Solomon Islands Giants
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Stay alert, boys. Keep an eye on the canopy. Roger. The year is 1942. Japanese forces have entrenched themselves throughout the Solomon Islands, which lie just to the northeast of Australia.

Allied forces moved quickly to route them out of the strategic island chain, the United States Navy heading first toward the island of Guadalcanal. But while the Japanese were busily preparing their Solomon Island defenses and air bases in the sweltering jungle heat, they remained entirely unaware of another kind of enemy.

Even if any of the beleaguered Solomon Islanders had wanted to warn the Japanese invaders about what monstrous beings ostensibly lived in the island's innermost regions of unexplored jungles and cave systems, the Japanese probably wouldn't have believed them anyway.

But as the Marines swarmed onto the beaches of Guadalcanal and the following US Army divisions arrived to push the Japanese soldiers further and further towards the island's center, terrifying rumors began to spread that something was killing off their men from their rear flanks. Something massive. Something unbelievable. Something that was eating the men alive. This is the story.

of the Solomon Island Giants. I'm Luke LaManna and this is Wartime Stories. Before 1941, the idea of World War II was an abstract concept for Solomon Islanders. The war was happening far away in Europe, or at worst, in the mainland regions of Asia, which was still thousands of miles away. But following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the island began to finally experience the far-reaching impacts of the war.

Britain began evacuating their colonial settlers off the islands and sending local workers either back to their villages or into hiding to prepare for a potential invasion. Sure enough, with the Japanese Empire's aim to create a defensive buffer against attack from the Allied forces, in May of 1942 the Solomon Islands would become the furthest extent of their military island outposts far to the south of Japan.

They quickly occupied the primary islands, beginning the construction of an airstrip on Guadalcanal, along with other floatplane bases and defensive fortifications.

With this occupation threatening to cut communication and shipping lines between Australia and the United States, and leave Australia exposed to a possible invasion, the US moved quickly to initiate their own counter-invasion strategy to retake the islands. The US chose the island of Guadalcanal as its first counterpunch on dry land, with the 1st Marine Division landing on August 7, 1942.

During their prior invasion, the Japanese soldiers faced little to no resistance from a largely peaceful and unarmed population of local islanders. The Japanese Imperial armies following treatment of the island natives was nothing less than abysmal during their invasion and short-lived occupation. The Solomon Islanders quickly began to hate the Japanese invaders for their cruelty, not only to them but to the thousands of Korean forced laborers they brought with them.

The islanders thus did all they could to work against the Japanese and assist the American forces before and during their island campaigns. Prior to the war, the Royal Australian Navy had implemented a coast-watching intelligence network, which was comprised of civilians, district officers, plantation owners, and even missionaries. Upon discovering the coast watchers' existence, the Japanese of course tried to root them out, but failed time and time again.

While these Coast Watcher men may not have been capable of hand-to-hand combat, they knew the islands far better than the Japanese. They were thus skilled at eluding capture, remaining hidden in the dense jungle, while spying on the Japanese and providing allied forces with regular radio reports on Imperial troop movements.

Apparently, it was a coast watcher who alerted the Australians to the Japanese air base construction on Guadalcanal, who then passed this information along to the Americans, which was the reason the island was chosen for their initial assault. With the help of the coast watchers and the Australian Navy, the American forces quickly overran the Japanese coastal defenses. However, the entire campaign to retake the islands would still last for a total of six long and bloody months.

After losing their foothold on the beaches, the Japanese began pulling back their forces towards the center of their respective island. They maintained an offensive strategy by way of guerrilla tactics, conducting raids on the American forces, before once again retreating back into the dense jungle. The mountainous jungle terrain was very difficult to navigate, making it a slow effort for the American soldiers and marines to pursue their enemy.

Some islands were cleared of enemy troops within days, others took the entirety of six months. But as the Americans forced them further and further towards the central, unexplored regions of the island jungle, horrifying rumors then began to circulate amongst the Japanese soldiers. Reports were now being made about their men encountering giant, hairy creatures. Giant men.

These giants were described as being between 8 to 15 feet tall with red eyes, some of which were covered in shaggy black, brown, or red hair. But while many such stories have come about during other military campaigns, stories about man-like ape creatures, such as the rock apes or Batutut in Vietnam, these giants were considered an entirely different kind of creature. They were said to be much more human.

and they carried massive stone clubs, spears, and other rudimentary weapons. When encountered, these giants were said to mercilessly attack the Japanese men who were unfortunate enough to stumble across them, smashing them with their heavy clubs, spearing them, carrying them off screaming, or even tearing them apart and eating them alive on the spot.

Other stories describe the giants displaying territorial acts, bellowing loudly and ripping entire trees out of the ground in massive displays of strength, the terrified Japanese soldiers then scattering into the jungle. The men then tried to hide, laying low to the ground throughout the night, hearing the nerve-wracking sounds of these monstrous beings crashing through the dense jungle around them, hunting them.

Sleep became impossible for the Japanese, not only from abject terror, but from the sounds of the giants bellowing howls and the abruptly silenced screams of fellow soldiers piercing the night air. As the battle raged on over the following weeks, during the daylight hours the Japanese men had the American forces to contend with on their front lines. And by night, they now lived in a constant state of terror.

unable to sleep for fear of what would happen to them if they were found by the giants. If these stories are true, it must mean that at least some of the Japanese soldiers survived to tell them. Captured by American troops, terrified by what they had seen, we can imagine these men would have seemed completely delusional when recounting their experiences to their captors.

It should be pointed out that the thought of surrendering was unthinkable for a Japanese soldier, whatever the circumstances, although the idea of being ripped apart by giants would likely not have ever occurred to them. But traditionally speaking, their orders were to return home victorious, to die while fighting, or to honorably take their own lives if they were defeated.

Many Japanese soldiers were of course taken captive during the war, but culturally, dating as far back to their samurai warrior ethos, the Japanese Imperial Army viewed survival following defeat as a shameful disgrace. If it was Japanese soldiers who came out of those jungles raving about man-eating giants, what became of these men is now unknown. Eighty years later, their stories are now considered myths, at least to most people living outside the Solomon Islands.

But bizarre as it sounds, many among the islanders themselves would assure us these kinds of stories are quite possibly true. For locals, the existence of giants on their islands, even their continued existence today, is no myth. It is a commonly accepted fact. The Solomon Islands remain an impoverished and developing country until today, and much of the nation's past has unfortunately been lost to undocumented history.

But it is known that by the year 1942, much of the inner regions of the island jungles had long remained unexplored, even by locals. These dense jungles and much of what lives in them remain a complete mystery even today. The reason for this is found in the islanders ancestral origins. A couple of hundred years ago, the Solomon Islanders were comprised entirely of highly territorial tribal people. These people were known to be headhunters and even cannibals.

Always at war with one another, these people lived in fortified encampments, possibly even treetop dwellings, for their safety and protection against not only dangerous animal life, but against enemy tribes.

When Christian missionaries began arriving to the islands in the 1800s, the religious conversion that took place over the following decades brought an end to these tribal wars, thus eliminating the need to continue living in fortified villages in the hard-to-reach, mountainous jungle interiors. Instead, islanders then began building their peaceful village settlements closer to the beaches.

This of course set the stage for the perfect, secluded environment for a species of cryptid monsters to now thrive in. Over the following two centuries, the interior jungles and what might live there became increasingly unknown and few locals risked exploring too far into them. But something that did survive over the centuries were the local legends.

As much as Europeans might have sung songs or told fables about man-eating predators to keep children from wandering too far into the wild forests, the island people told their children stories about something less conventional than wolves or bears. They told horrifying stories about cannibalistic giants. But why? Ask a local, even today, and they will tell you why. Because these giants are real.

The Second World War seems to have merely cast an unexpected international spotlight on their existence. Nicholas Cox is a field archaeologist who has explored these islands in recent years in search of the long-abandoned remains of Japanese island fortifications and wartime artifacts now buried in 80 years of jungle overgrowth.

His interest in the Solomon Islands began in 2019 when a friend mentioned to Nick that he had worked on a Solomon Islands forestry initiative in 1995, his friend being the first non-islander to see the remains of World War II Japanese tunnels on the island of Kalamangara.

Nick then excitedly began planning his own expedition to the islands, and it was during his preliminary research for this expedition that he stumbled across these accounts of Japanese soldiers supposedly encountering terrifying gigantic men. He noted that these stories about the Japanese encountering giants have largely been circulated by non-Japanese sources.

However, these same stories do of course circulate in both English and Japanese speaking cryptozoological forums, articles, and other websites, with Japanese people referring to these beings as "Titans". As fascinating as the stories were, Nick was disheartened to find no actual documented personal accounts or anecdotes from individual Japanese soldiers. Somewhat deflated by this lack of evidence, he started to think that the stories may be entirely fabricated.

Upon reaching the islands, however, his interest in the stories was almost immediately rekindled. When he asked about giants, the locals' attitude towards the existence of them was shockingly mundane. They said it was entirely true, without any hint of the existence of such giants being mythological. Much to his surprise, some of the islanders he spoke with even assured him of the giants' ongoing existence even until today.

Other islanders said they believed the giants had gone extinct, or possibly, because of their violent natures, had killed each other off hundreds of years ago, at least by the time the Christian missionaries had started arriving to the islands. As for the stories involving Japanese soldiers, while no locals could confirm these stories themselves, they stated that they very well could be true. And if the giants do exist, they said, the island's interior regions are exactly where anyone would find them.

Few, if any, locals ever explore so far into the interior jungles, in part because of their very real fear of what might live there. During these conversations with the island people, who are primarily all devout Christians, along with the stories about legendary giants, they also acknowledged their family connections to headhunter tribes.

They possess an ancestral history of which many locals expressed a feeling of remorse and yet also a kind of morbid fascination with regard to the violent and cannibalistic behavior of their ancestors. Because the giants themselves are also thought to be cannibalistic, some islanders believe that their native ancestors were cannibals because their culture was influenced by their prolonged contact with these violent man-eating giants.

While many of the islands in the Solomon Island chain are said to have no giant populations to speak of, Nick was told that the island of Melita is replete with giants.

Bizarrely, a local man named Ishmael claimed that he himself was descended from these giants, and that among his family lineage was a particular giant who was a notable figure, a celebrated warrior from a tribe of giants on the island of Melita who lived during the colonial period when headhunters still thrived. Ishmael explained that, while many giants lived in the jungles, others, like his ancestral line, lived in the cave systems.

Despite being separated on the surface by miles of ocean, there are locals who even believe some of the islands are linked by these extensive cave systems. Whether Ishmael's family history is believable or not, this idea of strange beings or cryptids remaining isolated by living in deep underground cave systems is not an uncommon belief around the world, whether or not it ties into the hollow earth theory that many ascribe to.

As for the ancestral origin of the giants, among the Solomon Island people exists an understanding that, although they are a distinctly separate creature, whatever the original lineage of these giants is, it was born out of humanity. The name Solomon Islands itself comes from scripture named after King Solomon. With the islanders now being primarily Christian, they may inherently ascribe the giants lineage to that of a race of giants known in the Old Testament as the Nephilim.

As such, because of their genetic lineage being traced back to humans, it is believed that they can thus still interbreed with humans. And the islanders even have stories about this happening. For instance, the Guadalcanal people and many other Solomon Islanders all know the story of Mango, a local woman who passed away in the year 2000.

The story goes that around 1950, only a few years after the end of the war, she had disappeared from her village. After failing to find her, everyone eventually gave her up for dead. That is, until she was found, 25 years later, hysterically frothing at the mouth, clearly mad, in a garden on the northeast coast of Guadalcanal. Seeing that she was heavily pregnant and in need of help, the men captured her with some difficulty.

Sadly, she remained mentally unstable for the rest of her life, but she was at least nursed back to the brink of sanity, enough to explain what had happened to her. Nothing much was ever said about the entire 25-year period of her absence, but she was able to communicate that she had been taken captive by a giant, who had taken her as a wife. She claimed she was eventually impregnated by this giant, which was the child she was now carrying.

Through her pregnancy, she eventually gave birth to what the locals believed was a half-caste boy. The boy lived to the age of five, at which point, for some unknown reason, one of Mango's brothers, the boy's uncle, is said to have killed him. Some islanders are said to know where the boy is buried, and according to others, Mango is evidently just one of several women to whom this type of thing has happened.

This account of Mango and the existence of giants on the Solomon Islands was largely brought to international attention when it was published in a book titled Solomon Islands Mysteries, Accounts of Giants and UFOs in the Solomon Islands.

The author, Marius Borian, began living in the Solomon Islands in 1995, following the end of his own military career as an aircraft-slash-helicopter engineer with the Royal Australian Air Force. Within his book are two more similar instances to the story of Mango, where Guadalcanal women have been taken by the giants. He also recounts many of the oral histories that were told to him by the islanders. These included stories about their ancestral tribes,

fighting literal wars with the giants. On occasions when the giants began killing the islanders, either for food or seemingly just for sport, brazenly raiding their villages, as with the Japanese stories, there are horrible accounts of the giants eating people alive on the spot. Numerous village chiefs then sent their warrior hunting parties after them, only for them to return in vain with fewer and fewer warriors.

From the accumulation of this research, it occurred to Marius that the giants had for a time considered the Solomon Islander people like pigs to be eaten. He believes one of the major reasons why the Solomon Island population is far smaller than they should be is because with over 5,000 years of giants on the islands treating humans as food to be eaten, those people never had the opportunity to breed.

He additionally suggested that from his own studies, his opinion on why the giants stopped hunting the island people is a culmination of three things: a war among the giant tribes that took place sometime in previous centuries, the introduction of firearms to the islands, and, quite bizarrely, alien intervention. Suffice it to say, the book makes for an interesting read.

Having read this book during his expedition research, when he was interviewed in 2021 on the Into the Portal podcast, Nicholas Cox offered his own opinion on Boreal's work. Nick acknowledged that, despite his fascination with exploring any combination of military history and cryptozoology, such crossovers seem to always tread a fine line between reality and far-fetched conspiracy.

He pointed out that Marius' book is heavily criticized by skeptics because of the author's frequent and seemingly sporadic deflections into his theories about world order governments, alien cover-ups, and his knowledge of the existence of subterranean UFO bases on the islands. If not only to add to the growing weirdness of this story,

As indicated by Marius in his book, the islands are evidently no stranger to UFO sightings. There's at least one undocumented incident where American sailors described seeing dozens of bright orbs flying in a diamond formation over their ships during the invasion of Guadalcanal.

Believing it to be some kind of new Japanese weapon, their defenses were scrambled, but the UFOs eventually disappeared without incident and were ultimately forgotten about in the following invasion. With regard to the existence of giants, however, there is another intriguing account that is attributed to Boréon and his time spent living on the islands. On the island of Guadalcanal is a gold mine, aptly called Gold Ridge Mine.

For various reasons, over the last 30 years it has gone in and out of being an active mining project. But in the mid-90s, shortly following an extensive negotiation with the island government for the approval of the mining efforts, the mining company was finally given the green light to begin clearing out the surrounding jungle to open up the gold mine. At some point during excavation, one of the bulldozers was rendered inoperative when the massive dozer blade detached, one of its large retaining pins having broken.

The blade weighed several tons, and because they did not have the necessary equipment to lift it out of the mud, the remaining pins were removed and the blade was completely detached. The men planned to conduct the necessary repairs to the dozer overnight and would reattach the blade the following day. So the crew and their equipment went home for the day, leaving the blade stuck in the mud.

The next morning, however, the crew was startled to return to the site, only to find that the massive blade had disappeared. Even more startling were the now three to four foot long humanoid footprints appearing in the mud around where the blade had been lodged. After scouting the surrounding area, the blade was found about 100 meters away on the side of a small hill.

Baffled, the men realized that something with very large feet had seemingly picked up the blade and moved it. Possibly it had even thrown the heavy blade a good distance based on where the footprints ended and where the blade was found.

This story offers at least something to compare with the stories regarding the Japanese encounters, in that the locals and mine workers always left the jungle areas before nightfall. The Japanese soldiers, however, had no choice but to remain in the deep jungle recesses overnight for months, which might explain why they and these giants eventually crossed paths.

If at all true, the giants perhaps became annoyed by their prolonged invasion of their territory, the noise of the gunfire, or otherwise felt threatened by these armed men, which resulted in their violent responses. In trying to rationalize that these stories might have some shred of truth to them, Nicholas Cox points out that the Solomon Islanders have also reported seeing other kinds of hairy humanoid creatures on the islands.

A creature known as the Kakamora, something akin to a North American Sasquatch or, perhaps more closely, the Australian Yowie, is believed to inhabit many of the island jungles.

If true, and if at all related to their international counterparts, it's no surprise that island locals describe these Kakamora creatures in ways similar to the descriptions offered by those who have encountered creatures like Bigfoot. They are said to be incredibly smelly, hairy, and even have sharp claws. And more horrifically, they are known to eat humans.

They are said to enter villages and human settlements around dusk, often to steal fruit from plantations and the occasional human, typically a child. Being reclusive creatures, they reportedly live in the island interiors and are said to dwell in either tall trees or caves. As far as their perceived intelligence, the Kakamora do not appear to be capable of making fire, but have been said to steal fire from humans, which is then used to create their own fires.

They are otherwise said to possess a strange cackling type of language and have been seen or heard singing while gathered together, an eerie kind of song reverberating through the dense jungle.

Nicholas Cox said with interest that during his own research into the stories about giants, he himself had read extensive articles written by German anthropologists around the turn of the 20th century. In these men's articles, he was surprised to find that they offered rather prosaic descriptions of the Kakamora in a way that would make the reader consider them to be everyday creatures.

They speak plainly about their diet, their lifestyles, and other facets of the Kakamora's nature that would not be expected if these were undocumented creatures or mythical cryptids. Nick also reasoned that, anthropologically, two separate but similarly behaved creatures, the giants and the Kakamora, could not possibly exist within the same regions without one of the two being driven to extinction.

He therefore surmised that the smaller sized Kakamora, which are often described around being 4 to 5 feet tall, are more likely what is being portrayed as giants, or perhaps a juvenile version of the giants. But as far as the idea that a 4 foot creature would eventually grow into a 15 foot monster, his opinion is that, as with all fisherman's tales, the stories of these giants reaching such massive heights is likely an embellishment,

With each retelling of the stories, especially by men who were frightened off by them and wanted to justify their abject terror, the creatures get taller and taller.

It's unreasonable to think, he says, that such massive creatures could remain undocumented when their sheer size would require a large diet and extensive foraging range on these small islands and likely frequent exposure to modern humans. Thus, the legends about giants, he thinks, might stem from encounters with larger adult Kakamuras.

Even if they reached a maximum height of just over that of six or seven feet, their size and unusual appearance could still be terrifying to behold. Solomon Islander men stand on average at about five feet four inches in height. But with regard to the intervention of giants against the occupation of Guadalcanal by Japanese forces during World War II, Marius Boreon at least acknowledges one mystery that puzzled the American forces after landing on the island.

The Japanese had months to prepare for the American counter-strike, so when the Marines landed at Red Beach on August 7th, they were surprised to find no Japanese resistance waiting for them. No American casualties were sustained during their landing. Moving west and further inland, they then quickly secured the partially constructed airfield at Lunga Point, which was then renamed by the Americans to Henderson Airfield.

This almost complete lack of resistance was certainly uncharacteristic of the Japanese during any of the following island campaigns. So why did such a large force of Japanese eventually flee? The primary conclusion by historians is that the Japanese simply did not expect the Americans to target the island, even in spite of knowing the island's strategic value.

It's assumed that they had succumbed to complacency because of all their previous victories in Asia and were genuinely surprised by the Allied invasion. That and the Americans had anticipated thousands more Japanese soldiers to be on the island, but the tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers that fought in the battle arrived to the island by way of the Japanese Navy as reinforcements after the American invasion had already commenced.

In his book, Marius stated his belief that, despite what is recorded in the history books, quote, "...apart from some Japanese soldiers of the Guadalcanal occupation of World War II losing their lives due to being a free feed for the giants, they more than likely had a few encounters with a species of warrior half-human lizard types. And when the news got back to Jaff headquarters about what was happening, it was, "'Abandon island and let them have it.'"

That's why there were no Japanese to be initially found when the Allies arrived on Guadalcanal and why the Japanese got a good hiding on the way out." So now we see the larger picture of Marius' theory, which is that the Japanese were also being picked off by warrior half-human lizard creatures, which prompted the Japanese to then want to abandon the island altogether.

But if that were remotely true and the Japanese were encountering these creatures and the giants before the Americans pushed the Japanese back into the jungles, well, it doesn't explain why the Japanese Navy was then still sending thousands of troops to continue fighting to keep the island. This is likely one aspect of Marius' seemingly bizarre approach to explaining what took place on the island that draws heavy criticism from skeptics.

After everything we've covered so far, these Lizardmen are a bit of a hard shift for this story. But in short, combined with his suspicions about the islands hiding numerous subterranean UFO bases, Marius believes there is a race of reptilian humanoids living in those same cave systems.

These subterranean creatures are of course something that has been purportedly seen in other areas of the world, no less the devil creatures that were reported by several American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. In relation to these creatures, Marius visited the Japanese war memorial on Guadalcanal and recounted his visit in the book.

While the primary feature of the memorial is a large geometric concrete statue, one corner of the original memorial garden hosted a bronze statue of a man. Marius' interpretation of this statue was that it is, quote, a half-human man with scales who is holding a ray gun style object that is attached to the end of his tail, end quote.

But others have pointed out that the statue is not of someone with scales holding a gun, it was a fisherman holding a net and looking out to sea. The statue was evidently made before the war by a Japanese sculptor who was drafted into the Imperial Army and was killed on Guadalcanal. The statue was then apparently donated by his father to the Mount Austin Memorial.

Why Marius describes the statue as portraying a lizard person does come off a bit conspiratorial, trying to tie the statue in with the supposed existence of the lizard men. But if only to add to the statue's intrigue and the strangeness of this story...

The statue had bullet holes fired through it by MEF militants sometime between 1999 and 2003. And then in 2008, thieves apparently sawed the statue down and stole it, presumably to sell it for scrap. But because it was too heavy to carry, it was abandoned nearby. And to date, the statue has not been put back, as the likelihood is that it would be stolen again and is believed to be kept in storage somewhere on the island.

Getting back to the Japanese aspect of this story, again, why would they send reinforcements to save an island that they did not want? The simple fact that the Japanese had only a few hundred troops on the island prior to the invasion, and that that was a genuine error committed out of complacency,

That would seem a much more practical explanation than anything else. But whatever the case, the UFO sightings, the Kakamora, the local legends, the violent history of these islands, and these bizarre stories about Japanese soldiers encountering reptilian humanoids and giants, all of this spins a fascinating web of mystery around the Solomon Islands that remains to be fully explained.

All of this makes the islands sound like something out of a King Kong movie. And indeed, perhaps there is a reason why the Solomon Islands national logo is literally "The Land That Time Forgot." A title that has been given to books and movies portraying that general theme of prehistoric creatures surviving on a secluded island. But even if all the stories about giants living on these islands are merely legends and folklore,

Where did they originate from? One possibility to consider comes from a seemingly unrelated magazine article from a 1977 edition of the Pacific Islands Monthly, which is titled, Kakamora Goes Home. This article is an obituary piece on a well-respected doctor who spent the majority of his adult life living with and serving the Melanesian people on the island of Makira.

Having moved to the island as a missionary school teacher in 1903, the article states with interest that Makira was one of the islands well known for its cannibalism in the old days. During his stay on the island, Dr. Fox was adopted into the Orosi tribe and exchanged names with a young chief, thus adopting his nickname Kakamora, which would indicate the chief was named after the strange, hairy creatures said to live on the island.

The article goes on to say that in 1933, Dr. Fox went to live on the island of Malaita, which was, quote, an island greatly feared because of the hostility of its people. But this was during 1933, and the people of Malaita were still considered hostile. And this is the same island that the locals still say is replete with giants. And one man named Ishmael said he was descended from a warrior giant from this island.

The article even points out that Dr. Fox was a coast watcher himself, providing intelligence and helping the Allied invasion root out the Japanese. But get this, quote, End quote.

So, far from being a religious, peaceful, and ocean-side dwelling people, it seems that during World War II, the people living on the island of Malaita remained a hostile tribal people who lived in the interior jungles and terrorized the Japanese soldiers. So, perhaps it was merely violent local tribesmen that terrified the Japanese

and these larger-than-life stories about cannibalistic giants attacking them were born out of that. Or perhaps, giving credence to the documented existence of these hairy hominid creatures, it was a combination of the two.

The term 'Kakamora' and the name 'Dr. Charles Fox' appear once again in a 2008 publication called 'Images of the Wild Man in Southeast Asia', written by Professor Gregory Forth of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada. The book examines so-called 'wild men', images of hairy human-like creatures known to rural villagers and other local people in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Professor Forth's research mirrors much of what Nicholas Cox found about the anthropological studies of these creatures and the well-established history they have in the Solomon Islands, especially on the island of Malaita, where Dr. Fox lived and worked for much of his life.

Being nicknamed Kakamora after the tribal chief, it's no wonder why he would have otherwise obtained that name. Dr. Fox himself evidently studied these creatures with interest. His research is cited multiple times by Professor Forth.

Their hairy appearance and sharp nails, their behavior in stealing food and even fire, their unintelligible language and even their use of spears and nets used to catch humans, and even a diet consisting of nuts, fruit, fish, and yes, even human flesh?

This is all repeated in Dr. Forth's own research, collectively gathered from at least a century of documented studies, combined with Dr. Fox's research, and with interviews with Melanesian locals from different islands within the Solomon Island chain, and even beyond.

This article makes it clear that it was Dr. Fox who might have first identified the gradual disappearance and later resurgence of the Kakamora population due to the introduction of firearms around 1860, followed by the British authorities' confiscation of firearms in the early 20th century.

Reported sightings of Kakamora resumed just two or three months after the recall, said Dr. Fox in his 1924 publication titled The Threshold of the Pacific, an account of the social organization, magic, and religion of the people of San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands.

Impressed by the weight of the independent testimony he gathered, Dr. Fox was open to the possibility of Kakamora actually existing in the large forest-covered tracks in the interior of the Solomons. As he noted, around 1920 the islanders were hopeful of capturing Kakamora, for which they believed the colonial government would pay 20 English pounds per specimen.

Fox alternatively suggested the creatures could reflect an earlier race, either in the Solomons or in the islands from whence the Solomon Islanders had come. As Nicholas Cox suggested, it seems unlikely that a commonly observed creature resembling a bipedal ape would be the same species of animal as the 8 to 15 foot giants that have been less frequently observed.

So again, perhaps these Kakamora creatures, despite their smaller stature, and perhaps in combination with the hostile locals on Malaita, are what we can ultimately credit for the origin of these stories about giants, at least with respect to the Japanese.

But it cannot be denied that the existence of giants and their relation to humans goes back thousands of years and despite widespread skepticism, they are widely considered to be real, whether or not they still exist today. Scripture speaks about them multiple times, as the ancient Israelites who traversed the desert regions of what is now Egypt and Israel encountered these beings, terrified by their appearance and saying they looked like grasshoppers by comparison.

And there are bizarre stories circulating still today of encounters with similarly described creatures, such as the story of a cave-dwelling spear-wielding giant encountered by U.S. service members in 2002 in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan. Evidence of giants living in other places around the world would seem to give credence to the idea that these giants migrated around the planet the same as their human counterparts.

According to archaeological evidence, it is believed that some 30,000 years ago, when giant animals still roamed the continent, the first Native Americans arrived from Asia, crossing an existing land bridge. And bizarrely, much more recently, other archaeological evidence and newspaper reports from the 20th century would seem to indicate the natives may not have been the only beings to cross over.

Vastly distant from the Solomon Islands, their tribal people, and certainly from their cultural origins, several Native American tribes have their own horrifying legends about encountering giants in both Central and North America, man-eating giants. And in 1833, in Lompoc Rancho, California, several Mexican soldiers were excavating a pit for a powder magazine when they dug up something unexpected.

the skeleton of a giant man, which was said to be nearly four meters tall during his lifetime, just over 13 feet. Next to the strange creature lay a huge stone axe, as well as an assortment of stones and shells on which indecipherable signs were carved, and as future newspaper articles would indicate, this would hardly be the first skeleton of its kind to be found in the Americas.

Perhaps there is a thread of truth after all, to the legends about the cannibalistic giant tribes of the Solomon Islands, to the Japanese encounters with them, and now the American native tribes fighting wars with a race of similar beings. But that is a story for another time.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke LaManna. Executive produced by Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Lacascio, and Whit Lacascio. Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham. Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callaghan.

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