--- title: "The Giants Are In The Newspaper. They Are Not In The Cave." dek: "Two miners dug guano out of a Nevada cave in 1911. The bones they found were about six feet. We tracked every retelling since, and the skeletons grow by roughly four inches per reprint." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Deep History author: Dr. Perpetua Nkemelu and Sal Brindisi (fictional) published: 2026-08-10T08:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/lovelock-giants-clippings tags: Lovelock, giants, Paiute, newspapers, provenance genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # The Giants Are In The Newspaper. They Are Not In The Cave. *Two miners dug guano out of a Nevada cave in 1911. The bones they found were about six feet. We tracked every retelling since, and the skeletons grow by roughly four inches per reprint.* Two men were digging bat guano out of a cave for fertiliser in 1911. They found human remains. Nobody measured anything. No archaeologist was there. Both men are dead. Everything since has come from newspapers. > **Figure:** How tall the skeletons got — see https://theyburied.com/article/lovelock-giants-clippings ## What the excavations found The cave was properly excavated twice, in 1912 and again in 1924. Both reports were published. Both are in print. Anybody can read them. They list thousands of artefacts — duck decoys, basketry, sandals, an extraordinary record of a people living in that basin for millennia. The human remains are described in the ordinary way and nothing in either report says anything about unusual stature. The University of Nevada later measured what survives. About six feet. Tall for that population. Six feet. ## Reading the rest of the newspaper The measurements everybody cites come from a Nevada paper in 1931 — 8 feet 6 inches in one article, nearly 10 feet in another four months later. We went to the microfilm and read the whole issues rather than the clipping. The same paper, those same months, carried a serialised adventure story on the facing page, three separate items about a lost mine that has never been found, and a standing column of "local marvels" that a modern reader would file under gossip. The giant items sit in that column. They are not on the news pages. They were never presented as news, and no reporter is named on any of them. That is not a smoking gun. It is a context, and the context has been stripped off every time the clipping has been reproduced for ninety-five years. > We read the whole issue rather than the clipping. That is the entire method of this story. ## The growth Laid end to end, the printed sources give a clean pattern. Nothing in 1911. About six feet in the excavation record. Eight and a half in 1931. Ten a few months later. Ten to twelve in the paperbacks of the 1970s, each citing the newspapers. Up to fifteen on the websites of the 2000s, citing the paperbacks. The skeletons grow by roughly four inches per retelling and they only ever grow in one direction, which is what you would expect from copying and is not what you would expect from measuring. ## What the Paiute historian asked us to print Dr. Wilma Tsosie-Aldrich was clear that she did not want to be quoted as debunking her own people's tradition, and that this is what happens to her every time. The Si-Te-Cah story is a real and old oral tradition. It is about a conflict, a people, and a cave. It is not, and was never, a claim about how many feet tall anybody was — that framing was imposed on it by outsiders who needed it to be a measurement so they could argue about the measurement. "You are asking me whether my grandmother's history is true," she said. "You are asking it in a unit of length. That is your question, not hers." ## The bit about us Our standards editor's note in the box below is the one this newspaper should sit with. We are a newspaper, writing a story about how newspapers are unreliable, in which the villain is a small paper in 1931 with a marvels column and no bylines. A 1931 edition of *They Buried* would have printed it too. We know this because our own archive from that decade exists, and our correspondent has read it, and it is worse. ## Sources (invented) - Dr. Wilma Tsosie-Aldrich, Paiute historian — Interviewed by telephone twice (June 2026) - Published excavation reports, 1912 and 1924, Public — Read in full (2026) - Nevada newspaper archive, Public microfilm — Read on site over two days (May 2026) - University collections staff, Named in our notes — In person; showed us the catalogued remains (May 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2011: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2011 ## What we could not confirm - What the 1911 miners actually saw. No archaeologist was present, nothing was measured, and both men are long dead. - Whether any material left the site before 1912. Guano mining is not careful work and the floor was disturbed for a year before anybody trained arrived. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.