NEW FROM OPERATIONAL HISTORY (THE K'N-Y'ANI)

DISINFORMATION: THE SMITHSONIAN OSSUARY

As reports of giant human bones dug up in various excavations began to ripple through local newspapers in mid-19th century America, an inadvertent cover-up was set in motion behind the stately facade of America’s premier museum; the Smithsonian. Regarded as a bastion of scientific inquiry, the Smithsonian became headquarters to an ongoing (almost accidental) operation to keep anomalous remains from the public.

 It began in the late 1840s (about the same time as the opening of the Smithsonian) and had all but played out by the early 1920s, but for nearly 70 years, a group operated in the basements of the Smithsonian, securing, cataloguing and hiding the huge bones Americans sometimes dug from the Earth in the relentless expansion west.

 On March 3, 1848, the Philadelphia Inquirer stunned its readership with an article headlined “Colossal Remains Found in Appalachian Mounds.” Laborers digging in the Appalachian foothills had unearthed bones of an unimaginable scale; with huge skulls and bones nearly four times the size of a normal man. The public, enamored with the mystery of the mounds of the American midwest like Ohio's Snake Mound, found its imagination ignited. The bones were seized by officials in New York State for the "public good" and sent to the Smithsonian Institution Building in 1849 for study.

 There, the nations best scientists could not account for them. The Smithsonian's first director, Joseph Henry, whose interests were clearly focused on physics and not archaeology or anthropology, saw the bone collection (which grew from 1849 onwards) as a dangerous distraction to the mandate of the Smithsonian, "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Henry was a well-known pragmatist, whose policies were sober-minded, focused on earth science and physics, and obsessed with efficiency, order and reason.

 "Who cares one sot for old bones? Our focus must be on the natural wonders of science and nature," Henry declared in a private letter to staff, accidentally setting policy for the next 70 years. The bones were isolated in the basement below the principal lecture room at the Smithsonian castle, in an area eventually called the Ossuary. Dr. Herman Maggot (1822-1899), a Smithsonian antiquarian, was the unofficial head of "that department", and spent all of his yearly acquisition stipend purchasing "giants" from locals all over the country.

 By the turn of the century, the Ossuary had fifty full skeletons of the "giants", and thousands of singular, human-shaped, odd-sized bones. In addition, gold and jade jewels and pottery that did not match the known American Indian cultures were also recovered and stored here. These bones were huge — much bigger than any recorded human — but appeared human. One male skeleton stood nearly 18 feet tall, had two sets of teeth, and was estimated to have weighed almost 1250 lbs when alive.

 Maggot's treatise on the subject, completed in 1888 and filed publicly in the annals of the Smithsonian, was called On the Magnitude of Ancient Human Remains, and it does nothing to hide the bones, their apparent sources, or what he believes to be their origins (he accounts them as the biblical Nephilim — giants). The document is still there, and is wholly downloadable in PDF form from the Smithsonian website, for those who know what to look for.

 By 1880, it was well known in nearly every state of the union that the Smithsonian paid good money for anomalous giant bones. Even after Maggot's death, a hodge-podge of personnel accepted the dwindling number of giant bones sent to the Smithsonian and dutifully stored them in the Ossuary. By 1925 or so, such reports and bones ceased turning up.

 Today, the Ossuary remains, though few know much about it, and the doors leading to it have been opened only four times since 1925 — all for maintenance, wiring or plumbing tasks. Little thought is given to the hundreds of carefully packed crates filled with the bones of giants, all now long forgotten.

THREAT: THE K'n-Y'ani

"they what live forever young as they like and you cant tell if they are really men or just gostes—and what they do cant be spoke about and this is only 1 entrance—you cant tell how big the whole thing is—after what we seen I dont want to live aney more France was nothing besides this..."

-The Testimony of Ed Clay, 1920

Long before the invasion of European colonists, many indigenous American traditions speak of giants in North America. The Iroquois’ oldest tales mention the Ge-no’sgwa, giants with stone skin who only appeared at night and could vanish in a cloud of insects. The Choctaw have legends of the Tso’ne, enormous beings with “white faces” who devoured men and resided within the Earth. The Cherokee, Delaware, and Shawnee’s oldest tradition speaks of the Wesa Usgwani Tsudatasdi, “the Moon-Faced People,” giants who ruled the Ohio valley, enslaving men for food and sport.

 These tales all culminate in a similar pattern: tribes (or a hero and his companions) unite against the giants, ultimately defeating or forcing them to retreat westward. In 1955, Delta Green uncovered evidence suggesting that these beings and the legends of their downfall were real.

 Sometimes referred to as “the old people” or “they who dwell below,” these beings are called the Xinaiáns (or the K’n-Y’ani) in two notable works written by individuals who directly encountered them. Despite the uprising against them leading to the fragmentation of the settlement-based Adena culture, the native American tribes of North America flourished for hundreds of years afterward in relative peace (until the Europeans arrived).

 Delta Green’s evidence indicates that the K’n-Y’ani were not the builders of the earthen mound outposts scattered across North America known as the Adena culture, but rather its conquerors. The Adena mound culture, a thriving pre-Columbian civilization dating back nearly 5,000 years, appears to have been captured and enslaved by a small group of K’n-Y’ani sometime around 800 AD, long after its establishment. These K’n-Y’ani lords ruled over humans for an unknown period of time, extracting labor and vitality to meet the insatiable needs of their culture.

 The K’n-Y’ani are an ancient, subterranean, humanoid species that physically resemble humanity, but clearly perceive humans as a distinct and inferior species. Extensive testing on recovered K’n-Y’ani bodies has only deepened the mystery. While scientific intelligence suggests they have the ability to breed with humans and manipulate the human genome at will, biological samples indicate the K'n-Y'ani are not human at all.

 Their scientific knowledge surpasses humans, evident in their unnatural abilities that, to them, are inherent. When they emerge from the depths, usually during dawn, night, or dusk, they transform into giants, towering between 18 and 25 feet tall. Their physical form shifts at will, becoming solid or immaterial as they desire. They possess telepathy, telekinesis, and many other powers.

 Strange disappearances throughout North America, first noted by the indigenous population, and later by colonists, appear to indicate the K'n-Y'ani have some sort of ongoing project involving humanity. These areas, once designated as cursed by native populations, later became isolated, and, in time, many became parks and national parks. Today, strange disappearances still occur in such places, in fact, they are known to the National Park Service, and certain U.S. agencies — who keep them quiet.

 By the late 1960s, despite no advancement in its knowledge of the species and few encounters, Delta Green determined the K'n-Y'ani, if they still existed at all, represented a tiny population of individuals isolated to a few sparsely inhabited areas of North America. As such, the group surmised, they represented no real threat. Later, many in the organization would come to disagree with this assessment.