There's a story that's been floating around the internet for just about 20 years now,

claiming that the mountains outside Kandahar, Afghanistan, are home to a race of man-eating giants,

and that they've tangled with U.S. forces there on at least one occasion.

You may not remember hearing about this on the evening news, though, and so you might find

yourself wondering, where then did this story come from?

Well, as always, we're going to find out right now, unskeptoid. Before we dive into today's episode, here's a question.

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You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from skeptoid.com.

The Giant of Kandahar.

Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.

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 U.S. 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

...