The Giant of Kandahar

by Brian Dunning
November 11, 2025

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In the mountains and caves around Kandahar, Afghanistan sometime in the early 2000s, it is said by some that a group of American Special Forces encountered a giant. Not just a tall man, but an actual giant: two to three times the height of a man, and a vicious fighter with a deadly spear. The firefight was massive, as the giant kept taking hit after hit from M4 rifles and even the huge .50 caliber sniper rounds. But it finally succumbed, and since then — so the story goes — the body has been in the US military's possession.

Here is the most popular version of the Giant of Kandahar story, as told in Soldier of Fortune magazine by Greg Chabot in 2025:

In 2002, the story goes, a Special Forces ODA was searching for a missing U.S. patrol in the mountains outside Kandahar. Working their way up the trail they came across pieces of kit and fired weapons casings scattered along the trail. Continuing the mission, the ODA came upon the entrance of a large cave with more kit and piles of bones lying about.

Approaching the entrance, a soldier named “Dan” was about to enter the cave. A loud cry was heard as a spear pierced Dan lifting him off the ground, killing him. A 13-foot-tall humanoid with flaming red hair and a beard stepped out and attacked the remaining soldiers. They engaged the giant with their weapons. They killed it after 30 seconds of sustained gunfire.

There are many such accounts on the Internet, all telling the same basic story. And naturally, various people have "come forward" claiming to have been there in person; but never giving their name, of course. The story probably received its biggest boost back in 2016, when a video titled Watchers 10: DNA was posted to YouTube (since removed) made by an author and filmmaker of alternative histories and Biblical prophecies named L.A. Marzulli. Marzulli claimed that the Kandahar giant was one of the nephilim, a race of giants that some believe were referenced in the Bible, and there's a complete Skeptoid episode about the nephilim, #887.

For provenance, Marzulli claims that a guy who was his driver when he visited Afghanistan said that when he was deployed there, he learned that everyone knew about this incident. In addition, when Marzulli's collaborator on the film Richard Shaw went on the Dr. J. radio show, an anonymous caller claimed that he had been one of the soldiers who killed the giant.

Anyway the story is all over the Internet now, and remains popular in conspiracy theory groups and groups dedicated to belief in Biblical giants. Many of the details change — what branch of the military these soldiers were part of, what kind of helicopter came in to spirit away the huge corpse, and so on.

When the fact-checking website Snopes checked out the story once Marzulli's YouTube video went viral, they emailed the Department of Defense and got a curt but incisive reply:

We do not have any record or information about a special forces member killed by a giant in Kandahar.

But of course, that's just what they'd say if they were trying to cover it up. So we have to figure this one out for ourselves, and we can start by checking out the plausibility of a humanoid creature of such massive proportions.

The various stories and retellings give a pretty big range of size estimates for the giant; anywhere from 9 to 19 feet tall (2.4 to 5.8 m). How much would such a creature weigh? It's easy to simply use the square-cube law and calculate a man's weight — take whatever factor we're scaling him up by, and square it to get his cross-sectional area, and cube it to get his weight. So, doubling the height of a strong 6-foot, 200-pound (183 cm, 91 kg) fighting soldier would make him weigh 1,600 lb (726 kg), and tripling his height would make him weigh 5,400 lb (2,449 kg).

But we can't do that, and here's why. Looking at that heaviest example, the cross-sectional area of one of his legs would be 9× the original, but it needs 27× the strength; so he would not be structurally strong enough to handle the much higher stress of that much weight on his bones and muscles. So we need to account for this, and make him thicker and more robust than our baseline soldier. Here's how we do that.

When we scale up a biological organism, we must add one more multiplier: an optimal stockiness factor, which comes out to the square root of the scaling factor. Thus we are, in effect, adding one to the exponent; we are no longer cubing the scaling factor to get the new weight, but raising it to the fourth power. This is the formula which gives us a scaled-up biological organism with muscular and structural strength the same as the normal scale organism:

W = W₀ × s⁴

So if the giant was twice the dimensions of a 6-foot, 200-pound (183 cm, 91 kg) man, he'd weigh 3,200 pounds (1,450 kg); if he was triple the dimensions, he'd weigh 16,200 pounds (7,350 kg).

Take Shaquille O'Neal who was listed at 7'1" (216 cm), that's a scale factor of 1.18×; this formula predicts he'd need to weigh 388 lb (176 kg) to be as robust as our baseline soldier. The formula is spot on; Shaq's listed weight at his second NBA championship was 385 (175 kg).

We can also see the effects of what happens when we scale up a human without adding the stockiness factor. One of the tallest humans on record, Robert Wadlow, reached the astounding height of 8'11" (272 cm) — a scale factor of 1.49×. But to the eye he appeared normally proportioned; or if anything, skinny. This is because he was very young and grew very quickly; his body never had time to adjust to his great height. Our formula says that to be strong and robust, he would have needed to weigh 976 lb (443 kg), but poor Robert weighed only 491 lb (223 kg) at his heaviest — half of what he needed. Consequently he was extremely fragile and suffered tremendous impairment. He needed leg braces and walking canes, and had severe pain in his hips, knees, and ankles. He had circulatory problems and had no feeling in his legs. He was prone to fractures. His physical problems led to an early death at only 22 years old.

So we'll stick with our formula. And with this mathematical tool in hand, we can now assess the plausibility of the Giant of Kandahar. And to do that, we have to follow all the threads backward in time and find the original version of the story. We shall ignore all the later retellings as possibly exaggerated or otherwise adulterated. And it turns out that all the threads lead back to a single man, Stephen Quayle, and a radio appearance that was our case zero.

The very first mention of the Giant of Kandahar was November 7, 2005, on the paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM with host George Noory. The guest that evening was a guy named Stephen Quayle, and it wasn't his first visit. He was an author who sold books about — you guessed it — giants.

Stephen Quayle is the author of many, many books — every web page I found with a listing of his books had more and different titles listed. There seem to be both series and individual titles, all on the themes of Biblical giants, Judgment Day, alien visitation, Revelations-style global cataclysms, alternative histories, impending religious wars, just about anything pertaining to the Bible or angels or demons, and, of course, generalized broad-spectrum conspiracy mongering. They are all self-published through his own label, which he calls (you can probably guess it) End Time Thunder Publishers, which shares a PO Box with his precious metals business in Montana.

So Quayle came on the show and told Noory the following yarn, claiming to be repeating a story told to him by an Air Force pilot who was tasked with picking up the body of a giant and flying it to Europe:

...You and I were fortunate to be contacted by a gentleman who's in the military that has a story to tell that basically he was charged with relocating the body of a dead giant that had killed a group of what he told me on the phone was a group of army guys that had gone out on patrol and when they disappeared and didn't come back, they had to send a special forces, a very elite team in looking for them... And what he's saying is that on a routine cargo stop to Afghanistan about eight months ago that he was asked to load a dead body. Now this was no ordinary dead body because it was absolutely huge. I can only classify it as a giant.

So where did this giant's body come from? Quayle continued:

...A team of Marines was out hunting for Taliban holdouts when they came across a small village near where this giant was living. The people were treating this guy like a God of sorts and revered him. They 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. All they said was their presence really angered the giant. As big as he was, now listen to this, he moved like the wind. He ran to the mouth of the cave faster than they thought a person this size ever possible and began throwing rocks at them. It was then a fatal mistake. The Marines killed him. They talked about, you know, they said this giant had the remains of decapitated bodies around his cave as well.

And how big was he? Luckily, Quayle gave a solid measurement of the giant's weight:

The load weight was 1,500 pounds. If we take the pallet weight off and approximate the weight of 60 pounds of plastic and netting, we figured that the giant weighed 1,100. All I can say is this was a really big being. Its height was about as twice as big as a normal human.

With a weight of 1,100 pounds (500 kg), we can use our scaling formula in reverse, and calculate that the tallest such a human (or humanoid giant) could be is 1.53× the size of our baseline soldier, which comes out to about 9'2" (279 cm) — only three inches taller than Robert Wadlow. That's big, but nowhere near "twice as big as a normal human." Once a scaled-up human exceeds seven or eight feet tall, they become impractical as Robert Wadlow's example demonstrated; they would have severe circulatory problems and associated mobility limitations, and would absolutely not be able to run out of the cave as fast as this story describes, even with the robustness adjusted upward by our formula. So the story of the Giant of Kandahar was suspect even upon its very first telling.

Quayle's appearance on the show was unsurprisingly synchronized closely to the release of one of his books on giants, his 2006 fiction novel LongWalkers: The Return of the Nephilim, due out just a few months after the appearance. The cynical might suspect the whole radio appearance was little more than book promo — Coast to Coast AM is one of the most obvious places Quayle would have sent a press release about his new book.

Three years later in December of 2008, Quayle came on the show again, this time bringing the alleged Air Force pilot with him as a special guest — and once again, the timing was tied to one of Quayle's books: this time it was the second edition of the same novel. The Kandahar giant story had changed a bit, for example, the pilot was supposed to take the giant's body to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio rather than to Europe. But regardless, the alleged pilot refused to identify himself.

Who was he really? Well, who knows. Coast to Coast AM has always been famously lax with its due diligence, which is one reason its listeners love the show. They once broadcast an entire interview with a Dr. Gordon Freeman, who described his work at an underground government lab, working on captured alien technology — this was the main character and plot of the video game Half-Life. Perhaps inspired by this, someone else called in a few months later as one of the characters from the game Fallout 3. Coast to Coast AM is a place for great late night storytelling, not one of journalistic rigor.

And so we end the tale of the Giant of Kandahar as we do plenty of others here on Skeptoid: as the fictional invention of a single imaginative author, in this case, an author promoting his own book on giants.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning