Timothy Alberino

Joe Rogan opens by saying that, of all Timothy Alberino's online content, the story that grabbed him most was the account of a giant in Afghanistan, known as the Kandahar Giant. Rogan links it to an earlier guest, the arm wrestler Devon Larratt. Larratt said that while deployed in Afghanistan with the Canadian military, a colleague of his had to deal with a local warlord who was eight feet tall. Larratt described him as wide as well as tall, the biggest man he had ever seen.

Alberino says he covers many risky subjects, including UFOs, but that giants worry him more than any of them. His reason is how his sources react. People he describes as knowing things become very nervous when the subject comes up, and some flatly refuse to talk about giants, especially giants in Afghanistan.

But nothing makes me more nervous than talking about giants, specifically the Kandahar giant.

Rogan pushes back on the scale. Eight-foot-tall people exist, he says, and he points to a young basketball player who is seven foot nine and others who play in the NBA. Alberino separates these publicly known tall people from what he means by giants, which he puts at nine to 12 feet tall. Rogan then gives a range of eight to 12 feet. In the transcript, the sentence in which an eight-foot person counts as a giant is cut off partway through its condition.

The conversation then explains why such claims are hard to verify. A speaker passes on what others have said: that Afghanistan is old, remote, mostly mountainous and run by warlords. They mention structures that look like Greek temples dating back to Alexander the Great, which archaeologists reportedly cannot study because the country is too dangerous. The speaker suggests that reaching Antarctica would probably be easier than travelling around Afghanistan.

Alberino's main source is an active-duty C-130 pilot. The pilot first told his story on Coast to Coast AM with Steve, Alberino's collaborator, and, Alberino believes, with host George Noory. Alberino and his team later flew the pilot to Bozeman, Montana, to film him for a documentary. The pilot showed them his credentials. He asked to be filmed in silhouette, although he knew he could still be identified by his voice.

In the pilot's telling, he was flying cargo missions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2005, often into Bagram Airfield. On one routine flight, men he called "the babysitters" met him on the tarmac. He thought they were Army or Air Force intelligence, though they never said. They told him there were to be no photos and no mention of the event, and that it never happened. He had flown classified missions before, usually to pick up Taliban prisoners he called high-value assets, but intelligence officers waiting on the tarmac was new.

The cargo came on a forklift, sitting on an air cargo pallet measuring seven by nine (the transcript gives no unit). The first thing the pilot noticed was a strong smell. On the pallet lay a body in the fetal position, so large that its hands, feet and part of its head hung over the edges.

He said it smelled like this like musk, B.O, and death.

According to the account, the pilot, his loadmaster and the Marines escorting the cargo held their feet up against the dead giant's feet to compare sizes. The body had red hair, six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. Its feet were wrapped in crude canvas, and a tarp covered most of it. Lying in the fetal position, it came up to about the men's midsections. When they hit it with their fists, it felt hard.

And the pilot told me he was solid as a rock, this guy.

The pilot's explanation of where the body came from was secondhand: it was what the Marines told him they had heard. A team searching for Taliban fighters noticed villagers bringing food and other artifacts to the mouth of a cave. Suspecting the villagers were helping the Taliban, the team went in and met an enormous humanoid that killed them all. A second team sent to find them came prepared and killed the giant, which, the soldiers said, was eating members of the first team. A transport helicopter then flew the body to Bagram.

Rogan asks whether Alberino looked for records of who was there or of reported casualties and deaths. Alberino says that has been very difficult. He says the Pentagon, through a spokesman or a release, put out a statement some years ago that, in his paraphrase, said the Kandahar Giant incident never happened and no giant was killed in Afghanistan. He confirms the statement is online and calls it bizarre that the Pentagon felt it needed to debunk the story. Rogan finds it funny and says it makes him suspicious.

Alberino says he believes the pilot because the man seemed credible. He did not want his name out, did not want fame, and was nervous that he would be recognized by his voice and face reprisals. In Alberino's account, the loadmaster weighed the body before loading, as required for all cargo, and recorded 1,100 pounds. The crew estimated its height at 10 to 12 feet.

The pilot flew the body from Bagram to Qatar, where it was unloaded. Alberino calls this a firsthand account of the flight itself. What happened afterwards was rumor, and the pilot said so himself: he heard "through the grapevine" that the body ended up at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and he added, "I don't know. That's just what I heard." When Rogan asks why unusual material always seems to go to Wright-Patterson, Alberino repeats a claim that the base once had a "blue room" holding recovered alien artifacts, open only to a very few people. He says he does not know whether it still exists.

Alberino cites several other sources. Each is anonymous or comes through someone else:

His colleague L.A. Marzulli was approached by a different man, a special forces soldier said to have firsthand knowledge. Alberino says he cannot remember the details. He also says it is unclear whether this was the same incident or a separate one. A couple of years ago, Alberino met a man he describes as very high up in operations during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a commander who had flown many missions. Asked about the Kandahar Giant, the man went pale and pointed at his phone, and his wife whispered that he could not talk about it. They later met in what Alberino calls a very controlled environment. Alberino says he cannot repeat what he was told there. A friend of Alberino's, whom he met with Luis Elizondo at a bar in Wyoming, said he asked a staffer for a senator about the Kandahar Giant. The staffer has a special forces background, and Alberino believes he is a chief of staff or at least an adviser. The staffer reportedly turned stern, warned the friend to be very careful, and said nothing more.

From the commander's account, which he does not share, and from talks with other unnamed soldiers, Alberino concludes that there was more than one giant and that the military has known about them. The evidence offered here is people's reactions and refusals to talk, not documents. Alberino himself presents this as the typical response he and others get when they look into the story.

But it's not the giant of Kandahar. It's the giants of Kandahar. There's more than one.

what have you gotten yourself into? What are you looking into?

Rogan's main question is why anyone would keep this secret, and both men say they do not fully understand it. Rogan points to the Nephilim of the Bible and the Book of Enoch, and to Native American stories of red-headed giants with six fingers and six toes. He asks how peoples in the Middle East and North America could share the same old story. Alberino replies that giant legends exist everywhere in the world.

Rogan recounts what he calls the "myth" about the Smithsonian. In this story, excavators found huge femurs they first took for woolly mammoth bones, then realized came from giant humans, some with red hair, and the bones were hidden in a Smithsonian basement or somewhere similar. He contrasts this with how openly scientists announce other finds, such as new extinct dinosaurs or Homo floresiensis, the so-called hobbit people. He adds the qualifier "If it's real." Alberino says he is "100%" sure that giants in general are real. He says he will first explain why he thinks the subject is covered up and then why he thinks it is real.

Like, if they find a new species of dinosaur that's extinct, they'll let you know.

Alberino first sets aside two common explanations. One, popular in his field among people with a biblical outlook, is that secular atheists want to suppress anything that confirms the Bible. He rejects it because giants would confirm the myths of every ancient culture, not just scripture. The other is that giants would contradict evolution by natural selection. He rejects that too, arguing that scientists could simply place such humanoids in a branch descended from something like Gigantopithecus. He says he is not an evolutionist himself but doesn't think giants would cause the theory much trouble.

So the only thing left on the table for me, is that there's something very sinister going on in regard to the remains of giants.

His argument draws on mythology, especially from the ancient Near East and the Book of Enoch. He says some cultures worshipped giants, which they saw as hybrid beings who were not entirely human. These cultures believed a dead giant's spirit could be contacted, summoned, and could possess living people. Alberino says that in Hebrew cosmology these spirits are where demons come from, including the possessing demons of the New Testament. He names the Canaanites as one such cult and says they had several customs and rites related to giants. The segment ends as he introduces one of them, the rite of Kispum, before he explains it or how it connects to his claim of a cover-up. He also says the Sardinia part of his argument is still to come.

Alberino begins with a book by his friends Derek and Sharon Gilbert, Veneration, which he says describes an ancient practice of contacting and venerating the spirits of dead giants. The transcript renders the rite's name as "Kisbam" and "Kisbom". He says it was practiced widely in the ancient world, but especially among the Amorites and other Canaanite clans. In his account the ritual was a feast to which the dead were invited, so he classes it as necromancy: participants called up the dead and believed the dead would come and eat with them. He says the kings, and the Amorite kings in particular, invoked the spirits of "the mighty ones, the great ones, the giants of old, the Rephaeim."

He grounds these figures in the biblical account, which he says names several clans of giants living in the Levant during and after the conquest under Joshua. He says many of these clans were driven out and eradicated, but some individuals survived and moved mainly to the Philistine cities of Gaza, Gath and Ashdod. That, he says, is where Goliath of Gath comes from, whom David later meets in the text.

Giant clans Alberino says the Bible names: the Anakim, whom he describes as descended from the Nephilim; the Rephaim; the Zamzummim; the Emim; and, separately, Goliath of Gath, a Philistine city.

Alberino explains the motive in his own terms. These descendants of the Nephilim were sought out "because they have knowledge," and he calls them "possessing spirits." His textual evidence is the corpus from Ugarit, which he describes as an Amorite city-state on the Mediterranean coast in what is now northern Syria. He says documents found there show Amorite kings summoning dead giants, the Rephaim, by name, so that the kings could be empowered by their spirits. He ties this to the Enochic tradition, under which the spirits of dead giants exist in a kind of suspended animation and can be revived and made to live in human bodies.

Alberino links this cult to Baal, describing the giants as "the warriors of bail" (the transcript's spelling of Baal). He says Jesus calls Baal Satan in the New Testament, so in his view the cult is "basically Satanism." He then claims the cult still exists and points to the Epstein files. When the host asks what he means, he says there are references to Baal and "this recurrent theme of bail worship." Asked for specifics, he concedes:

I can't remember the exact references

He also hedges on who is involved. He says some elites are obsessed, adds "I don't know who or how many of them," and describes an "infatuation" with Canaanite cults. He then states his central hypothesis: these practices are alive today, and the people involved are using giants' remains. He presents this as his own reasoning, ending with "Nothing else makes sense to me."

I believe that they're using the bones the remains of giants in these practices

The host offers a more ordinary explanation for any cover-up. Powerful, wealthy people would not want to be exposed for whatever they were doing. The host mentions the odd "beef jerky" and "pizza" references that seem to be some kind of code. The host also says that right after the indictment, Epstein brought barrels of sulfuric acid to the island, admits "I forget how many gallons," and notes that sulfuric acid can be used to dissolve bodies. A blackmail operation holding information on powerful people would, in the host's view, explain a cover-up. Alberino calls that "the cover up of the pedophilia," and the host widens it to include adultery or drug use.

Someone in the conversation then checks the Baal claim against a document on screen and undercuts it. The word appears on a bank document as "b-a-a-l-name." That speaker says people looking into it think it may have been misread, and that it is the only mention. Looking at the page, the speaker first can't see the word, then finds one clear instance, and adds "I don't know if that has anything to do with the occult specifically." The exchange ends with the reference judged "at least creepy" rather than shown to be occult.

might have just been a misinterpretation. That's the only mention of it.

The discussion then sets up a hypothetical. The host says "let's just say for the sake of argument that it's true": the legends are true, the giants were real, and their spirits can be contacted, perhaps through their bones. The host adds "Or at least people believe this" and asks whether there is a method. Alberino says the answer leads to Sardinia.