The National Geographic Society has not discovered ancient giant humans, despite rampant reports and pictures.

The hoax began with a doctored photo and later found a receptive online audience—thanks perhaps to the image’s unintended religious connotations.

A digitally altered photograph created in 2002 shows a reclining giant surrounded by a wooden platform—with a shovel-wielding archaeologist thrown in for scale.

By 2004 the “discovery” was being blogged and emailed all over the world—”Giant Skeleton Unearthed!”—and it’s been enjoying a revival in 2007.

The photo fakery might be obvious to most people. But the tall tale refuses to lie down even five years later, if a continuing flow of emails to National Geographic News are any indication. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)

The messages come from around the globe—Portugal, India, El Salvador, Malaysia, Africa, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya. But they all ask the same question: Is it true?

Helping to fuel the story’s recent resurgence are a smattering of media outlets that have reported the find as fact.

An often cited March 2007 article in India’s Hindu Voice monthly, for example, claimed that a National Geographic Society team, in collaboration with the Indian Army, had dug up a giant human skeleton in India.

“Recent exploration activity in the northern region of India uncovered a skeletal remains of a human of phenomenal size,” the report read.

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

The account added that the team also found tablets with inscriptions that suggest the giant belonged to a race of superhumans that are mentioned in the Mahabharata, a Hindu epic poem from about 200 B.C.

“They were very tall, big and very powerful, such that they could put their arms around a tree trunk and uproot it,” the report said, repeating claims that initially appeared in 2004.

Voice editor P. Deivamuthu admitted to National Geographic News that his publication was taken in by the fake reports.

For anyone who may have knowingly propagated the myth, Mikkelson added, the motivation “probably wasn’t any different than the motivation for engaging in a game of ringing someone’s doorbell and running away—because it’s an easy way to have a laugh at someone else’s expense.”

Alex Boese, “curator” of the virtual Museum of Hoaxes, said fake giants have a long history going back to the at least the 1700s.

The recent hoax is reminiscent of the once famous Cardiff Giant myth, involving a ten-foot-tall (three-meter) stone figure dug up in 1869 in Cardiff, New York, Boese said.

Many people believed the figure was a petrified man and claimed he was one of the giants mentioned in the Bible’s Book of Genesis: “There were giants in the Earth in those days.”

Likewise, Boese said, the recent giant hoax “taps into people’s desire for mystery and their desire to see concrete confirmation of religious legends.”