A Race of Giants | Documentary

Almost every ancient culture tells the same story. Before us, there were larger beings. The Hebrew scriptures name the Nephilim. Greek myth has its Titans. Norse tradition has the Jotnar. Indigenous North American traditions describe tall peoples who came before. The A Race of Giants documentary starts from that near universal memory and then asks a question that turns myth into an archival problem. If these accounts are pure invention, why did American newspapers spend the nineteenth century publishing detailed reports of oversized skeletons pulled out of burial mounds, and where did those remains end up?

The film’s argument is that the story of giants is not only a mythological question. It is a record keeping question, and the records are strange.

What the A Race of Giants Documentary Presents

The film’s central evidentiary claim concerns the American newspaper archive. It states that in the United States alone there were more than 1,500 published accounts of unusually large human remains being discovered, and it references a figure of 3,781 skeletons described in those reports as belonging to a population of giants with fair hair, recovered and exhumed across many states. These figures come from the film and the researchers it draws on rather than from any independent institutional accounting, and that distinction matters when weighing them.

What the documentary does effectively is show that these reports were not fringe publications or tabloid oddities in the modern sense. Many appeared in ordinary regional papers of record, often with named local officials, surveyors or landowners attached, often describing burial mound excavations in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys where genuine and substantial mound building cultures did exist.

The Question of the Missing Remains

The film’s most provocative thread is what happened afterward. If thousands of anomalous skeletons were recovered, they should be somewhere. Museums hold collections. Universities hold collections. Instead, the documentary argues, the trail goes cold with remarkable consistency, and the remains that were reportedly shipped to institutions cannot now be located or examined.

That leads the A Race of Giants documentary to the Smithsonian Institution, which absorbed an enormous volume of American archaeological material during exactly this period. The film raises the long circulating allegation that the Smithsonian took possession of anomalous remains and suppressed them, whether to protect a prevailing model of human settlement in the Americas or for reasons the film leaves open.

The Smithsonian has consistently denied this. Its position is that no such remains were ever received or destroyed, and that the allegation originates in a fabricated news story that has been recirculated for over a century. Historians of nineteenth century American journalism add important context here. Newspapers of that era competed aggressively for readers with sensational discoveries, many such reports were never verified by anyone, and at least one of the most famous American giant discoveries, the Cardiff Giant, was a documented and admitted hoax carved from gypsum. Exaggeration of skeletal size by untrained excavators working in poor light with fragmentary bones was also common and well documented.

The Monoliths That Came Before

Running alongside the skeletal question is the film’s interest in stonework. It examines megalithic construction around the world, the sites where blocks of extraordinary size were quarried, moved and fitted with precision that still invites argument about method. The implied connection is obvious. If a larger and stronger population existed, the engineering problems that modern observers find so puzzling would look different.

Conventional archaeology answers that question with organized labor, inclined ramps, levers, sledges, water transport, copper and stone tools, and above all time and social coordination. Multiple experimental archaeology projects have demonstrated that very large stones can be moved and raised with period appropriate technology. The film’s counter is not that these methods are impossible but that the sheer quantity and precision at certain sites still sits uneasily with them.

Why It Is Worth Watching

Take the A Race of Giants documentary as a guided tour of an archive rather than as settled history. Its strongest contribution is drawing attention to a genuinely odd body of published material that mainstream history has largely declined to catalog or address in detail, and to the fact that a great deal of early American archaeology was conducted without standards, documentation or custody of what was recovered. That much is uncontroversial, and it means the record really is incomplete.

Its weaker ground is the leap from an unreliable archive to an intentional cover up, which requires evidence the film does not produce. Watch it for the newspaper record, for the mound building cultures it introduces along the way, and for the reminder that a great deal of what was dug out of American soil in the nineteenth century was lost through carelessness long before anyone had a motive to hide it.

This film was featured in the MONTHLY REPORT • November 2025 • Volume VIII • Chapter XI. Explore more in the MUST WATCH Documentary Library.