551: Giants of Malta | Evidence the Ancient Builders are Hiding Underground
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In 1985, Maltese pediatrician Anton Mifsud got a frantic call from his contractor. He was clearing a piece of land for a new medical clinic. Dr. Mifsud was hoping they didn't need more equipment. They were isolated on Gozo, one of the islands of Malta. The nearest mainland was the Italian coast, 60 miles away by boat.

But Mifsud quickly realized this wasn't about equipment. The contractor sounded worried, afraid even. Mifsud wondered if someone had been hurt. He got the contractor to calm down and tell him what had happened. While digging, workers found human bones. The doctor said they should just call the police. But the contractor said there was more to it. The skeleton they found was 10 feet long. Dr. Mifsud said that was impossible. No human ever lived that was that enormous.

Then he remembered the legend. It was a late winter night on the island of Malta many thousands of years ago. A farmer was awakened by a strange rumbling sound. It sounded like wind, but deeper. His family was still asleep, no need to wake them until he figured out what this was.

The farmer stepped through the low entrance of his hut and stood at the edge of his wheat field. It was just a day or two after the new moon. It should have been pitch black, but an eerie orange light washed over the field, and it was getting brighter, and the sound was getting louder. It wasn't wind.

He'd seen meteors before, but they were small and came in bunches. This was a single large object blazing a path through the night sky. Then he became afraid. It was getting bigger. This fiery object, whatever it was, was headed straight for the island. He wanted to warn his family, but there was no time. Seconds later, it roared past. It left a trail of fire in the sky above his hut, his field, and then into a valley nearby.

A bright flash lit up the island and the sea beyond. Then just as quickly, the darkness returned. The farmer's wife stepped out of the hut, afraid. He turned to comfort her. Whatever it was, it crashed. The danger was over. But she wasn't looking at him. She was staring at something behind him in the direction of the crash.

The farmer turned around and saw a huge figure emerge from the woods, a dark silhouette that stood higher than the trees. The giant, called Sansuna, had arrived. When Sansuna emerged from the woods on Gozo, the locals were terrified. But despite her overwhelming size and strength, she eventually earned their trust.

She claimed to be from a race of beings called the Nephilim, and she promised to protect them. The farmers in the islands were in constant danger from raiders and pirates. But now, with the arrival of these giantess, the Maltese had a powerful guardian.

The islands were abundant with huge limestones, some weighing 20 tons and stood 20 feet high. To the Maltese people, the stones were too large to be useful. This was thousands of years ago. They had no metal tools. They hadn't yet discovered the wheel. But Sansuna was able to pick up even the largest stones and carefully place them one by one.

Soon, enormous temples were assembled. Some had walls three stories high. She built 30 different megalithic temples across the islands. The most impressive temple is on the island of Gozo. The farmers named it Gigantia, the Maltese word for giant. Gigantia is made of two separate buildings built using enormous limestone blocks, and it still stands to this day.

But as the centuries passed, Sansuna became nothing more than a local legend, a myth. No one believed these enormous stone blocks were carried by a giant. No one believed in giants until they found the bones. The Maltese Islands have been continuously occupied for thousands of years. They're strategically important. They're 60 miles from Italy and 180 miles from North Africa, right in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Phoenicians were the first empire to claim Malta. Then came the Romans, then the Byzantines, the Arabs, and the Christians. In 1530, Malta was governed by a nobleman named John Abella. He was the first person in a long time to take interest in the temples on the islands. He collected artifacts and documented ancient buildings. Most were buried in debris from centuries of neglect, but a little digging revealed the structures were enormous.

Abala didn't understand how these huge temples could be built by ancient farmers. One day, a worker found something wedged in a rock fissure. When Abala saw it, the answer to who built the huge structures was clear. They were built by a giant. The worker handed Abala a femur, the largest bone in the human leg. Except this femur was twice as large as a normal human's. A person with a femur this big would be about 10 feet tall. Yep.

Soon, Abella had workers all over the island hunting. And by 1647, he had enough bones to publish a pioneering book that made him famous. He's been called the father of Maltese history. Tell the people the name of this famous book there. That's not really important to the story. Yeah, you can't pronounce it. It's Italian. I can pronounce it. Go ahead then. It's not... 20 bucks says you can't do it.

Abela's book was titled "De la descrizione di Malta Isola nel mare siciliano con le sue antichità e rastre notizie." Take it. Grazie mille. Show off. The book documented skull fragments, giant femurs and tibias, impossibly large vertebrae and enormous pelvic bones. Abela concluded that the Maltese temples were built by a prehistoric race of giants that lived on the islands.

Abele turned his home into Malta's first museum. He put the bones on display and opened the museum to the public. Anatomists and naturalists who saw the large bones agreed. They must have belonged to giants. Skeptics said they were animal bones. And until the sites were fully cleared, there was no way to know for sure. Then centuries later, proper archaeological excavations were done. But what they uncovered didn't solve the mystery. It added to it.

In 1915, a Maltese farmer kept hitting large stone blocks while plowing his field, so he contacted the Malta museum director, Sir Temi Zamet. Expecting more temple remains, Zamet instead found something quite different, a massive statue. The top had been destroyed, but the bottom remained. Two giant legs and feet. The statue was over 10 feet tall. ZAMET

Workers kept digging, and what was a buried statue turned out to be much more.

The statue is in the middle of a complex group of megalithic temples. Zamet uncovered one of the most significant and impressive archaeological sites in Malta. They're known as the Tarsian temples. Four structures in all are arranged in a cloverleaf pattern only visible from above. The temples were made from limestone blocks. Some are 20 feet tall and weigh over 50 tons. Walls, doorways, even floors made of enormous stones that fit together perfectly.

He kept digging. Zamet oversaw the excavation of nearly 30 different sites, all megalithic, all made with enormous limestone, stacked in close-fitting slabs.

The obvious question plaguing Zamet was: how could Stone Age farmers on a remote island build these things? The temple excavated at Amnidra is even more mysterious. It might be the world's oldest calendar. On the equinoxes, the sun hits the main axis of the temple. On the solstices, the sun hits the opposite axis. The alignment is perfect.

Almost. Now, it might seem odd that a culture that could build a site with such precision would be off by a few degrees. So what went wrong? Well, nothing. As you know, the Earth slowly wobbles on its axis, and the position of the stars changes over time. This is called precession. There was a time when the Temple of Amnidra was in perfect alignment with these celestial events.

10,200 BC. - That means... - Yep. - The Younger Dryas! - 10,200 BC is just after the end of the Younger Dryas, when the ice sheets melted and a great flood rushed over the Earth.

The flood was quick and it was merciless. Coastal cities were gone, shredded by a mile-high tsunami moving at the speed of sound. Their remains scattered at the bottom of the sea. The only human survivors were the ones on higher ground. The entire landscape of the Earth was changed. The cause of the flood is still being debated. Some say it was caused by the impact of a giant asteroid, while others believe it was a massive solar event.

But Zamet was exploring Mnidra in the early 1900s. He didn't know anything about asteroids or solar storms, but he did know the story of the Great Flood. The Flood was the wrath of God, meant to destroy the Nephilim. The Flood was meant to kill the giants.

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But if we look to holy texts outside the Bible, we get the full story. The Book of Enoch is not included in the canonical Bible for most Jews and Christians, but it's an important work, especially within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and among scholars of early Judaism and Christianity. The book tells a story about the origins of evil. It starts with a group of angels called the Watchers.

God entrusted them with the task of overseeing mankind, and they provided order and guidance. Eventually, the angels rebelled. They took human wives, which was forbidden. The Watchers were cast out from heaven and forced to live in the underworld. But their evil remained on earth. The Watchers and their human wives had offspring.

These hybrid beings were mighty giants called the Nephilim. According to the Book of Enoch, these giants wreaked havoc on Earth and are the reason God created the Flood. He meant to destroy the children of the Watchers from amongst men. Of course, if the Nephilim were destroyed in the Flood, they'd be long gone before the early Maltese farmers settled on the island. But in the Book of Numbers, there's more to the story.

Moses sends spies to explore the land of Canaan. They report that some giants may have survived the flood. - The land through which we have gone to spy it out is a land that devours its inhabitants. And all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim and we seem to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seem to them.

The Maltese legend of Sansuna goes back thousands of years before the Bible was written, yet that legend aligns perfectly with what's told in the Book of Enoch. Sansuna was a demigod stranded on the island, a giant who survived the flood, and she wanted to continue her species. Bad idea. But there were no other giants on the island. Okay. But she might have taken a human male as a mate. That would...

would explain the skulls. "Whoa, whoa, wait! Skulls? What skulls? What skulls? No, no, no, no! Don't show the logo! Don't show the logo!" "Crip."

In 1902, the British Navy expanded its base in Malta, and new housing developments started popping up all over the islands. On one job site, workers were digging out an area for a large water tank. Suddenly, the ground gave way, exposing an enormous underground chamber. Excavations revealed a subterranean maze of rooms and burial chambers. Zabit named the site the Hypogeum, the Greek word for underground.

What Zamet found near the megalithic temples above ground. There are limestone walls and doorways, the same slate floors. The stonework is precise and massive. Zamet and his team were stunned by the size of this underground world.

Then they discovered this was just the first level. There were two more levels below, maybe more. And the Hypogeum was full of well-preserved artifacts. The most common design was the same found everywhere on the island, the figure of a giantess. Many parts of the Hypogeum were used as a burial site. That meant there would be bones.

Zamet recovered the remains of more than 7,000 people. Some of the bodies date back to the Neolithic period. He documented every bone he found. Until he got to a group of skulls he couldn't quite explain. Both of them. The skulls were elongated. Ah, like alien heads. Well, they do look like that. But Zamet knew many cultures around the world used head binding to stretch their skulls. So Zamet had scientists examine them.

And they confirmed that the long cranium was natural, not the result of bonding or boards. But it gets even stranger. Every human skull has a seam between the two parietal bones. It's called the sagittal suture. When we're born, our skulls are flexible. That makes it easier for our big head to, uh, um... Square out the baby chute. Right. As we grow, the two halves of our skull fuse together, forming that seam.

But these elongated skulls had no seam at all. That's impossible. That seam is a key part of human development. Ah, so these skulls aren't human. Nope, they didn't seem human. Well, not completely human. In 1920, National Geographic magazine reported that the first inhabitants of Malta were an alien race with elongated skulls. Now, Zabit would have called that crazy, except he couldn't explain the skulls otherwise. Then he remembered the story of Sansuna. Sansuna!

Part of the Sun Tzu legend is that she carried stones under one arm while cradling a baby in the other. The child was a Nephilim-human hybrid. So let's go back to the skull for a second. For a child to be born with a fully formed skull, it would have to travel through a very large... Babysuit.

Yes, like that of a giant. Now, maybe these skulls belonged to the descendants of Sansuna. If they were human-nephilim hybrid children, they would have the size and strength to carve and build the hypogeum. Now, it's a fun story and adds to the legend, but still, this was conjecture. There's no proof of giants living underground in the hypogeum until 1940, when someone saw them. ♪ He always smells like pine ♪ ♪ She said get out the chat room and clean mine ♪

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In August 1940, National Geographic magazine printed an interesting and disturbing story about Malta and the Hypogeum.

First, the article reported that excavators discovered the bones of over 33,000 people who had been sacrificed by an ancient pagan cult. Then there was the story of the children who went to the hypogeum on a school trip. A school field trip to an underground cave where thousands of people were sacrificed in a cult? Yep. They must have signed one hell of a waiver with that permission slip, eh? Well, I hope so, because the children went in and never came out. W-w-what? Yep.

30 schoolchildren and their teacher went down a passage. They either got lost or stuck behind a cave-in because they were never seen again. For weeks, mothers declared that they had heard wailing and screaming from underground. But numerous excavations and searching parties brought no trace of the lost souls. After three weeks, they were finally given up for dead. To this day, the children have never been found. Which brings us to the story of Lois Jessop.

She was in Malta with a few friends touring the various historical sites. It was a hot summer afternoon, so a local suggested they go see the Hypogeum. Not only was it an amazing historical location, it was underground. It would be nice to get out of the Mediterranean sun. When they found the entrance, they hired a guide named Joe to give them a tour.

They weaved through various passageways and found the entrance to a mysterious looking cave. On the walls were ancient carvings and designs painted with red ochre. The entrance smelled damp and moldy, but once they entered, the air felt clean and dry. Their guide Joe told them there were three floors of underground rooms. Joe gave Lois and each of her friends a single lighted candle.

One by one, Lois and her friends entered the cave. The passage was narrow, so they had to crouch and walk single file.

They emerged into a large room with smooth limestone walls. The women laughed and talked, and they noticed their voices were echoing and creating a strange humming sound. Joe said the room was built thousands of years ago for a powerful oracle. The oracle would perform miracles using certain sounds. Joe said the room would still work today if anyone knew the correct sound to use.

Lois and her friends followed Joe through another narrow passage. The ground was steep. They were going down, very far down into the deepest part of the hypogeum. I don't like where this is going. Do you mind? Sorry, sorry. I'm just trying to break the tension. Yeah, I was building tension on purpose. Oh, oops. Lois wasn't sure how far down they went, but her senses told her it must have been 20 or 30 feet.

The tunnel opened up to another large room. Cut into the walls were shelves. Lois thought they looked like beds or resting places. She got a closer look. They were shaped like coffins. Joe said they buried their dead in here. He gestured to a slit in the wall, and Lois realized there were slits carved all around the room, evenly spaced. She looked through one and saw skeletons. Lois asked about them, and Joe said they were prisoners and their remains could not be disturbed.

They looked around for a few more minutes, then Joe said, "This is the end of the tour. It's time to go back." Then Lois asked Joe, "What's down there?" She was pointing at a small square doorway, maybe three feet wide. Joe said, "If you go in there, you go at your own risk, and you won't go far." Now Lois felt like this was a challenge. She grabbed the length of rope and tied it around her waist. She passed the rope to another friend who did the same, and then another and another.

Lois and her three friends squeezed through the small opening. - Oh, like a baby chute. Sorry, sorry, good. - The four women disappeared down the dark chamber. The other two stayed behind and waited with Joe. It was dark, but the women still had their candles and they were having fun. This type of adventure was exactly what they were looking for. Finally, the passage opened up and Lois was able to stand. When she got to her feet, she felt herself leaning forward. She was starting to fall.

A rush of cold air hit her in the face and she was yanked back. Now, it's a good thing they used the rope. Lois was on a ledge no more than two feet wide. Then it was a sheer drop 50 feet down. And from behind, Lois heard a friend tell her to keep going. They were getting claustrophobic in the tunnel, but Lois was frozen. Here's what she saw in her own words.

There, across the cave, from an opening deep below me, emerged 20 persons of giant stature. In single file, they walked along a narrow ledge. Their height I judged to be about 25 feet, since their heads came about halfway up the opposite wall. They walked very slowly, taking long strides. Then they all stopped, turned and raised their heads in my direction.

All simultaneously raised their arms and with their hands beckoned me. Terror rooted me to the spot. Another gust of wind rushed up from the cavern, this time blowing out Lois's candle, and everything went black. And then she started screaming. She was in pure panic. She heard herself yelling, go back, go back, as she shoved her friends back the way they came.

The women spilled back into the room where Joe and the other two friends were waiting. And Joe said nothing. But Lois was suspicious. I looked up at him. Eyes met. I knew that at one time he had seen what I had seen. There was an expression of caution in his eyes, adding to my reluctance to tell anyone. I decided not to.

Lois turned to head back to the surface when Joe grabbed her arm. He said, if you're interested in exploring further, you should join a group. Soon I'll be taking a teacher and her students down there. I'm sure they'd enjoy the company. I left my address with him and asked him to have the school teacher get in touch with me. But I never heard any more about it until one of my friends told me to read the paper.

A few months later, Lois returned to the Hypogeum and found another guide. She wanted to know about the teacher and the children, but the guide shrugged and said he couldn't talk about it. Lois still wanted answers. She asked, "Where's Joe, the other guide?" The man said, "Ma'am, I alone have been the guide of this catacomb for years. I don't know anyone named Joe." Lois went to respond, but something about this man frightened her, so she left.

And though it had been her favorite place in the world to visit, she never went back to Malta. Never again. The islands of Malta are steeped in legends. Giants riding comets and building huge temples. Underground cities where the descendants of the Nephilim hide, capturing any human who wanders a bit too far. Elongated skulls that appear more alien than human. But how much of this is true?

Quite a lot of it, actually. But not all of it. The temples on Malta and Gozo remain a mystery. No one knows for sure who built these structures or why. They remain among the earliest freestanding structures in the world. Mainstream archaeology debated the age of the temples for years, saying they couldn't be older than 2600 BC, the Bronze Age. But carbon dating shows they're at least a thousand years older than that. That's a proven fact.

As to whether they go back to the Younger Dryas, there's no physical evidence. But the solar alignment theory of Adam-Nydra is true. It would align perfectly if it was built between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago. We just can't prove it. But for years, mainstream science did get the age of these sites wrong.

They were built during a time before humans had the tools to work stone so precisely. They were built before the wheel. They were built before writing. But there they are. You couldn't build these things without very advanced engineering and logistics. Nobody has yet to explain how this could have been achieved. As for the giants...

The giant bones Abela found in the 1600s turned out to be from elephants, not actual giants. So above ground, there's no evidence of giants. Below ground, things get a little more complicated.

But let's clear up a few things first. Zamet didn't find 7,000 skeletons. He found about 7,000 bones. In all, about 120 individual skeletons have been identified. As for the 33,000 sacrifices, there's no evidence of that. 120 people. That's all we got. As for the missing children, that's an urban legend. Locals think it was a story parents told their children to keep them out of the hypogeum.

In fact, in the catacombs under St. Paul's Basilica in Rabat Malta, there's a wall painting that tells a story of a group of children disappearing in the caves underground as a warning. Now, Lois Jessup's story is interesting. She was a real person, and she really did write that story. I quoted some of it, but it's probably just a story. The types of rooms she describes don't exist in the lower levels of the Hypogeum.

Now, sure, she might have stumbled into a secret level known only to giants, but you can't get much lower before you're underwater. The curators of the Hypogeum said that if she was in a flooded chamber with a candle, reflections might have disoriented her. Now, that could be true, but the fact that her story includes the missing children is what debunks it. If a whole group of children went missing in the 20th century, there'd be reports of it, and there aren't.

In 1940, National Geographic magazine wasn't as mainstream as it is today. It often included stories of the fantastic and the bizarre. I wish they'd go back to that. Me too.

Now, the elongated skulls are a bit of a conundrum. Sir Temi Zamet was actually trained as a doctor, so he knew a lot about anatomy, physiology, and craniology. He documented the skulls as being of the long-headed type, and that's about all he said. The skulls were hidden from the public for years, which only fueled speculation.

but they were finally put on display just a couple of years ago. They are long-headed, but at least one of them appears to have been artificially lengthened by binding like many cultures do. But not all the skulls. Now, the skeptics will say the elongation is genetic. Yeah, alien genetics. Or were the skulls elongated as a way of worshipping a prehistoric god who is actually an alien? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes. Maybe. They're still being studied.

Now, I didn't know much about the mysteries of Malta before researching this episode. And stories about giants, I do those because people like them, not because I believe them. But the Temple of Amnidra really threw me off. The sun really would line up with the structure perfectly at the end of the Younger Dryas over 12,000 years ago. Now, I don't know how many times the Younger Dryas and the Great Flood have come up on this channel, but we're three years in, and they've come up a lot.

When I first started the Y-Files, I believed almost none of these stories. And most of them are still bunk. They're fun, but they're bunk. But there have been a few episodes that, after researching, made me a little bit of a believer. Not a full believer, but much more open-minded.

I don't know, maybe I've been doing this too long and the tinfoil is seeping into my brain. Ah, you get used to it. I was once a complete non-believer, but now after years of research, I believe the moon might be hollow. Crop circles are real, and I'm starting to believe that maybe at one point very long ago, great megalithic structures were built by a race of giants. But if that's true, where's the evidence? Well, there wouldn't be any, because when the Great Flood came, the

The giants boarded their chariots, took to the sky, and went back home. Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is AJ. That's Hacklefish.

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No, it never ends.

Fear the crab cat and got stuck inside Mel's home with MKUltra being only two away. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadow people there?

The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man. I'm told, and his name was cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fishes. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And the white guys have a great eye. If you ever wanted to watch, you just hear the truth. So we'll be like...

The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come To have got the secret city underground Mysterious number stations, planets are bold too Project Stargate and what the Dark Watchers found In a simulation, don't you worry though The Black Knight said a lie, he told me so I can't believe it

Hedgelfish on Thursday nights when they chase you And the wild boars all make me all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the wild boars all make me all through the night Hedgelfish on Thursday nights when they chase you And the wild boars all make me all night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the wild boars all make me all through the night

Because she is a camel and camels love the feeling is wild

Bye.