Weird News

Hull, an atheist, got into an argument with Reverend Turk and his supporters at a Methodist revival meeting about Genesis 6:4, which states that there were giants who once lived on Earth. Being the minority party, Hull lost the argument. Angered by his defeat and the credulity of people, Hull wanted to prove how easily he could fool people with a fake giant.
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In 1868, Hull, accompanied by a man named H.B. Martin, hired men to quarry out a 10-foot-4.5-inch-long (3.2 m) block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument to Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Edward Burghardt in Chicago, a German stonecutter who he had sworn to secrecy. Burghardt hired two sculptors named Henry Salle and Fred Mohrmann to create the giant. They had taken cautious steps to cover up their work during the carving, putting up quilts to lessen the sound of carving.

The giant was designed to imitate the form of Hull himself. Hull consulted a geologist and learned that hairs wouldn't be petrified, so he removed the hair and beard from the giant. The length of the giant was 10 feet 4½ inches and it weighed 2990 pounds.

On a night in late November 1868, the giant was buried in a hole in Newell's farm. Nearly a year later, Newell hired Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, ostensibly to dig a well, and on October 16, 1869, they found the giant. One of the men reportedly exclaimed, "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!"

On the first day, the audiences were able to view the giant with no fee charged. The next day, a tent was set up on the discovery site and Newell charged each audience fifty cents for a fifteen-minute session of visiting the giant. The number of audiences went to about three to five hundreds per day as the demand for wagons and carriages dramatically increased. The townspeople also gained huge profit because of the Cardiff Giant. The hotels and restaurants in Cardiff saw more customers in those four days than they had ever seen before.

Some believed this giant was a petrified man, while some believed it was a statue. Those who believed it was a petrified man thought it was one of the giants mentioned in the aforementioned Genesis verse. On the other hand, John F. Boynton, the first geologist to examine the giant, declared that it could not be a fossilized man, but hypothesized that it was a statue that was carved by a French Jesuit in the 16th or 17th century in order to impress the local Native Americans.
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Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh examined the statue, pointed out that it was made of soluble gypsum, which, had it been buried in its blanket of wet earth for centuries, would not still have fresh tool marks on it (which it did), and termed it "a most decided humbug". Some theologians and preachers, however, defended its authenticity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant