After airing the episode about the Solomon Islands Giants, a while back, I was going through messages and listener feedback.

I do my best to read as much of it as I can, even if I'm not always able to respond.

But one message in particular stood out. It came from a woman named Lucy, who told me she was a native of Fiji, a small chain

of islands just south of the Solomons.

She said that stories of giants weren't just limited to the Solomon Islands, but had

been passed down by her own grandparents in Fiji.

But that wasn't all she shared.

Lucy mentioned that at least on one of the Fijian islands, there are long-standing stories

about the Navelli, creatures that she described as forest-dwelling, mischievous, small humanoid

beings, not necessarily violent, but unsettling enough that culturally, people in Fiji tend not to talk about them openly.

After hearing from Lucy, I started seeing similar accounts surface elsewhere.

Other people pointing out that stories of little people don't belong to just one culture or one part of the world. They show up again and again, separated by oceans, languages, and centuries.

That combination of stories sent me down a very interesting rabbit hole.

To someone in the West, the novelli might resemble what we would call gnomes.

But that image, the friendly snow-white version,

the garden statue, is only a modern interpretation, much like Brom Stoker's Count Dracula

when compared to what was originally reported about vampires by Austrian officials in the

1700s. The point being, the idea of little people existing is widely held by many

cultures, and not as creatures of myth. And wouldn't you know it, there are a fair few contemporary

stories people have shared about encountering what they described as very small people, or at least small humanoid creatures.

And some of them happen to be soldiers in combat zones.

What I find especially intriguing is that several of these encounters happened in the same

...