Nevada’s Mysterious Cave of The Red-Haired Giants
by Terrence Aym (source)
….
The Paiutes, a Native-American tribe indigenous to parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona, told early white settlers about their ancestors’ battles with a ferocious race of white, red-haired giants. According to the Paiutes, the giants were already living in the area.
The Paiutes named the giants “Si-Te-Cah” that literally means “tule-eaters.” The tule is a fibrous water plant the giants wove into rafts to escape the Paiutes continuous attacks. They used the rafts to navigate across what remained of Lake Lahontan.
According to the Paiutes, the red-haired giants stood as tall as 12-feet and were a vicious, unapproachable people that killed and ate captured Paiutes as food. [Overestimation is to be expected.]
The Paiutes told the early settlers that after many years of warfare, all the tribes in the area finally joined together to rid themselves of the giants.
One day as they chased down the few remaining red-haired enemy, the fleeing giants took refuge in a cave. The tribal warriors demanded their enemy come out and fight, but the giants steadfastly refused to leave their sanctuary.
Frustrated at not defeating their enemy with honor [underestimation is to be expected], the tribal chiefs had warriors fill the entrance to the cavern with brush and then set it on fire in a bid to force the giants out of the cave.
The few that did emerge were instantly slain with volleys of arrows. The giants that remained inside the cavern were asphyxiated. [—“Honorably,” I presume]
Later, an earthquake rocked the region and the cave entrance collapsed leaving only enough room for bats to enter it and make it their home.
The Excavation
Thousands of years later the cave was rediscovered and found to be loaded with bat guano almost 6-feet deep. Decaying bat guano becomes saltpeter, the chief ingredient of gunpowder, and was very valuable.
Therefore, in 1911 a company was created specifically to mine the guano. As the mining operation progressed, skeletons and fossils were found.
The guano was mined for almost 13 years before archaeologists were notified about the findings. Unfortunately, by then many of the artifacts had been accidentally destroyed or simply discarded.
Nevertheless, what the scientific researchers did recover was staggering: over 10,000 artifacts were unearthed including the mummified remains of two red-haired giants—one, a female 6.5-feet tall, the other male, over 8-feet tall.
Many of the artifacts (but not the giants) can be viewed at the small natural history museum located in Winnemucca, Nevada.
Confirmation of the Myth
As the excavation of the cave progressed, the archaeologists came to the inescapable conclusion that the Paiutes myth was no myth; it was true.
What led them to this realization was the discovery of many broken arrows that had been shot into the cave and a dark layer of burned material under sections of the overlaying guano.
Among the thousands of artifacts recovered from this site of an unknown people is what some scientists are convinced is a calendar: a donut-shaped stone with exactly 365 notches carved along its outside rim and 52 corresponding notches along the inside.
But that was not to be the final chapter of red-haired giants in Nevada.
In February and June of 1931, two very large skeletons were found in the Humboldt dry lake bed near Lovelock, Nevada.
One of the skeletons measured 8.5-feet tall and was later described as having been wrapped in a gum-covered fabric similar to Egyptian mummies. The other was nearly 10-feet long. [Nevada Review-Miner newspaper, June 19, 1931.]
![jayaprada:
A Pakistani villager holds a wreckage of a suspected surveillance drone which crashed in a Pakistani border town along the Afghanistan border. (Shah Khalid / Associated Press / August 25, 2012)
Living with death by drone via Los Angeles Times
By Jennifer Gibson
October 4, 2012
Last week, Stanford University and New York University released a major study about the use of drones in the ever-evolving but never-ending war on terror. Unfortunately, many commentators missed the report’s key message: Drones are terrorizing an entire civilian population.
[..]
People in the United States imagine that drones fly to a target, launch their deadly missiles with surgical precision and return to a U.S. base hundreds or thousands of miles away. But drones are a constant presence in the skies above the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan, with as many as six hovering over villages at any one time. People hear them day and night. They are an inescapable presence, the looming specter of death from above.
And that presence is steadily destroying a community twice the size of Rhode Island. Parents are afraid to send their children to school. Women are afraid to meet in markets. Families are afraid to gather at funerals for people wrongly killed in earlier strikes. Drivers are afraid to deliver food from other parts of the country.
The routines of daily life have been ripped to shreds. Indisputably innocent people cower in their homes, afraid to assemble on the streets. “Double taps,” or secondary strikes on the same target, have stopped residents from aiding those who have been injured. A leading humanitarian agency now delays assistance by an astonishing six hours.
What makes this situation even worse is that no one can tell people in these communities what they can do to make themselves safe. No one knows who is on the American kill list, no one knows how they got there and no one knows what they can do to get themselves off. It’s all terrifyingly random. Suddenly, and without warning, a missile launches and obliterates everyone within a 16-yard radius.
Naturally, the Obama administration claims it strikes only militants. But if we have learned anything since 9/11, it is that we must all read the fine print. What people do not appreciate is that the administration defines militants as all military-age males, typically those between 18 and 65. In addition, because the U.S. generally does not release the names of people who have been killed, we cannot know whether the victims were actually militants or were deemed militants simply because Washington says they were.
Indeed, the entire process is riddled with the same sort of flaws that beset the detention regime at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In Afghanistan, the Bush administration paid enormous bounties in an effort to get information on the ground. In areas rife with tribal and familial rivalries, the result was predictable: Hundreds of innocent people were wrongly fingered as Taliban or Al Qaeda, many of whom spent years at Guantanamo or other American prisons overseas.
Now the United States is offering similar incentives to people in North Waziristan who promise to identify militants. The alleged militants’ homes are tagged by GPS trackers and later, when the informant is at a safe distance, blown to smithereens. And because no one knows who the informants are, people are reluctant to invite neighbors into their homes. The entire community withdraws from the public square, afraid to venture out but equally afraid to bring the outside in.
This is what it means to live under drones. It has turned North Waziristan into the world’s largest prison, a massive occupied zone. A humanitarian worker who was in New York on 9/11 and is now working in North Waziristan told us that the atmosphere in the two places feels very much the same. The constant sense of terror is a feeling that knows no boundaries.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbl1aiNGmz1qjdk8lo1_500.jpg)
