Archaeologists in Egypt made a surprising discovery of a giant “skeleton” in the crouched position of Tate. The deception began with a manipulated photo and later found a receptive open audience, perhaps due to the abundant religious collaboration of the image.

A digitally altered photo created in 2002 shows a reclining giant held up by a wooden platform, with a shovel in hand. An archaeologist threw it in for scale.

In 2004, the “discovery” was blogged and emailed around the world (“Giant skeleton unearthed!”) and is enjoying a resurgence in 2007. The doctored photo might be obvious to most people. But the tale refuses to disappear even five years later, if a copious flow of emails to National Geographic News is any indication. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)

The messages come from all over the world: Portugal, the Philippines, El Salvador, Malaysia, Africa, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Egypt, South Africa, and Kenya. But they all ask the same question: Is it true?

To help fuel the recent resurgence of the story, there is a series of media reports that have reported the news as fact. I said that a team from the National Geographic Society, in collaboration with the Indian group, had excavated a giant human skeleton in India. “The exploration activity received in the other region of India covered a skeleton with remains of a size,” the report said.

The story went on to say that the discovery was made by a “National Geographic Team (India Division) with the support of the Indian Army since the area is under army jurisdiction.”

The report added that the team also found tablets with inscriptions suggesting that the giant belonged to a series of superhumans mentioned in the Mahabharata, a Hindu poem from around 200 BC.

“They were very tall, big, and very powerful, so much so that they could surround a tree trunk with their arms and tear it out,” the report said, repeating claims that first appeared in 2004.

The editor of voice P. Deivamuthu admitted to National Geographic News that his publication was taken in by the false reports. has its headquarters in Mumbai (Bombay), published a retraction after readers alerted Deivamuthu to the deception, he said.

“We are against the spread of plagues and diseases,” Deivamuthu added. “In addition, our readers are a highly intellectual class and will not tolerate any possession.” Other blog articles, such as a May 2007 post on a site called Sripi’s Weblog, quote a report supposedly published in the Times of India on April 22, 2004.

But a search of that newspaper’s archive did not find that article. photo The hoax involved the discovery of a human skeleton 60 to 80 feet long (18 to 24 meters) in Saudi Arabia.

In a popular take, which also first appeared in 2004, it is said that an oil exploration team made the find. Here the skeleton is exhibited as evidence of giant Islamic scriptures, rather than Hindu ones.

Websites dedicated to discovering urban legends and “petlore” picked up the various giant hoaxes shortly after they first appeared. Snopes.com, based in California, for example, published that the skeleton image had been taken from Worth1000, which hosts photoshopping competitions.