The Giant of Kandahar, by Aidan Mattis

The Giant of Kandahar is a well-known story in US military circles. Aidan Mattis and his team at The Lore Lodge YouTube channel do some superb storytelling and investigation work and recently tackled this legendary story, offering the script to us for our readers to enjoy. MH

The Giant of Kandahar
By Aidan Mattis

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The Lore Lodge

Contents
The Legend
In October of 2001, less than a month after the devastating 9/11 attacks, the United States
of America and a coalition of its allies invaded Afghanistan. The Americans were looking to root
out and eliminate Al Qaeda, and one aspect of that mission was to deny the group and its leaders
any safe haven. Due to the control that the Islamic Militant group known as the Taliban held over
the mountainous middle eastern nation, that meant deploying the might of the United States
military to a region whose written history goes back to the days of men of great renown; names
such as Alexander, Xerxes, and Cyrus. The result of that endeavor was a war which lasted nearly
a full two decades – the necessity of which is extremely debatable – and which resulted in the
deaths of many tens of thousands of Afghans and over two thousand American soldiers; but
amongst all of those tragedies, however, one story stands out in its sheer peculiarity.
Early in the conflict, Coalition forces had established a base at Kandahar International
Airport, built by the United States in the 1960s.1 As the story goes, early in the war an American
Military unit encountered some kind of giant while out in the mountains near that location. Most
of the legend remains the same regardless of who tells it, with details sometimes differing in one
way or another. The gist, however, is that the troops found themselves outside of a cave, bones
strewn all about, and then all hell broke loose. A huge man burst from the cave, the warfighters
fired their weapons, and when the dust cleared the giant lay dead. The corpse of the strange,
1Monica Whitlock, “Helmand’s Golden Age,” BBC News, August 7, 2014,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_8529/index.html.
humanoid creature was carried off by a helicopter, put onto a C-130, and was never seen again;
allegedly covered up and then deeply buried by the powers that be.
If the government did try to wipe the story from memory, it didn’t work – at least not for
very long. Just eight months after the incident is said to have occurred, author Steven Quayle
spoke about it on Coast to Coast AM with host George Noory. Five years later he made another
appearance related to the legend, and this time he brought with him the pilot who allegedly told
him of it back in 2003. The story made the rounds on some of the more obscure sides of the
internet, and was surely discussed at many a convention, but doesn’t seem to have reached a
mainstream audience; unsurprising given that this was before the dawn of social media and the
virality that came with it. Then, in 2016, author Lynn Marzulli – a frequent guest on History
Channel’s Ancient Aliens – published an interview with two former soldiers known only as Mr. K
and Mr. D – both of whom spoke under conditions of anonymity and used voice modulators to
further disguise their identity. Mr. D spoke of hearing the story told while he was deployed to the
region in 2005, but the real gem was Mr. K; who if he is to be believed, was a member of the
very team which fought and killed the Giant of Kandahar.
Now usually, I’d be inclined to doubt a story that made its first public appearance on
Coast to Coast AM and that was later “corroborated” by a guy prominently featured on Ancient
Aliens. After all, by the time Marzulli’s interviews came out there was so much Special Forces
related material out there that anyone could have claimed to be an infantryman or a pilot and put
together a reasonably believable story; at least as far as convincing the average person goes. But
for me, this story didn’t come through those channels. Instead, I first heard it from the well
known and deservedly successful MrBallen, real name John Allen; an actual, verifiable Navy
SEAL with experience in Afghanistan. John is usually pretty ambiguous about how credulous he
is when it comes to the stories he tells, but in this case he said that “Mr. K” told a story that
“sounds authentic.” A real life Navy SEAL, arguably the most visible one out there today, and he
was lending some credence to what otherwise feels like just another story cooked up by late
night radio hosts. While he by no means said that he believed the story was absolutely true, he
also wasn’t just tossing it out as a myth of non-military origin.
That was enough to make me take a second look.
The Sources
Coast to Coast AM
So far as I can tell, the first major public appearance of the story of the Giant of Kandahar
was on November 7th 2005, on the radio program Coast to Coast AM. Created and originally
hosted by Art Bell, Coast to Coast has been a force in late night radio since its founding in 1978.
Bell was himself a military man, having served as an Air Force medic during the Vietnam war,
and began his broadcast career with a pirate radio station based out of Amarillo Air Force Base.2
When he left the military in 1966 he went right into the radio world, and what’s truly remarkable
about Bell’s career from that point on is just how normal it was. For the first twenty years he
worked as a disc jockey for rock music stations, only entering the talk radio sphere as something
of a side project in 1978 with the Las Vegas based West Coast AM. That show – renamed to
Coast to Coast AM ten years later – mostly dealt with fringe political topics and conspiracy
theories, which set the stage for what the show would become in the late 1990s; that being one of
the most notable paranormal oriented broadcasts of all time.
2“Art Bell,” Wikipedia, December 16, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Bell#Early_life.
Bell’s show was special because it offered something different. Rather than trying to
convince the listener of the reality of supernatural phenomena, Coast to Coast provided a
platform for enthusiasts, researchers, and others to call in and tell their stories without fear of
mockery or derision from the host. In addition, because the aim of the show was simply
entertainment, Bell interviewed many guests who weren’t arguing for a conspiracy theory,
talking about being abducted, or telling stories about their steamy encounters with Bigfoot’s
daughter or the later lawsuits resulting from her father’s wrath. He spoke with artists, comedians,
actors, and even scientists. The meat of the program however, and what carried it forward after
Bell’s semi-retirement in 2003, were the stories of the paranormal.
Steven Quayle 2005 Interview
Calling in for the November 7th 2005 episode of Coast to Coast, independent researcher
Steven Quayle was there to talk about giants. During that conversation, he noted how he and – at
that point rather new – host George Noory “were fortunate to be contacted by a gentleman who’s
in the military that has a story to tell” According to Quayle, this gentleman was “an Air Force
officer” who told him over the phone that about eight months back he “was charged with
relocating the body of a dead giant that had killed a group of…army guys that had gone out on
patrol.” The pilot apparently sent Quayle a letter as well, in which he wrote that he could “only
estimate its size because it was laid out and covered with a plastic tarp.” He went on to explain
that “it was too big for the 463L pallet,” which is 108” by 88” but in the letter was described as
104” by 84”, and as a result had to be loaded “in the fetal position.”
Using those measurements and the weight of the pallet versus the total weight of the load,
the alleged witness suggested that the monster had to be ten to twelve feet tall and somewhere in
the area of 1100 pounds. In metric units, that’s between three and four meters and nearly 500
kilograms. Furthermore, the pilot said that he “[could not] properly convey” it, but “that [the
giant’s] girth and width were also noticeably different” from the average man. It also held a
distinctive odor, described as a “dirty, pungent, musky smell” that was “undeniably unique.” The
creature’s feet were estimated to be twenty-five to thirty inches long, and along with the hands
had six digits each. The giant was also more pale than the pilot would’ve expected, though his
light skin could have been attributed to the palor of death.
Steven Quayle then summarized another portion of the letter, explaining that “they had
some Marine Corps personnel that were riding along with a body that he called the babysitters,”
and that “they had been with the giant from its pickup in the Afghan wilderness and transport to
the base with a CH-47 helicopter.” According to them, “a team of Marines was out hunting for
Taliban holdouts when they came across a small village near where this giant was living.”
Apparently, “the people were treating this guy like a god of sorts and revered him,” so the
Marines, “thinking they were protecting possible extremists, went up further into the mountain to
look into the cave system…that’s when the Marines came across the live giant.” Upon making
contact, the giant “ran to the mouth of the cave faster than they thought a person this size ever
[could] and began throwing rocks at them.” The Marines responded by shooting him, and
without much fanfare the giant fell dead. It was only then that they looked around and saw the
remains of decapitated human bodies strewn about the cave and just outside of it.
When all of this got back to the pilot, he found it very strange but also largely out of his
hands. “I actually considered it an oddity,” the pilot wrote, until a friend of his to whom he’d told
the story “taped the Coast to Coast AM show with [Quayle’s] interview with George Noory” –
probably the August 20th episode from the same year – and showed it to him. The pilot allegedly
wrote that he was “floored by the absolutely accurate description [Quayle] gave of something
[he] thought was only an abnormality.” Unfortunately, aside from his description of what he
experienced and was told, the man knew little else. The giant had supposedly been taken to a
base in Europe, and after that, the rest is mystery.
For Quayle, however, this was just another bit of evidence for his belief that giants not
only once roamed the earth, but were still doing so to this day; and far from being unsure of their
origin or substance, Quayle had an answer for what they were. Pointing to the six digits per
appendage, the smell, the cannibalism, all of it, he suggested that these giants weren’t just some
larger race of men – they were the Nephilim of the Bible.
Steven Qualye 2008 Interview
On December 3rd 2008, three years after he first spoke about the story of the Giant of
Kandahar, Quayle was back to promote his book, a novel entitled LongWalkers: The Return of
the Nephilim. It was not his first appearance since that 2005 interview, but it was the first time he
brought forward new information about the incident; and this time he brought the pilot on with
him. Unfortunately, despite telling Noory that the entirety of the letter was in the new book, the
copy I purchased doesn’t seem to contain it. For the first half of the segment, Quayle explained
how he believes that the narrative of Genesis 6, along with stories of Hyperboreans, Thule, and
Atlantis, all factored into this story coming out of the mountains of Afghanistan. He spoke of
“genetic manipulation of these entities” being conducted by the military in order to develop “a
race…or a group of super soldiers or controlled giants;” all of which tied in to Ancient Egyptian
mummification practices which were really about preventing the dead from being reanimated
and wreaking havoc on the world. There’s more, but what really matters is what the pilot said
when he came onto the show about twenty minutes into the interview.
The pilot explained that he was on a deployment in which he routinely flew missions in
both Iraq and Afghanistan, and that one of his missions involved transporting a 463L pallet
“loaded down with what they told us was a giant.” He “couldn’t see a whole lot of it,” but what
he could see was a six fingered hand and foot. After some prompting from Quayle, the pilot then
revealed something that had not been in the 2005 letter. According to him, the “babysitters” –
who he wasn’t sure had been the team that killed the thing but said they were – said that “when
they got this thing, it had actually taken out the first crew that had found him, and they went in
afterwards.” When they arrived, the giant “moved like the wind” and threw stones at them, just
as had been described before.
After more prompting from Quayle regarding the scent of the thing (including a number
of oddly confident statements about how the metabolism of a giant works), the pilot did
acknowledge that it was “stinky,” like a “musky scented skunk.” Quayle then took over again
and started talking about how they have blood of goo. Host George Noory attempted to bring the
conversation back to the pilot’s experience, asking if it was possible that this wasn’t anything
supernatural, but rather some kind of freak of nature, but Quayle quickly quashed that possibility.
Citing a story about how “a group of these in a certain underground base in Arizona had broken
loose” and referencing “incubatories” on “south pacific islands,” Quayle proceeded to utterly
derail the conversation with entirely unsupported statements. To Noory’s credit, he didn’t get into
the weeds and brought it back to the pilot, asking where the giant was taken after it was loaded
onto his C130. Apparently, it was taken back to another base, loaded onto a faster jet, and taken
to Ohio; in the first iteration, it was said to be a base in Europe.
A lot of what is said during the interview, at least on Quayle’s end, is pretty out there. He
talks about there being three hundred million of these giants, people sacrificing children to them,
and the like, after which point the pilot seems to politely distance himself from any of that. As
far as he was concerned, he’d transported something that seemed to be a giant, and that was all.
He even referred to himself as being more of a skeptic, and all he would say was that it was a
large humanoid with immense proportions. Noory thanked the man for his contribution, and then
Quayle went on to say that he knew all of this was real because a Dr. Mulda Shaparashan in
Tibet said he’d seen them in suspended animation in a cave owned by monks. While I won’t go
so far as to say that person doesn’t exist, I will say that no search returns any information about
such an individual. If the stories had stopped here, I’d have been inclined to consider them
nothing but a military legend heavily embellished in order to sell some books.
But they didn’t end there.
The Marzulli Interviews
Mr. K Interview
In 2016 author L.A. Marzulli published an interview with an unnamed source known
only as “Mr. K” – a man who claimed to be a member of the team who shot and killed the giant
of Kandahar. That interview is no longer publicly available on Marzulli’s YouTube page, but I
was able to track down some excerpts posted to a different channel called Global Net (Spiritual
Domains). While it’s clearly not the full interview, Mr. K shared a number of interesting details
which fleshed out the story far beyond that told on Coast to Coast nearly a decade prior; some of
which conflict with the claims made by Steve Quayle and his alleged eyewitness back in 2005
and 2008. For example, Mr. K said that the events transpired not in 2004, but in 2002; a detail
corroborated by MrBallen, who says that he heard the story himself while deployed in
Afghanistan several years later. Another relevant difference – more so because it calls the
credibility of Quayle’s witness into question than anything else – was precisely who was
involved.
Quayle’s version of the story involved the Marines, and at first just one team. Then, when
the “pilot” came on to say his piece, he clarified that the team he spoke to was in fact a second,
more specialized unit that had been called in when the first one went missing. According to
MrBallen, however, the Marines weren’t involved in the story at all. Mr. K, if the story is to be
believed, would have been a member of an Army Special Forces team, colloquially known as the
Green Berets. The alleged soldier went on to explain that they were deployed to a remote part of
Kandahar Province after an Army patrol failed to report in at a checkpoint. He went on to say
that nobody was really sure what had transpired with the missing patrol. Some suggested an
ambush, but others pointed to the complete lack of communications. They would’ve expected the
patrol to call for air support, reinforcements, or at least to inform base about what was
happening; but there had been no calls. So, it fell to the Green Berets to go off looking for the
missing men, who were feared dead or captured.
A helicopter flew the team out to what would have been the patrol’s last known position,
and from there the soldiers hiked four kilometers into the mountains until they came to “a nice
path.” Peering around a section of the slope, Mr. K said that they spotted the mouth of a cave,
then “a lot of rocks…and then bone matter.” He wasn’t close enough to identify the bones, but he
was able to make out a piece of Army Communications equipment, and they decided to prepare
in case of an ambush like the one that they now believed had claimed the lives of their comrades.
Then, something moved in the cave.
It moved with incredible speed and agility, catching everyone off guard, and in seconds it
was out of the cave and standing directly before them. “t was a man at least 12 to 15 feet in
height,” Mr. K said, describing it as a “monster with a red beard” with scarlet red hair that fell
“long past the shoulder.” Whatever it was, it had six toes, and the nails were pointed and gnarled,
and it wielded a pike with a ten foot pole, split and lashed at the end where the blade was
attached. For a moment they stood shocked, only for one of the soldiers – a man named Dan – to
charge and begin shooting. One of the other team members started firing, then Mr. K, and then
everyone else; but the thing just wouldn’t go down. Then, with superhuman strength, the monster
hefted its giant pike “skewered” Dan. The rest of the Green Berets quickly realized their
weapons weren’t working, despite packing armament as heavy as .308 and .50 caliber rifles, and
shifted their aim towards the giant’s head.
That did the trick, and thirty seconds after the shooting started, the scene fell silent. The
giant was dead, Dan was dead, and nobody knew what the hell they’d just encountered. They
called for a medevac, but “then all of a sudden it’s not a medevac request,” Mr. K said, “all of a
sudden we had a helicopter show up.” That one dropped some netting and some orders, the latter
being to bundle up the strange creature in the aforementioned netting. A short time later, another
larger helicopter showed up, described as “almost like a Jolly Green Giant,” a term frequently
used to describe the Sikorsky MH-53; better known to most Millennial and Gen Z individuals
through the Call of Duty franchise as a Pave Low. This once again contradicted the story told by
Quayle’s witness, who claimed that the giant had been flown out of the mountains in a CH-47
Chinook.3 The two are not easy to mistake.
With a great deal of effort, the soldiers managed to get the net around the thing, which
Mr. K explained that it smelled like a mixture of a skunk and a corpse that’s “been around for a
while.” When they finally returned to base, they were asked to complete a standard after action
report, but after it was completed they were told that it needed to be rewritten; obviously,
3Coast to Coast AM December 3rd 2008, Hour 3, Timestamp 22:15.
rewritten to exclude the bit about the giant. So Dan was killed some other way, the patrol was
never found, and they never loaded that giant onto the aircraft.
The second person Marzulli interviewed, who was only known as Mr. D, corroborated
that he’d heard most of those details himself while on deployment in 2005. On the other hand, he
mentioned enough “strange phenomena” and other rather X Files type material to fill an entire
season of Ancient Aliens, and he wasn’t actually there when it happened, so the interview
provided very little information of any real value. What he was certain of, and in my opinion the
reason Marzulli bothered to even post that interview, was that what killed those soldiers in 2002
was not just some giant, but one of the bible’s most enigmatic legends: the Nephilim.
The Nephilim
The creatures known as Nephilim have long held a place of great interest amongst both
Biblical scholars as well as, for lack of a better term, conspiracy theorists. For the latter, opinions
range from the Nephilim being a race of extraterrestrials to, well, precisely what we’ve just
described in the preceding material of this video. But before they were aliens, or the central
figure of a dubious story coming out of Afghanistan in 2002, they were a topic of discussion
amongst biblical scholars; and this was mainly due to their appearance in three ancient Jewish
texts – two of which remain in all Christian bibles to this day.
Genesis
The first mention of “Nephilim” comes from the sixth chapter of the Book of Genesis,
just before God decides to flood the world. Now, when I was originally taught the story of the
Great Flood, it was explained that humanity had simply become wicked, and that God decided
only one man was of good enough character that he should be allowed to survive the deluge; and
that man was Noah. It was only when I finished my degree and got my minor in religious studies
that I began to question that version of events. You see, Noah isn’t simply described as being a
good man. In the highly literal Lexham English Bible translation, he is referred to as “without
defect in his generations,” a description which in the biblical context can be read to mean that he
was of a pure lineage. In other translations, the description is much the same. The most popular
English language Bible, the King James Version, calls him “perfect in his generations,” and the
more literal English Standard Version renders it as “blameless in his generations.” The Message
translation reads “But Noah was different. God liked what he saw in Noah.” This is why we do
not use The Message.
So what does “without defect in his generations” actually mean? The phrase is preceded
by the statement that “Noah was a righteous man,” so if it’s supposed to mean the same thing,
then this is a pointless and redundant statement; but in the full context of the first four verses of
the chapter, it begins to make quite a bit more sense. Genesis 6:1-4 read as follows.
“And it happened that, when humankind began to multiply on the face of the ground,
daughters were born to them. Then the sons of God saw the daughters of humankind, that
they were beautiful. And they took for themselves wives from all that they chose. And
Yahweh said, “My Spirit shall not abide with humankind forever in that he is also flesh.
And his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were upon the earth
in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went into the daughters of
humankind, and they bore children to them.”
You might expect that there would be some further mention of who the Nephilim were, what
precisely they did, and why it was important, but the book doesn’t actually elaborate. Instead, it
leads directly into the flood narrative, with which most people raised in Christian and Jewish
communities will be familiar. But what exactly is that narrative saying? What do Noah’s
generations – his lineage – have to do with it?
In modern scholarship, there have been two views regarding what verses one through
four mean. The more dominant view is that this passage is describing those who are of the line of
Seth as the “sons of God” and those who are of the line of Cain as “the daughters of men.” The
Nephilim therefore would be those born of a union between these two “tribes,” for lack of a
better word. It’s nice and neat, and it doesn’t require thinking about anything too paranormal –
ironic given that it’s part of a text which is entirely about the relationship between mankind and
the supernatural. The problem with this line of thinking is that the word has historically been
translated as “giants,” and furthermore the term “sons of God” has a pretty exclusive use within
the Old Testament; in other words, it’s exclusively used to describe angels.
The implication here is that a group of divine beings bred with human women, and
produced these “nephilim” or “giants,” and that the flood was a result of this event in some form
or another. Noah being “without defect” suddenly makes a lot more sense when you consider the
idea that angelic bloodlines were in play. If that sounds crazy, don’t take it from me. Take it from
the late Dr. Michael Heiser, who knew immensely more about this topic than I could ever hope to
understand. I plan to do a series of videos on his work, either here on The Lore Lodge or over on
The Weird Bible channel, but for now I hope you’ll be content to know that the man was a very
legitimate scholar and well respected within the field.
But you may be asking the same question I did when I first came across Heiser’s
remarks: if the flood killed everyone but Noah’s family, then how could the Nephilim still exist
in the modern day?
Numbers
As it turns out, that’s a question you have to ask long before you get to anything that
could have happened during Operation Enduring Freedom, because the Nephilim come up again
in the Book of Numbers, chapter 13. At this point in the biblical narrative Moses and the
Israelites had come to the borders of the land of Canaan, the former homeland of Jacob which
was promised to them by God, who instructed Moses to send scouts to explore their past and
future territory. Each tribe was told to send one of their leaders along for the expedition, and after
forty days in that land they returned.
Upon their arrival in the Israelite camp, the scouts proceeded to tell Moses and Aaron
what they had seen. They described a bountiful land “flowing of milk and honey,” one full of
fertile soil and great prosperity; but it was also a land of strong people and fortified cities. The
Amalekites, Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites were all to be considered, but the true concern was
the “descendants of the Anakites;” men whom the chapter goes on to clarify were of the
Nephilim. It is in this passage that it is made clear why the translators of the Septuagint (the first
major translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek) chose to translate “nephilim” as “giants,”
because according to the Israelite scouts, they felt as small as grasshoppers next to these things.
But if the flood wiped all of the Nephilim out, then how could this be possible?
Heiser answers the question masterfully, in two non-mutually exclusive ways. First, it’s
possible within the Biblical text that the flood was in fact not a global event. As he points out,
the same “whole of the earth” terminology used to describe the breadth of the flood is also used
on several occasions to describe the immediate region of Israel and its neighbors. If the “whole
world” is just referring to the Middle East, then any Nephilim who were outside of the region
could have survived.4 Additionally, there’s the language from Genesis, which explains that “the
Nephilim were upon the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went into
the daughters of humankind, and they bore children to them.” Due to the rules of grammar in
biblical Hebrew, this passage leaves open the possibility that more of the “sons of God” had
children with humans, leading to later instances of Nephilim being born. In either case, or
potentially both, there is a way for Nephilim to exist even after the flood. So from a biblical
perspective, the Giant of Kandahar being such a creature isn’t actually out of the question.
When it comes to the credibility of the source, however, I’m not sure that the same can be
said. This is a story coming from anonymous sources which very directly contradict one another
on all of the important details, and which honestly doesn’t make much sense to me for several
reasons.
● Could an Air Force pilot mistake soldiers for marines?
● Would a Special Forces team be carrying multiple Barrett M82s on a mission with short
sight lines?
● What doctrine instructs soldiers to break cover and charge an enemy armed only with a
large spear?
● Why did the pilot say it happened in 04 while the Green Beret said it was 02?
● How does a military man mistake a Pave Low for a Chinook or vice versa?

41. Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA:
    Lexham Press, 2019), 189.

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