IF THERE WAS EVER A TIME AND PLACE to pick up a book, it was the 1960’s in Greenwich Village. Joe Taylor grew up on the Bible. His dad was a minister, and his grandfathers were deacons, the results of which garnished him with a thorough New and Old Testament education. And then one day in 1967, while paying the bills in New York City, he stumbled upon a book about giants. Joe Taylor had always known about giants, he said. But this—this was Biblical.

On the Monday morning in which I called Joe Taylor up on the phone, my house was a wreck. I was moving my family to Europe for the remainder of the year, and in only a few days’ time, which meant mandatory preparations for the incoming renters were in order. Coincidently, it was spring break, and my twin sons were home from preschool—something I hadn’t taken into consideration when scheduling our interview. Voices of chaos blasted down the hallway, and occasionally, despite hiding out in my library room, little hands and feet sprung on me from behind.

Then again, my troubles paled in comparison with my caller. At that very moment, Taylor was dealing with giant problems of his own. If his Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum in Crosbyton, Texas was closed to the public, where he presently sat for our interview, it’s because a vulgar wind storm, and what Joe described as salvage hail, split the roof open. On the Friday prior, a hundred gallons of rain gushed in. Quite suddenly the spirited cries of destruction rumbling up and down the hallway and the child who catapulted upon my lap mid-sentence, oye, I can’t recall which one, seemed to vanish like the mysterious whistle which lulls the unsuspecting Sasquatch hunter to sleep.

Despite unwelcome weather, to put it lightly, Joe has been asked by three different groups if he’d be willing to move his museum in Houston, Dallas, or Lubbock. But Joe isn’t going anywhere. “I’ll set up a museum anywhere, because I got tons of stuff, but all the molds and real fossils need to stay here so that I can work on them.”

Joe insists, “It’s a great building.”

I have yet to visit Joe’s museum in Crosbyton, but it has been on my mind to do so for a couple of years now, and I asked him, if I were to step foot into Mt. Blanco, what narrative would I expect to hear regarding giants and their relation to the Biblical?

He said, “My view is that the sons of God rebelled against God, came down and married women, which they were not supposed to do. Their offspring were the wicked giants, the Nephilim, the dead; you know—the walking dead. And they caused so much trouble on the earth that God destroyed the earth in a flood, giving us all the dinosaur fossils and a lot of other stuff—the strata around the world. The only people you find in the rocks before the flood or in the flood are giants—for the most part.”

“Rob Skiba and I disagree on this particular point,” Taylor continued, consciously pronouncing Skiba as Sky-ba, and warmly chuckling as he did so. “Skiba is always quick to correct me, It’s Skee-ba. Anyhow, I believe that after the flood those angels who had not married women—but were still in rebellion, I think they turned around and married women anyway. By a couple of hundred years after the flood they were repopulating the earth with the Nephilim. Rob feels like it’s some manipulation of the gene pool. But I think it’s just the same thing as before the flood. And those very giants probably still exist today in some of the world governments, the world banking system—that’s maybe where they’re doing their thing now. But these people today aren’t giants. They’re maybe six and a half feet tall. That’s not a giant. They still may be—some of them still claim descendancy from some of the giant tribes in the Middle East.”

But apparently there are still giants, some of them 14 feet tall, living in India and the Middle-Eastern countries, and some maybe in the US. “When we’re talking nine feet tall, I don’t think we’re talking about a normal person there.”

2

THEY’RE DISTINCTLY KNOWN FOR THEIR AUBURN HAIR and one baby, Joe said, was a redhead. Though Scripture gives no indication as to the color of Nephilim hair, it seems to come up often in archeological topics of conversation, even when discussing the Neanderthal, and I wanted to ask him about it. But Joe had his mind set on the Long Heads down in South America.

He said: “Those aren’t giants, but they came from the Middle-East, probably.”

In fact, they likely all did.

I was actually prompted to call Taylor up concerning a photograph I’d seen of him standing next to a leg bone; a femur, to be precise—undoubtedly only one of many curiosities in his Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum. By simply looking at it one could only come to one conclusion. Whether fake or real, it was, for lack of better words, gigantic in nature. The 1800’s saw an explosion of such discoveries. Most were ferreted off to the Smithsonian and other institutes to never see the light of day again. In many cases they were so fragile that they simply fell apart, “or Mom said put this in the garage,” Joe quips with a chuckle, and not surprisingly, “the garage burns.”

But not all is lost.

“We know where some are.”

The femur, as it turns out, is one of Joe’s own sculptures. Sometime after the giants of Greenwich, Taylor read an article in an old newsletter, which he’s since republished, and involves a road engineer in the Euphrates Valley, southeast Turkey for starters. Sometime in the 1950’s, perhaps the early 60’s, three separate hills were bulldozed in order to level out a road, all three of which turned out to be giant burial mounds. They were of course destroyed, which is to be expected. But not before the engineer observed multiple skeletons and then took measurements of its femur. Joe sculpted a replica.

The bone, by the way, measures 47.24 inches.

In other words, the Euphrates river giant stood some 14-16 feet tall, and his custom fit shoes would have been in the range of 20-22 inches. Goliath of Gath was practically a midget by comparison. The Dead Sea scrolls, Josephus, and the Septuagint all pronounce the Philistine’s height of four cubits and a span—6 feet 9 inches. The popular Masoretic Text, which I have pronounced my hesitation of on a number of accounts, adds an additional two cubits, making 9 feet and 9 inches in total.

Still a midget

“I molded it. I put one up on display here. It has caused more interest than anything else—even dinosaurs. We love dinosaurs. But we’re more fascinated by people—giant people, little people, fat people, skinny people, strange people, people with strange heads. We love people more than anything else.”

There is no way of knowing how many giants were buried in those three mounds. Who knows—perhaps a decisive battle had been lost. And even when it comes to the exact number of giant mounds, “we simply don’t know… there must have been a lot more of them. But in three countries, three separate areas, there were a lot of giant bones, and we think there were a lot more than that.”

Speaking of the Smithsonian—they may be in league with suppression. I am quite certain of that fact, and Joe needn’t convince me of it. Garages may have burned and entire shiploads of precious cargo may have gone missing at sea, but in America, the Natives of that land haven’t forgotten what lies beneath those burial mounds.

Much like the Euphrates Valley, which runs through Turkey, Syria, and Iraq—prime giant country— burial mounds decorate the American landscape, particularly in the east and up north towards the Canadian border. Just ask the plains Indians, the Lakota and the Ojibwa. Or as one Ojibwas native told Joe, “We know who’s in those mounds. It’s those bad blonde haired people. We had to kill them, because they were so bad.”

Joe grinned, “They’re not talking about Vikings.”

“Yeah, but blonde,” I said, adding a heavy-ended question mark to my tone.

“Blonde or red haired,” Joe shrugged as if it were a tossup. “Depending on the time of year, you might think one is the other. Some of the giants in Nevada were purely auburn. But red hair is a pretty common color reported in America, especially in Tennessee and the Ohio Valley, and out in Nevada.”

“If you ask an academic, they will deny there are giants. Burial mounds for giant men up to 10 to 15 feet tall. They don’t want to lose their jobs, even if they know. Museums are suppressed by those who don’t want the Bible given credence by bones that are dug up.” For that very reason, Taylor’s museum is not 501c3. Joe represents no church, political party, or institution. “So we just show what we know, and what we know goes against the grain of atheist institutions.”

In other words, “We can’t give a write off here,” Joe stated with an added cushion of warning. That will come as a disappointment to some, and undoubtedly an encouragement to the people in my circle. One could easily hear the relief in his voice, perhaps even a grin below his plush beard, when he concluded: “So we can say whatever we want.”

Then again, while others will gladly employ Taylor’s hands of experience, several decades worth—that is not to say those other institutions will publicly divulge the conclusions of his research.

Not everyone is 501c3 free.

3

JOE CALLS THEM “LONG HEADS.” Mainstream science however insists they were head bound. If Taylor seems frustrated by those broad sweeping conclusions, it’s because he’s spent a lifetime in the field attempting to prove there were exceptions to the rule. “I worked on a lot of them.” Down in Peru, that is. “The one’s that ended up on Ancient Aliens and L.A. Marzulli, I worked on those things.”

Taylor would be referring in part to an elongated skull named Cinnamon, dated to be between 12 and 17 years of age. Just as one should expect of television programming, particularly “the big anthropologist in NYC,” as Joe calls him, whom Ancient Aliens featured, entertainment botched it. The skulls most interesting narrative, a discovery almost entirely ignored, stems from her DNA results—results which Joe was personally invested in; and leans heavily towards Egypt and India and the Middle-East with a matriarchal lineage that was traced back to the Scotts.

Cinnamon’s caretaker seemed to shrug while writing, “That’s TV for you.”

Anyhow, “I molded them, studied them. They’re not like a normal person’s skull.”

“Because they’re elongated,” I spoke the obvious.

Um, duh Noel!

“We have two perennials on top of our head. We have two sections up here. Today in America our parietals don’t fuse until we are about 90 years of age, but you can see the extensions in there, understand?” He paused to think about it. “But in these skulls over there, even the individuals who died 19 or 20 years old, there’s no sagittal suture in there—there’s not two halves. There’s just one. Along the back of the skull, where the parietals join the occipital bone, lots of those skulls in Peru have extra bones. One skull, which did have two parietals, had 30 extra bones between the parietals and occipital. The extra bones are about the size of one’s fingernail. And they are separate bones—they’re kind of like an amoeba.”

“Some people think they’re non-human. I think they’re human. L.A. Marzulli did DNA on several that I worked on.” That would be the DNA leading back to Egypt, India, and the Middle-East. “Somewhere in there—I think that’s probably true. South and North America were peopled by those from China and the Middle-East, as far as I can tell.”

Consider the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.

“Nefertiti had that really long head. That hat she wears—that’s her head back in there. That’s how some of the Egyptians were.” In one case Joe observed a skull in the museum in Lima with a diamond-shaped bone an inch and a half wide in between the two parietal bones. “That’s not something that man did.”

To this Joe considerately concluded: “What that means, I don’t know—were they trying to mimic something that was already that way?”

4

“I NEVER GOT TO THINKING ABOUT THE NEPHILIM until I got into the fossil business,” Joe said. In 2010, an entire four decades and some change after his encounter with the giants of Greenwich Village, Joe had compiled enough research of his own to write a book on the subject. One shouldn’t be surprised however to learn there is a notable difference between the two. Elsewhere in northern California, while Joe occupied himself flipping through a book, it just so happened to be the summer of love, and meanwhile, some 350 miles north of the San Francisco Bay, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin set out to Bluff Creek in Six Rivers National Forest. Their resulting film, Joe insists, is “one of the most important pieces of film in our modern day.”

Nowadays Joe finds himself using broader terms for his Nephilim research. As one might naturally conclude, it involves Bigfoot—but also UFO’s.

Or as Joe told me, “Bigfoot got involved in the whole UFO thing.”

In fact, the two combined neatly encompasses his entire worldview.

“So what I’m trying to do is study Bigfoot, Moth Man, chicacabra, giants, UFO’s, all these alien questions and all that, and where does it fit in the Bible? That’s my—my thing. Where does it fit in the Bible? Where does it talk about it? First of all, you have to find out what it is. You know, if you don’t know what something is, then you probably can’t find it in the Bible. So, it’s my job—I hope I’m a scientist, or at least scientific. I want to first find out, identify it. What is it? That’s what I’m trying to do with Bigfoot. What are they? People go, well, they’re a myth. Well, they’re not a myth. Or they’ll go, they’re just an ape. Well, they got a lot more human characteristics than just an ape. Or they’ll say: they’re human. Yeah, but well—if they’re human, then why don’t they come to church?”

Joe laughed. “Maybe they don’t have a car.”

“I’m not willing to take an extreme stand on a lot of things. Things I know, things that I am convinced by the Bible, I’ll take a hard stand on it, but there’s a lot to know.”

So, we have before us Bigfoot, UFO’s, and giants. This is where it all comes together.

“You have the beast of the field, the creeping things, all the things that God made, and He made man and woman, female and man. So you have beast of the field, which includes monkeys, dinosaurs, and things like that, and people. But you also have the angels—the angels of a God who, some were good, some rebelled. So they added a new dimension to it, and they came down and cohabitated with women, and apparently from what I can tell, they cohabitated with animals—they were so depraved. So did a human like ape come out of that? That’s—I think that’s a good question to ask.”

5

A MAN BY THE NAME OF PARKER WALKED into Joe Taylor’s Museum and told him of a friend who owns a ranch somewhere in Texas. Parker, we’ll call him Parker, went out one day, wandered around the property a little—you know, exploring. As he came upon a hill he heard humming, or something like humming, he said. So he kept low, thinking it was a hunter. He didn’t want to get shot, you know? He snuck up over the hill, but that wasn’t a hunter. Below him he saw a pond and a tree, and under that tree he saw a Sasquatch, just sitting—sitting and humming. Well anyways, Parker said, it got up, made a footprint in the mud, turned around, pushed a limb branch up and over its head, and made like the breeze.

“The guy goes over there,” Joe recalled, “he’s about six feet tall. He tried to touch the limb but couldn’t. That means Bigfoot’s head was at least 6 ½, 7 feet, or more. He goes back and tells the rancher. He said, ‘You wouldn’t believe what I just saw.’”

Apparently, Parker was preaching to the choir. The Sasquatch choir.

“Yeah, we know it,” the rancher told him. “We watch them with our binoculars, and don’t want anyone to know,” because they didn’t want anyone getting any wild ideas. “We don’t want anyone to kill them.”

I stopped Joe’s story right there. It was a good story—but I had a question.

Why is Bigfoot so elusive?

Joe said, “Two things—One, there’s the theory that they disappear. And that would make them supernatural. There’s another theory that they can make this sound which, when the person sees them, they hear that sound—they temporarily go to sleep for a few seconds so that when they wake up they’re gone. They haven’t really disappeared. They just walked away while you were momentarily asleep.”

I said, “Are you referencing missing time?”

No, it’s like watching TV with a remote in your hand and dozing off and then waking up, not really realizing you’d ever dozed off. Bigfoot is a really strange, complicated being. Maybe he’s amazing at hiding. Maybe his ears are phenomenal for hearing. Maybe he can smell you coming. Or maybe he can simply lull you to sleep. And another thing—

Joe interviewed a cowboy who called himself Pope not far from his Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum. “They were out in the boondocks,” Taylor recalled. “You know, where the trees are. And Pope said this whitish looking Bigfoot about 8 feet tall starting coming at him.” Apparently, even cowboys get scared, from time to time. Actually, they were mortified.

So Pope and his friends shot the thing several times. Bang! Bang! Bang!

“And I said, are you sure you hit him?”

But Pope was a cowboy. If you want to insult a cowboy, go ahead and ask him a hot-headed question like that. Bang-Bang-Miss…? Pope told Joe, somewhat indignantly, “We’re dead shots. We don’t miss.”

That’s not to say he and his friends watched him die, per say—let alone get shot. “They hightailed it out of there like most people do. So can they be killed?” Joe rounded his shoulders with puzzlement, “Apparently.”

6

OH, AND MAYBE THEY BURY THEIR OWN DEAD. And maybe—just maybe, Joe suggested, they even eat them.

7

WAIT, BIGFOOT, IN THE BADLANDS..? Joe had let the words slip out. Badlands, I thought, as we prepared to hang up the phone.

I had a family to move to Europe, and despite roof issues, Joe was preparing, that very week in fact, to return into the place he likely feels most comfortable—the research field.

Only this time he was packing his bags with Bigfoot researchers.

“These are some of the top guys out there,” he said. “And we’re trying to find some answers to some hard questions.”

“Two of these guys—one has seen Bigfoot six times, or rather six Bigfoot. The other one, I’m not sure I can say he saw them. He has recorded them. These recordings have been analyzed. It’s really wild stuff what they do with their voices. So, their research is still going on, and these guys know more than anybody. If they’re not willing to nail down exactly what they are, then neither am I. The photographs of these things—finding Bigfoot and getting a photograph of Bigfoot, it’s elusive, but there are photographs.”

Yeah, but he said badlands.

Badlands National Park lies just east of the Black Hills in South Dakota. Then again, coming from a flood and fossil hunter like Taylor, badlands could simply refer to any number of dry terrains where soft sedimentary rocks and clay-rich soils have been eroded by wind and water. The second option seemed far more reasonable, and ambiguous. Curiosity set in.

So I asked him, “You said badlands. So what are we talking about here—Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado…?” I started numbering states on my finger, and hadn’t gotten to California yet, much less South Dakota, the only badlands which has been heightened to the government funding of a National Park, when Joe stopped me.

Joe grinned.

“I’ll tell you when we get back.”

 

-Noel