Overview

The Cardiff Giant is a ten-foot statue of a naked man, carved from gypsum, that became one of the most celebrated hoaxes in American history. Buried on a farm near Cardiff, in upstate New York, it was "discovered" by well-diggers in October 1869 and exhibited as a petrified prehistoric giant. Its religious dimension is what earns it a place among debunked religious artifacts: many who paid to see it believed, or were encouraged to believe, that it was the fossilised body of one of the giants mentioned in the Book of Genesis, and the exhibit fed directly into contemporary arguments about whether the Bible should be read literally. The whole affair had been engineered by George Hull precisely to exploit and satirise that literalism. Within months Hull confessed, and scientists had already shown the object could not be a petrified man. The site records the Cardiff Giant as a debunked hoax with a religious framing; the statue itself still exists and is on public display.