking resemblance to the progressive enemies vilified by the contemporary QAnon community—who are characterized as globalists, paedophiles, child sacrificers, and Deep State adherents (2020, 423). In fact, Sanger includes a prominent QAnon slogan as an epigraph before the Introduction to the book: “Symbolism will be their downfall. -Q.” As many have already recognized, the QAnon conspiracy group has woven numerous antisemitic motifs into their ideology, including, in Sanger’s book, not only pernicious ideas about “Jewish elites” but also comments about alleged harm to children perpetrated by QAnon’s contemporary political enemies that recalls the “blood libel” (i.e., the false accusation that Jews ritually murdered children and drank their blood).²³

The association of the Nephilim with “seed” and genetics imagery has emerged as the central explanatory trope for contemporary conspiracists to connect the ancient Nephilim with our world today.²⁴ Additionally, the invocation of genetics takes advantage of the love of science fiction themes combined with the prestige of scientific disciplines that one might lend to historical interpretation. As a theological theme, the notion of a “seed war” appears in recently popular books about Nephilim, giants, and demons by Brian Godowa (2014), a screenwriter with a professional researcher’s touch, as well as by Michael Hesier (2015; 2017), a traditionally educated biblical scholar (with a PhD from UW Madison) forging a publishing career based on heavy interest in the Nephilim and giants issue. Heiser is careful at points to characterize the seed and genealogy issue as only spiritual and metaphorical (e.g., 2015, 134), though at other points the language of seed and genealogy are unqualified or come off as at least potentially literal and historical—in his popular Unseen Realm (2015, 142), Heiser speaks of “bloodline lineages” between the Nephilim and Anakim, and in Demons: What the Bible Really Says About the Powers of Darkness (2020), he argues that literal, contemporary real-world demons are the offspring of Nephilim.

Although these more circumspect works do not engage in direct conspiracy language outside of the spiritual or demonic situation, they do serve as “bridges” toward the full conspiracy views. Sanger (2020), for example, prominently cites Heiser dozens of times in building her case about the Nephilim agenda behind the Federal Reserve. In both Heiser’s and Godowa’s cases, we have authors who have also written popular biblical fiction series invoking the Nephilim, viz., Heiser’s “The Façade Saga” and Godowa’s “The Chronicles of the Nephilim,” for which their own aforementioned nonfiction works serve as companion guides.²⁵ Reyes and Smith (2014, 413) suggest that more research should be pursued regarding the interplay between conspiracist forms of “fiction” and “non-fiction,” such as the way a series of fantasy films about the 2012 end-of-the-world phenomenon interacted with real-world attempts to prove the accuracy of the 2012 Mayan calendar scenario. Further exploration into these works may reveal blurred boundaries in these authors’ conceptions between what others might traditionally consider “fact” and “fiction”; certainly from a commercial standpoint the authors benefit from creating an ecosystem of entertainment and educational options that mutually reinforce one another.

Two other recent books in this genre deserve mention in order to demonstrate that biblical giants can serve as the centrepiece for conspiracy-oriented views of the larger world (see Thomas 2012, who saw the emergence of giants and DNA material already in the early 2000s). If Sanger’s book seems to be too much of a niche product for this type of analysis, consider a top-five selling book (throughout 2022–2023) in Amazon’s category of “Mysticism Christian Theology”: Ryan Pitterson’s Judgment of the Nephilim (2017).²⁶ The book follows now-familiar storylines, including the war of seeds between Satan and Eve, miscegenation involving divine beings, the survival of Nephilim DNA through the flood—teased through the cover of the book, which displays a DNA strand, Noah’s ark, and two pyramids—and the ultimate survival of Nephilim and the souls of other giants into our present world. Unlike many other works of this type, however, that use 1 Enoch as a de facto canonical source on the Nephilim,²⁷ Pitterson points out what he sees as grave contradictions between 1 Enoch and the Bible and dismisses it as a source on the Nephilim entirely (2017, Kindle loc 3028–381). Instead, Pitterson uses “only the Bible” to reach essentially the same speculative conclusions that others have reached through a variety of sources (2017, Kindle loc 5904):

With so much at stake, given that the spirits of dead giants roam the world today and the “Nephilim DNA” remains alive and well, in Pitterson’s vision, the question of where exactly these Nephilim are right now would seem to be quite urgent. Unlike Sanger, however, Pitterson ends his study without pointing out any particular historical instantiation in the contemporary world where Nephilim have played a clear role.

Gary Wayne’s The Genesis 6 Conspiracy: How Secret Societies and the Descendants of Giants Plan to Enslave Humankind (2014), however, goes much further. The longest in this genre among recent works, Wayne casts aside all traditional boundaries of canon and religion and examines not only the Nephilim and ancient giants but carries the story forward through 1 Enoch, Freemasonry, the seven sacred sciences, Egyptology, holy grail bloodlines, UFOs and aliens, the “Rothschild-Rockefeller-Morgan axis,” the Illuminati, fairies, Atlantis, and dragons—to name only a sample of materials examined in the book’s chapters. The basic thread through it all comes back to the literal, physical genealogy of giants that continues to live on in our world today, and which will inevitably occupy the entire world. As Wayne dourly puts it in conclusion of the whole matter (2014, Kindle loc 13761):

Short of conducting rigorous and in-depth individual studies of those who have produced or consumed and believed in conspiracies around Nephilim and other biblical giants, that is, along the lines of longitudinal studies carried out by psychologists, we can only offer speculation of a certain type for what exactly it is that attracts adherents to this content. Taking very recent studies into account, we might learn, for example, that conspiracy belief may be genetic (Holoyda 2022); certain conspiracies can serve as “gateways” to others (Granados Samoyoa, et al., 2022); exposure to digital materials and politicians generally increases conspiracy belief (De Coninck et al. 2021); unsurprisingly, those with “lower science intelligence and higher conspiracy mentality” are more likely to be believe conspiracies such as the flat Earth arguments, particularly on YouTube (Landrum, Olshansky, and Richards 2021); and so on. Most broadly, as Douglas et al. (2019) put it, conspiracy belief comes from “a range of psychological, political, and social factors,” including epistemological, existential, and social motives, demographic and political identities, personal ideology, motivated reasoning, and a basic lack of agency or power in one’s life.

To be sure, these “negative” explanations tend to dominate—conspiratorial thinkers are “losers” who seek narrative control over the world that they cannot otherwise achieve (Van Prooijen et al., 2022; Drążkiewicz 2022). As Van Prooijen et al. (2022, 26) point out, in the professional literature conspiracy belief is most often associated with out-of-control and anxious emotions; “feelings of anxiety, uncontrollability, and uncertainty necessarily always are aversive, and need to be managed psychologically.” Against this trend, however, and with our YouTube content in mind, we might explore, with Van Prooijen’s research project, alternative motivations that describe why conspiracy belief persists despite the negative health and social effects often associated with them: viz., conspiracy content is positively stimulating, provides an emotionally intense experience, and is straightforwardly entertaining. Simply put, this research suggests that individuals consistently experience conspiracy explanations for an event as more entertaining and emotionally stimulating than non-conspiracy accounts for the same event.

On the face of it, notwithstanding obvious differences in what individuals find entertaining, the YouTube content under examination here offers a bombardment of images, music, b-roll, images, and fast-paced stimuli that are clearly meant to entertain its audience. As pointed out above, some of the content seems created not by passionate “believers” at all—as contrasted, for example, with the brothers at the heart of the Search for Lost Giants series or some of the religiously motivated material—but rather by production companies churning out content to generate advertising revenue. The sometimes quite incongruous explanatory gaps and open-ended questions evoke a sense of mystery and are not experienced by adherents negatively but rather as desiderata. In their analysis of the “Planet X” conspiracy YouTube series, Reyes and Smith (2014, 400, 402, 406) argue that conspiracy videos are truly their own genre and function on the basis of “leaps” and “blurs.” Ultimately, the issue is not about factual accuracy, predictions coming true, or even the popularity of the theory, but rather the key issue is a sort of inner ability, within the genre, to “set and keep in motion a labyrinthine argument that is itself the mark and measure of conspiracy rhetoric” (2014, 413). Conspiracy video creators operate, in this model, not so much as failed historians or philosophers as much as they seek to “perfect a discourse” in the aesthetic form of their genre (2014, 413). They are, in this reading, something more like artists. Indeed, Robin Sloan takes up this provocative angle in a piece of speculative fiction entitled “The Conspiracy Museum,” wherein the narrator quotes a colleague who calls conspiracy theories “the third great American art form, alongside jazz and superhero comics” (Sloan 2020).

In earlier research along these same lines, Soukup (2008) argued that the specifically digital dissemination of conspiracy belief regarding the 9/11 attack accounted for the popularity of these beliefs. Rather than relying on the negative social implications of this belief (which clearly do exist), Soukup noticed the way that the content provided “a unique sense of pleasure for media consumers” (2008, 6), with “unanswered questions” driving the narrative (2008, 8) within a “form of play” (2008, 9). Citing work by Lindemann and Renegar (2006, 4–5), Soukup suggests that such theories do offer resistance on loaded topics but do so with “‘pleasurable resistance’…empowering the consumer’s complex interpretations of media texts.” Needless to say, this empowerment is not dependent on the classically defined rational rigor of the rhetoric. Soukup speaks of the “spiraling” effect digital content provides—as noted in our YouTube giants content—that includes a barrage of rapid fire, open-ended examples and questions, in something approaching a stream-of-consciousness style that takes the form of “limitless, pleasurable signification” (2008, 19). In this spiral, the search for a “hidden truth” or even the ultimate “believability” of the content fades in favor of aesthetic concerns; the aesthetic challenge of the genre is to present the issue in a way so that it keeps “spinning,” “out of (discursive) control” (Soukup 2008, 17).

Ultimately, I suggest, the popular appeal of the YouTube giants content relies not on any organized “belief” in the actual discovery of bones but rather on the content creators’ ability to usher viewers into their spiral of questions and suggestions and possibilities. This aesthetic is clear in the History Channel’s Search for Lost Giants, where each episode is intentionally structured, like a never-ending soap opera, to compel us to the next instalment. If we fall under its spell, we follow it. At some point, most viewers probably do realize that the next episode will not, in fact, reveal the world-changing discovery that the show’s narrative continually promises. In other materials, such as “Giants Emerging Everywhere,” “The Most Fact Based Documentary,” “20 Shocking Discoveries,” and “Giant of Japan military parade,” we should acknowledge that the point of engagement is not to “get past” the incongruous leaps and obviously fake, altered photos—these features are the point. The images of the tiny archaeologists next to menacing bones are transparently funny, and it is hard to imagine that content creators who manipulate and present these images “actually believe” in them—perhaps the same can be said of viewers, regardless of their comments, which are not statements of doctrinal belief but rather a way of participating in the community’s in-group language. In more overt form, internet culture and its love of “memes” has even provided opportunity for communities to intentionally engage in conspiracy creation as a performance by way of expressing a political or emotional point—consider the recent “Birds Aren’t Real” protests, which mock both the idea of a surveillance state and the rhetoric of other conspiracies, or the widely circulated rumour that began in 2015 claiming that Ted Cruz was the “Zodiac Killer.”²⁸

This kind of appeal crosses the boundary of the YouTube video genre and would likely hold true for content of all kinds, including the more elaborate written publications discussed here. One Amazon reviewer of Sanger’s The Roots of the Federal Reserve, “Jill S. Herrera,” illustrates this idea with total transparency (still visible on the site as of November 2024):

The entertainment value, for this review, is the deeper value. But to seize upon another part of the reviewer’s comment that is also instructive: the Bible needs to be understood “in a whole new way,” which gestures toward a need for Christian communities to re-experience Scripture…with excitement. One could, I think, profitably begin to explore the ways the materials I have reviewed here intersect with narratives of religion’s enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment that occur for readers of the Bible in rapidly secularizing contexts in the United States (referring not only to Weber’s famous thesis, but also more recent work, e.g., Taylor 2007). The YouTube materials here play a part in this quest to re-enchant the Bible in the face of 1,700 years of Bible familiarity, or even Bible boredom, for those seeking to connect with an authentic past and the giants who lived in it.

An additional note to the reader: Although the antisemitic tropes noted in two of the materials reviewed above (Sanger 2020 and the YouTube channel “GeorgeHollicke”) do not yet rise to the level of what we might call a pervasive antisemitic theme across specifically giant-themed conspiracy content, we should be aware of the potential for further developments on this front. Research has documented a long history of the way antisemitic themes have appeared intertwined with conspiracy belief (with particular relevance for recent digital materials, see Allington, Buarque, and Barker Flores 2021; and for more general historical overviews, e.g., Simonsen 2020; Kofta, Soral, and Bilewicz 2020; Baer 2013). These beliefs are not without consequences, as antisemitic violence has spiked in recent years. As Allington, Buarque, and Barker Flores (2021, 96–97) conclude, audiences may even respond to “latent” antisemitic content with explicitly antisemitic comments and actions. Thus, the “disinterested” academic study of conspiracy language cannot remain easily detached from real developments in the contemporary world. I encourage readers to engage with the content reviewed in this article with all this in mind.

Published online: February 14, 2025