The Monstrefact: Marvel’s Ulvar the Giant

of Journey into Mystery. The story, as recounted in Monsters Creatures of the Marvel Universe explored by Kelly Knox, actually begins with another giant alien conqueror, Gigantes, the Atlantean, who arises from his undersea kingdom to lay claim to coastal San Diego and also presumably the world. After poking around the surface world for a bit staking out the claim, if you will, Gagantis returns to the waters to report back home to Atlantis, and here he encounters an even taller,

even more intimidating giant standing in the ocean. It is Oulvar. Oulvar stands a good thousand feet or three hundred and four point eight meters tall and absolutely towers over the puny Atlantean far beneath him. In a booming voice, it proclaims that Earth is now the property of the planet Centaurus too, so hands off. This, of course, leaves Gagantis with no other option but to return home to the

ocean depths in defeat. It's only then in the comic that it's revealed that Oulvar is not an alien conqueror at all, but a giant decoy built by humans to scare away there would be conquerors. The illustrations in Knox's book revealed that Oulvar was atomic powered and commanded from a central control room inside the body. Yet this is not a fighting robot like your mecha godzillas or your vultrons. No,

Olvar was nothing but a highly successful technological bluff. Later we learned that Olivar was eventually dismantled, so complete was his victory, and his head now rests on the ocean floor. Now I love this story the moment I read it. Such a ridiculous twist, but I was at a loss as how to really tie it into anything on the monster fact aside from decoys and scarecrows. Which we may come back to this Halloween on stuff to blow your mind.

But then I heard the story of Italian fishermen and conservationist Paolo Fancioli, as detailed in a twenty twenty Guardian story by Giorgio Giglioni. Italian law already banned environmentally destructive trawling nets in its waters. In Tuscan, authorities took to dropping blocks of concrete on the seafloor to dis disrupt the nets of illegal trawlers, but Foncioli and others noticed that these were space too far apart to make much

difference with permission. He began to sink more blocks of stone, but decided to take things in a more artistic direction. A local quarry donated one hundred blocks of granite, and local artists volunteered to shape them into stone guardians that now occupy an underwater sculpture garden to both deteri illegal fissures, but also to attract scuba diving tourists like Oulivar. They serve as stone guardians on the seafloor, though they're a

direct physical deterrent rather than a communicative one. Now another possible connection to make with the real world. In Ulvar. Here would be the concept of using artistic creations, such as sculpture, to warn future generations about radioactive sites. The landscape of Thorn's concept by architect Michael Brill, proposed in nineteen ninety three, is one of the more evocative of these proposed for the US Department of Energy report for

the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant or WIPP. It envisioned a series of jagged concrete thorns emerging from the ground of a radioactive site. This was one of several proposed long term nuclear waste warning messages from the nineteen ninety three Sandia National Laboratories report that included other threatening works of stone or earth, but no giant aliens, at least with the fictional Ulvar example. Humans knew who to direct the message at Gigantis, the Atlantean in the comics. They'd already

met him, It'd seen him around the surface world. But creating a non linguistic message for human beings ten thousand years in the future is another matter altogether. Finally, Ulvar can be thought of as a kind of tongue in cheek opposite to the pioneer plaque that would be later placed on board the nineteen seventy two Pioneer ten nineteen seventy three Pioneer eleven spacecraft, serving as a kind of time came, but also potentially as a message to alien beings.

This is what we are, and here is what we were. All of our's message, however, is simply, don't mess with us. We're a thousand foot tall monsters. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.