Monday, November 14, 2005

Giantology - Being Hoaxed?

Those of you who know me will know there's been a minor fascination with giants and mythology in my work, so will not be surprised to hear how much I'm enjoying this site all about giants and the study of.

There's been a spate of recent posts about new discoveries, supposedly uncovered in recent disasters. The Iranian giant, the Siberian ice giant, the Phillipines underwater giant and the Tusnami colossus have all recently come to light. The consensus is that a the Tusnami and the Ice Giant are hoaxes, possibly as some slick marketing campaign for the release of the PS2 game Shadow Of The Colossus".

This is not to say that Giantology is a hoax, anything but. The truth is yet to emerge about this, but its and interesting ruse as well as an interesting marketing ploy - targetting real sites to spread the message.

There seems to be a reticence on the part of the site owner to admit this - but if they're not connected, I can't help but feel that the Iranian giant and the underwater giant are also hoaxes.

The photographs of the creatures don't look right, they both look like montages to my eyes, albeit very well done fakes. Its hard to put an academic reason on why, but it comes down to a gut feeling in part inspired by what I see at the cinema all the time these days - somethings are made to look too real.

That's a strange thing to say, but I think if you look closely, the lighting isn't right, its not consistant across the frame. The spinal column bits in the one photo look espescially wrong. The same for the amazing head under the sea - it looks to well done, too over egged. I can't point to a specific thing, its more a gut feeling. I'd love these to be real, but I can't pledge myself to the fact they are. I'm still far from convinced.

Its a great little site though - the ~~podcasts~~ MP3 Downloads are worth a quick listen as well. Your thoughts on the authenticity of the Iranian and Phillipines giants would be appreciated. Its fair to say I've not looked really deeply into them beyond what I've seen on the Giantology site and their respective home sites. If you've seen more academic evidence let us know.

Posted by Dio Bach at 12:54

4 Comments:

RR said...: Naw, sorry Dio, can't take these seriously at all. Good photoshop work at play I think.; 7:07 PM
greg said...: Then who made the Giant's Causeway RR? hmmm? ;)

Lots of interesting stuff the past week! Thanks!; 6:25 PM
Anonymous said...: Yes, the Giantology site is a sham. The 12/12/05 post about the Russian Ice Giant claimed there was a secret page on a "Stop Polarneft" site protected by a Javascript password (Javascript!). When I teased out the password, it was an index directory linking to a scan of a memo, a "3d" sonic scan of the ground around the colossus, and a picture of a cave painting. Except the title of the index page was mapped to /sony/playstation/SOTC_dev/... BUSTED! Thinking the site might not be a sham, I emailed the author, letting him know the colossus was fake...but instead of responding, low and behold the "secret" page was fixed to not incriminate Sony. Lame!; 7:41 PM
Dio Bach said...: Yep - there's a later post on the blog where I reach the same conclusion - the whole blog is obviously a set-up - which is a shame, there was some nice stuff on there.; 9:48 PM