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Astonishing footprints found of gigantic man-beasts
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Giant's footprint next to human foot.
The man-beasts haunted the forbidding green hells. Their howls sometimes echoed–booming screeches that pierced the gloomy forests. Giant, lumbering creatures that thrashed about, foraging on the moonless nights seeking…seeking what?
What no man alive really, truly knows.
A history of horror
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Tarawa atoll – home of giants.
Tarawa is an inhabited, tropical atoll and part of the chain of Gilbert Islands located in the central South Pacific. Once it was the home of the capital of the Republic of Kiribati, South Tarawa…and before that the home of terrifying roaming giants.
Today, although some researchers dismiss as myth the indigenous islanders' tales of giants, those scientists cannot explain away the giant footprints found on the atoll. Some are also found on neighboring islands.
The natives tell of the brutal giants that stomped across the land like movng mountains. The natives had to battle the giants for food and sometimes to save their women and children from being dragged off and eaten alive.
Yes, like many giants said to inhabit the world–from the Middle East and Northern China to Central America and the American Southwest-the giants of Tawara relished the pungent taste of tender human flesh.
They were cannibals.
Record of a ferocious reign
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Cast of a footprint left by a 'small' giant child.
The giants' hunger for the "long pig" drove the puny humans into hiding. The giants often strolled the land seeking human prey and fresh meat carrying crude clubs the size of huge tree trunks.
Some of the hulking brutes left their giant footprints along the sand and limestone beaches. A very few of their prints remained, solidified into brittle fossils still visible to this day.
A record left in stone of their ferocious reign.
Perhaps the best region to see the giants' footprints is near a primitive, tiny village called Banreaba by a native holy place dubbed Te Aba-n-Anti–the Place of the Spirits.
It is said by the natives the restless spirits of the giants roam there. And if you can't actually find a giant (and would you really want to?), you can see and photograph the telltale signs pressed into rock of where the brutish behemoths once tread.
The footprints of Tarawa
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A native places foot on print left by female giant.
A scientific book, describing the giants and their footprints on Tarawa and other nearby atolls and islands, was written in 1949–The Footprints of Tarawa from the Journal of the Polynesian Society by anthropologist I.G. Turbott.
The book describes in detail the evidence for the prehistoric giants and the record of their gigantic footprints. At one point author Turbott writes: “Here various footprints can clearly be seen in the volcanic stone, some of them so huge as to seem impossible. Most have six toes on each foot."
One footprint in particular "is said to be his left foot–it sinks a good inch into the solid rock, a coral limestone, has 12 toes and measures 3-feet 9-inches across the toes and 4-feet 6-inches from the toe to heel.
"Its counterpart, the right foot, is reported to be near the village of Tekanranga on Maiana, a separate island in the Gilberts some 20 miles to the southwest of Tarawa."
The gargantuan size of the footprints easily makes them at least twice the size of any human foot ever recorded.
"On Tarawa, the main atoll of Kiribati," Turbott continues, "I found the footprints of a giant, his wife and children in a schoolyard–in the village of Banreaba. They all had six toes."
Turbott believes that "These men [the giants] apparently had six toes and were probably ten to twelve feet tall…”
Swiss researcher Erich von Däniken once visited the island chain, studied the giants' footprints and proclaimed them authentic.
The stone clearing where giant footprints can be clearly seen embedded into the stone is named Te Aba Ni Maneka–the Rock of Footprints.
When asked why the holy place revered by the villagers is called Place of the Spirits, the natives said it had nothing to do with the spirits of the giants, but the ghosts of the ones the giants had consumed.
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© Copyright AYM Communications, 2011.
