So, are there no mysteries then about these deformed heads? Can everything be satisfactorily explained, medically and genetically?
The Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC), who is credited with the Hippocratic Oath, a set of ethical practices that today's physicians still swear by, wrote in the fifth century about a people called Makrokephaloi. They would put bandages around the heads of newborns to elongate their bones.1
The oldest finds of deformed skulls in Europe stem from Armenia and are dated to the ninth millennium BC.2 But the cult of elongated heads flourished in ancient Europe over millennia. Deformed skulls were found in Hungarian cemeteries. From an ethnic point of view, the custom is said to have originated from the Huns, the Asian equestrian people who moved west from the Caspian steppes during the fourth and fifth centuries. The name of the king of the Huns, Attila, also called the Death Rider, is well known. But the Huns could not have invented the deformations. The custom is much older than the fourth century. Where did the idea originally come from? Gernot Wagner published his diploma thesis about deformed skulls in Austria and comes to the conclusion that the custom had come into the European regions through the nomadic horsemen of the Huns.3 But—where did they get the custom?
German researcher and writer Hartwig Hausdorf, author of an outstanding series of books on enigmatic finds, talks in his book Götterbotschaft in den Genen ( Message of the Gods in the Genes) about mass skull deformities in France and even in Germany.4 In the district town of Straubing (Bavaria), archaeologists—according to Hausdorf—“made a surprising discovery during the excavations in a row graveyard in the late 1970s. In two of the tombs they found skeletons with artificially reshaped skulls that were unusually well preserved.” According to Hausdorf, there are now twelve artificially deformed skulls that were found in Bavaria alone. All of them are said to date from 450–550 AD. And “at the beginning of the 1930s, British anthropologist Eric John Dingwall (1890–1936) presented a flawlessly researched study that focused on deformities in European countries.”5 Since then, more than eighty skulls are said to have been found in Germany, fifteen in Switzerland, and thousands in France. Isotope analyses, which measure the proportion of a chemical element in a sample, conducted on German, Hungarian, Austrian, and French skulls, showed that they were not from distant lands. They were local. The same question remained: Why did parents for decades torment their children by deforming their skull bones with bandages and boards, often to adulthood? And why did this occur worldwide?
The Museum of Natural History in Vienna exhibits the Tower Skull of Mannersdorf. It once belonged to a twenty-year-old man who lived in the fifth century AD. Of the eighteen deformed skulls found in Austria, fourteen lay along a line that ran east through Vienna. Three others appeared in the Krems-Land district on the Danube and another in the Völkermarkt district in Carinthia. Famous scientist Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), who worked as a physician at the Charité; in Berlin, argued that early humans had carried out their skull deformations due to “practical considerations”—or based on a “beauty ideal” or as a means to “distinguish their race from other races.”6 But did they do that to thousands upon thousands of people, and on a global scale, as is now known? Just in Europe alone, artificially deformed skulls were found first in Hungary, from there across Slovakia and Lower Austria to the Rhone, Lake Geneva, and further west toward Burgundy and Bordeaux, even on small islands like Malta. In Bavaria alone there exist “twenty-one documentations from seven sites.”7 And this is—from a global perspective—just a drop of water on the earth's surface. By now we know about hundreds of thousands of deformed skulls. And now—this is hard to believe!—deformed skulls may even have surfaced in Antarctica. What crazy idea has humanity followed for millennia? And in addition to the medically and genetically explainable skulls, in addition to the deformations caused by humans, are there also cone-shaped skulls that don't fit anywhere into the pattern? How did our ancestors carry out the deformations?
We know this from Peru. The Spanish conquerors again and again met young people with elongated heads. They were shown newborns wearing bandages and strings around their heads. Depending on the age and hardness of the skull bones, boards were found to the right and left of the temples. Even boards holding the forehead and latticed plates made of algarrobo wood were used. There were children's cots with a device including a lever at the head of the bed. At bedtime, the baby's head was forced into the device. However, this seemingly unnatural behavior of our ancestors was not started by any South American peoples. The same was also practiced by the Mangbetu tribe in the northeastern part of the jungle in the province Orientale in what used to be Belgian Congo (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo). How did the information about deformed skulls travel from the heart of Africa to the Pacific coast of Peru? Or was it the other way around? Today, most anthropological museums in South America show deformed skulls. The Ethnographic Museum of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina has a particularly impressive collection. It presents deformed skulls found from Colombia to Ecuador and Peru all the way down to Chile. There, in the dry desert of Atacama, where on the walls of the hills you can admire the gigantic sketches pointing to the heavens, you come to the village of San Pedro de Atacama with its museum Padre Le Paige. The museum was founded by Belgian missionary Gustave Le Paige (1903–1980). He was convinced of the existence of humanlike aliens who are buried in the soil of our Earth. Stored in the basement of his museum, which is not accessible to the public, are more than one hundred deformed skulls. Before his death, he had confided in Chilean journalist Juan Abarzua that he had found mummies with faces that weren't shaped like those of humans. “People wouldn't believe me if I told them what else I found in the graves.”8
Spanish priest and subsequent bishop Reginaldo Lizárraga (1545–1615), who lived for many years in Peru and spoke the language of the natives, had met with living “longheads.” In his Descripción y Población de las Indias, he described people with incredibly tall skulls.9 Originally, they descended from giants, he wrote.
Spanish conqueror Pedro Cieza de León (1520–1554), author of the Crónica del Perú, writes about giants that were said to have landed with ships on Peru's coast.10 Are they the explanation for the deformed skulls? Did giants ever exist? At least in the historical tradition, they do.
They appear in the Bible (Genesis Chapter 6, verse 4): “In those times, and also later, when sons of God joined the daughters of men who then bore them children, the giants existed on Earth. These are the heroes of primeval times, the ones who became famous.”11 The fifth book of Genesis tells of a sarcophagus in which lay the mortal remains of a giant: “See, his basalt coffin is still in the Ammonite city Rabba; it is nine cubits long and four cubits wide” (Chapter 5, verse 11). As the Hebrew cubit measured 48.4 centimeters, the sarcophagus would have been about five meters long. Commonly known is the battle of David against Goliath, described by the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel Chapter 17, verse 4). The prophet Joshua and the Chronicles, which are part of the Bible, also speak of giants. But the Bible is far from being the only literary resource for giants. In the texts about Die Sagen der Juden (The Legends of the Jews), one can read, “There were the Emins or Terrible Ones, then the Rephaites or Giants . . .”12 And in the fourteenth chapter of the book of Enoch, which is one of the apocryphal texts, you find this terse statement: “Why did you act like the humans of Earth and fathered giants?”13
The giants also play a role in ancient Greek history with regard to the journey of the Argonauts. It happened that the heroes without worry climbed a mountain to get a better view. There they were attacked by giants: “Their bodies had three pairs of nerved hands like paws. The first pair hangs from the horny shoulders, the second and third pair cling to the hideous hips.”14 The monsters also appear in Homer's Odyssey, where the hero fought on the island of the Cyclopes against a giant and destroyed his only eye by plunging a burning stake into it. Today, walls made of gigantic stone blocks are called “Cyclo
pean walls.”15, 16
Even older is the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which was excavated from a hill near the village of Kujundschick, the former Nineveh (now Iraq).17 On the clay tablets, which belonged to the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal, one can read how Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu encountered the fearsome creature Chumbaba. It had “paws like a lion, its body was covered with scales.”
The book on the origin of the Eskimos states, as a matter of course, “In those days, the giants lived on Earth.”18
Nothing different is written in the Ethiopian Kebra Negast (Book of Glory of the Kings). Chapter 100 reports, “Those daughters of Cain, however, with whom the angels had copulated, became pregnant and died . . . because the children split apart the womb of their mothers. As they grew older, they grew into giants.”19
I wrote about these and more references from ancient literature in an earlier book.20 If you believe the statements, then these monsters once actually existed. Even Herodotus, the “father of historiography,” reported in his first book of Histories, “I wanted to dig a well here in the hall, and during my dig I came upon a coffin that was seven cubits long. And because I thought people were never taller than they are today, I opened it and saw that the corpse was really as long as the coffin. I measured it and filled up the hole again.” Facts are hard to come by. Over the past few decades, several scientists have affirmed that they have unearthed giant bones or tools of giants somewhere. But all such finds are controversial and their origins are attributed to gorillas or mutations. As late as 1944, German paleontologists Gustav von Königswald (1902–1982) and Franz Weidenreich (1873–1948) reported on the bones of giants that they had bought in pharmacies in Hong Kong. In 1944, Weidenreich even reported this to the American Ethnological Society.21
Did giants even participate in the construction of the Great Pyramid? The question is justified because a few years ago a Swiss hobby researcher in Egypt photographed parts of the hand of a mummified giant. Following is the story.
For decades, Gregor Spörri from Basel had been coming back to the country on the Nile. As far as the construction of the Great Pyramid is concerned, he knows both the classical and the skeptical literature, and he personally researched the pyramid several times. Every visit to Egypt attracts traders who try to sell junk to the tourists. To avoid this, on April 14, 1988, Spörri took a ride to the tiny village called Bir Hooker, somewhere between Cairo and Alexandria, hoping to find a dealer who could offer something other than the usual souvenirs. In a house built with mud bricks, he met an elderly Egyptian named Nagib. Nagib offered no figurines, hieroglyphic representations, or papyrus leaves. Instead, he offered real ancient art. After Spörri had told him about his research on the pyramids, Nagib was ready to show him the closely guarded family treasure. This included the chopped-off finger of a giant, including the fingernail and middle and end joint. Everything was covered by mummified skin. Particularly interesting was a bone protruding from the bottom of the finger. Spörri was a smart man and knew how to distinguish fakes from originals. The giant finger could not be a fake. The production of such an object would have been much too expensive. Bones, tissue, the ruptured skin, the fingernail—it was a hideous relic. Not something for tourists, not something to earn money with. Nagib even showed the astonished visitor an x-ray of the giant finger, which was said to have been taken by a friend in a Cairo hospital. Before Nagib put the unique object away, Gregor Spörri was allowed to take a few pictures of it. Back home in Basel he started to think more about it. The giant finger interested Spörri so much that he began to research and eventually wrote a Paleo-SETI thriller in which the finger plays an important role.22 Luc Bürgin, who publishes the magazine Mysteries, became aware of the curious find. He dedicated several pages to the “Monster Claw of Bir Hooker.”23 In its stretched-out state, the finger is at least 38 centimeters long. Truly a big deal. (Mr. Spörri can be contacted directly via www.grespo.com.)
The mummified finger of giant with nail, joints, and even the bone
In a thoroughly researched article in the magazine Nexus, British researcher Hugh Newman proves the existence of giants in Ancient Egypt.24 He refers to Egyptologist Professor Walter Bryan Emery (1903–1971) who was instrumental in carrying out the excavations at Saqqara in the 1930s. Emery found several giant bones and mummies and mentioned them in his excavation reports. These giants are supposed to have been priests and descendants of Horus, according to Emery.25 They reached a height of up to 4.6 meters. In the forecourt of the temple of Abydos, famous British archaeologist Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) also found bones of beings that seemed to have been much larger than humans.
So do the deformed skulls originate from giants? Something is missing: assuming that there were a million deformed heads worldwide (and in reality, there are more) and further assuming that 80 percent of them were created artificially by man, there are still two hundred thousand “natural” skulls left. About half of them are said to contain genetic factors of giants. But where are the skeletons of these giants? Why are there large numbers of skulls but no bones? The museums of the world exhibit deformed monster heads without skeletons.
In the early 1970s, British zoologist Dr. David Davies discovered an elongated skull in Ecuador (South America) by sheer accident. During a hard rain, Dr. Davies fled into the rooms of a small private collection in the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca. There he found “a great number of fossil material from which two human teeth stared me in the face.”26 Davies inquired about the location of the find and eventually visited it. There, in a rock layer approximately 2 meters high and 2 kilometers long, he discovered bones of various animals that should not exist in South America. Among them were saber-toothed tigers and mastodons (a mammoth species). I was confident of this because I had admired pictures of mammoth-like animals in the collections of Father Carlo Crespi (1891–1982) in Cuenca, Ecuador, and in the collection of Dr. Janvier Cabrera (1924–2001) in the city of Ica, Peru.27 Among the many different pieces, Davies also came across a deformed skull. He called it “Fred.” According to the C-14 analysis, Fred would have to be 28,000 years old and thus the oldest American. Fred's head extended backward; in this case, an obviously natural deformation. But it did not belong to a giant—at least no corresponding bones could be found at the site.
Figurines with skulls extending backward appeared as early as 3000 BC. They are on display at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, Greece.
Museum of Cycladic art in Athens—these longheaded figurines and statues are dated back to 3000 BC.
Elongated skulls in the Museo Regional de Ica “Adolfo Bermúdez Jenkins”
“In the Museo Regional de Ica ‘Adolfo Bermúdez Jenkins’,” writes researcher Reinhard Habeck, “the most extraordinary specimens have survived. Some skulls are so elongated that one does not quite believe their human origin.”28
And that's exactly it. What perversion caused our ancestors to stretch out the tender heads of their own children? Experts with whom I talked at length did not come up with any sensible explanations. It probably had to do with “practical thinking,” such as making it easier to wear headbands. Nonsense; a normal head with a normal forehead carries heavier loads over a headband. Other invented reasons are “beauty ideals” and a way to “distinguish oneself from other social groups.” I have a different opinion and explained it in several books.29, 30
The worldwide skull deformations were practiced only to make the children look the same as the old gods.
All over the world, our ancestors encountered those frightening beings—the aliens. And on a global scale, attention seekers sought to be at least outwardly similar to them. Soon, priests used the barbaric trick of looking god-like through elongating the backs of their heads. It was a great way to impress people. “Look! He looks like a god, and he moves like a god. He must have special wisdom and, thus, a special power over the stupid ones. He must lead them. He deserves respect.” The religious leaders wanted to distinguish themselves from the c
ommon people by their oversized skulls. The common people needed to see them as the chosen ones. And, of course, the priesthood was owed offerings. For the priestly families, this belief was vital and at the same time hypocritical. They also had to know that the minds of adolescents, despite the deformed skulls, did not function better than the ones of people without elongated heads. In addition, some people with “tower heads” may have been particularly simpleminded. Why? Even though the head was enlarged, the volume of the brain mass did not grow with it. That inevitably created hydrocephaly.
My fellow writers Hartwig Hausdorf and bestselling author David Hatcher Childress from the United States arrived at the same conclusion. Hartwig Hausdorf asks, “How would the different peoples on all continents come up with the same crazy idea at the same time? All of them must have met beings whose anatomy was so strikingly different from their own. But since tower heads do not naturally occur on our planet, it seems reasonable to conclude that those beings are not from this world.”31
David Hatcher Childress, author of over twenty nonfiction books, points to the various theories of skull deformities.32 There is the “mainstream theory,” according to which the heads were altered because of a “beauty ideal.” Or the Atlantis theory: the inhabitants of Atlantis are said to have originally possessed elongated heads. People from Atlantis also supposedly visited Mexico, Peru, and Egypt, thereby influencing the local population. The result? Tower heads (the medical term is turricephaly). Then there is the “Nephilim-Watchers theory,” which holds that at one time “watchmen,” extraordinary teachers, would have instructed humankind. These “guards” were said to have lived in the areas of northern Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon and to have visited other peoples elsewhere in airships. The heads of those “guards” were extended backward. So says the theory. And finally there is the “Nephilim Extraterrestrial theory.” This one refers to extraterrestrials who had been teaching young mankind.
War of the Gods Page 2
