[narrator]
Rapa Nui, or Easter Island,
as it has become known,
is one of the most remote places on the planet.
The nearest inhabited island is 1,100 miles to the west.
And its nearest continental country, Chile,
is over 2,000 miles away.
Scattered around the perimeter of the island,
most with their backs to the sea,
stand nearly 300 massive stone figures
known as the moai.
Most are between 15 to 20 feet tall.
But the tallest stands over 70 feet.
And the heaviest weighs up to 165 tons.
Why did these people go to such great effort
to build these giant statues?
No one else in Polynesia was doing that.
When you talk to the people of Easter Island today,
the Rapa Nui people,
they say that they were doing them to honor
certain important ancestral ariki
or rulers.
These moais are images of great ancestors.
[narrator]
have suggested that the moai may have been erected
by a lost race of giants
that once inhabited the island.
Interestingly, C.F. Barons,
a member of the Dutch expedition team
that first discovered the island in 1722,
described some of the priestly class of inhabitants
as goliaths.
[Barnhart]
Someone had rowed up to their boat
that was some 15-foot tall.
He really made a big deal of these giants on the island.
[Childress]
landed on Easter Island, what they found was
that there were two types of people there.
There were the short ears and the long ears.
And the long ears were often described as giants.
And they were a different race from the short ears.
Presumably, they had these very, very long ears
and earlobes.
And they were the priestly caste.
They were directing the creation
and the movement of these statues around the island.
[Newman]
that each of the crew could walk under the legs
of these giants.
The sheer size of the megaliths on Easter Island
do suggest they were made by giants.
There are legends all around the world
linked with megalithic sites,
which may give some clarity
on who and how they actually built these sites.
[narrator]
prior to its western discovery.
But only 52 years later,
explorer James Cook described a site
of mass devastation.
With nearly all of the moai statues toppled over,
and only about 700 inhabitants
left on the island.
And no mention of giants.
Something seems to have happened at Easter Island
that decreased the population seriously.
And it seems that
a number of people either died off,
left, or something happened to them.
[narrator]
propose that evidence left at the site
may point to a more intriguing theory
regarding their disappearance.
Archaeologists found unfinished moai
left at the quarry.
And tools scattered around
as if the work had been suddenly abandoned.
[Childress]
and even what happened exactly
to the priestly caste of giants
who was overseeing all of this work.
Suddenly these people just vanished,
all the work stopped.
[Howe]
about Easter Island,
was this a genetic experiment
where non-humans would use
islands, high mountains, peninsulas,
so that there would not be interference with
or contamination of their experiments.
Maybe that's why they were transferred out.