The Smithsonian's Giant Cover-Up

The Supreme Court Ruling

Let’s begin with that bit since the skepticism is palpable. The article concluded that the Smithsonian were responsible for the destruction of giant bones and forcing them to declassify their files. Was it real? Yes, in the sense that it was an actual article that was disseminated online in 2014. But was anything in it true? No, of course not, although that did not stop people from believing it and sharing it with others.

The original article was published by a website called the World News Daily Report. It doesn’t exist anymore, but just going by the name, it sounded less credible than the drunk guy in the bar who always gets chatty after a few pints. The site was run by two Canadians (Olivier Legault and Janick Murray-Hall) and was pure, 100 percent fake news published under the guise of satire.

At the peak of its popularity, it was one of the biggest sources of false information on the internet. One analysis from 2016 that compiled the 50 most widely circulated fake news stories of the year found that the World News Daily Report was responsible for five of them.

The fact that the website had a disclaimer which mentioned that all of their content was fictional and satirical did not seem to diminish its credibility too much. Oh, and the American Institution of Alternative Archeology? That doesn’t exist, either.

For whatever reason, the story keeps popping up online every now and then and gaining traction again, despite the fact that the alleged Supreme Court ruling occurred in 2014 and the Smithsonian was supposed to share its super secret files in 2015.

It happened in 2022, and recently in 2025, Republican Rep. Eric Burlison from Missouri announced that he intended to take the institute to task again to reveal what it was hiding in the basement. He stated unequivocally that he believed in the biblical Nephilim, and he even gave a presentation at NephCon 2025, because of course it has its own convention. Besides giants, the event also addressed other topics such as aliens, biblical prophecies, and Bigfoot.

Debunking the Photos

What about all those photos? Were they all fake, as well? Yes. Obviously. However, they were all fake in different ways, which goes to show just how many different avenues of misinformation exist for those looking to deceive, and for those who want to be deceived.

The first one from 2004 caused a lot of headaches for the National Geographic Society, who finally published a piece debunking it in 2007 after receiving almost constant queries from all over the world, asking if it was real or not. Of course it wasn’t, but it hadn’t been created with the intention of fooling people or perpetuating the giant conspiracy, either.

It was made by a Canadian illustrator known as IronKite for a photoshop contest titled “Archaeological Anomalies 2.” Nowadays, with the emergence of AI, anyone can create a fake image like that in just a couple of minutes. But back in the olden times, it took IronKite a whole hour-and-a-half to make it. He started with an image of a mastodon excavation and then superimposed a regular human skeleton over the remains of the creature.

Finally, he added a few shrunken down humans to the mix to give the skeleton a greatly exaggerated sense of scale.

IronKite, however, did not share the image online, nor did he ever claim it was genuine, unlike the similar photograph from 2024, the one purporting to be from a giant’s grave in South Africa. The creator of that image is unknown, but they did it with the intent to deceive. They took a photo of a skeleton on an excavation site, sprinkled in a few tiny humans and, all of a sudden, the skeleton looked giant. The original photograph was taken as an archaeological dig in Russia known as the “Necropolis of the Rostov Settlement.”

It won’t surprise you to find out that the skeleton was of normal size.

Then there is the photo with the giant footprint. Interestingly enough, that photo is 100 percent genuine. It just doesn’t show what everyone thinks it does. The man standing next to it is Robert Schoch, associate professor of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at Boston University College of General Studies, and he said that the so-called footprint was a completely normal and explainable phenomenon: “a wonderful natural weathering and erosion feature – a form that falls into the broad class of erosional features often found in rocks known as tafoni.”

Lastly, there is the photo of the giant human and snake skeletons. This one also happens to be real. Well, the image is real, the context is not. It was an art display called “Giant Ruins,” created by Taiwanese artist Tu Wei-cheng and staged at the Thailand Biennale exhibition of contemporary art.

The Tall Tales of Native Americans

We’ve gotten the most ridiculous claims out of the way first which, curiously enough, also happen to be the most recent. Now let’s go back in time and see if any of the historical claims had any merit or if they were just…tall tales.

Starting off with the various Native American accounts, these are almost impossible to consider accurate since they are stories that have been told from one person to the next for centuries, maybe even millennia. There is no way of knowing that the account one person heard was identical to the one they told someone else. Multiply that by thousands of times.

Even if you are inclined to accept that some of the oral history might be accurate, there is little reason to believe in the story of the Lenape migration and their encounter with the giant Allegewi. First of all, there is no evidence for the existence of the Allegewi. Or, at least, no evidence that hasn’t been destroyed by the Smithsonian.

Furthermore, the original document that provided us with this information, the Walad Olum or the “Red Score,” is now generally considered to have been a hoax, perpetrated by a French polymath named Constantine Rafinesque, the man who supposedly found the Walad Olum almost 200 years ago and translated it into English. His reasons for doing this remain his own, but a modern analysis of the text suggested that Rafinesque first translated the text from English into Lenape and then back into English. This conclusion is a recent one (mid-1990s), so not everyone is on board with it yet.

As for the Si-Te-Cah, the cannibals who fought the Paiute, I’m not sure at what point they started being referred to as giants, but it wasn’t in any of the main historical sources. Arguably the most authoritative work on the history of the Northern Paiute people is the book by Sarah Winnemucca, Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims from 1883. She was not only a Northern Paiute herself, but the daughter of a famed chief called Winnemucca. In her book, she talked about the war with the Si-Te-Cah and how the last of them perished in Lovelock Cave. She mentioned that they were cannibals and that they had red hair, but nowhere did she say they were giants…or tall, or made any kind of reference to their stature.

Then, another extensive work about the Paiute written in 1929 by two archaeologists once again mentions their war with an ancient people whom they described as “mean, contemptible, foolish, degraded cannibals, had red hair which they were excessively fond of decorating with bone ornaments…” Again, there was no mention of them being giants.

A small point to make, but I can’t help but notice that, in almost all the legends involving giants, they were always the enemy, and the storyteller’s ancestors fought them bravely and managed to triumph over them in a fierce battle. Not to be overly dismissive, but exaggerating the enemy is a fairly common narrative technique used by ancient historians, particularly those who were biased towards one side. Caesar has been accused of doing this several times, particularly in his war against the Gauls.

The reason is simple: the greater the foe, the greater you are when you defeat him. Just once, I’d like to hear someone brag about beating an army of gnomes armed with toothpicks.

Racism in Archaeology

We’ve talked a bit about the nascent field of American archaeology in the 19th century and the role it played in shaping people’s view of the Mound Builders. And when I say “Mound Builders,” I’m using the 19th century meaning of the term i.e. a single mysterious, unidentified race responsible for all the mounds, as opposed to the modern meaning, which is simply a collective word grouping all the pre-Columbian North American cultures that constructed mounds over the course of thousands of years of history.

It seems that people were willing to believe that the mounds were built by Europeans, Asians, biblical giants, even Atlanteans. Pretty much anyone except for Native Americans. And the main reason for this was good ol’ fashioned racism. Americans from all backgrounds back then considered the natives to be too primitive to be able to construct something complex like the mounds.

It was similar thinking to those who believe that aliens built the pyramids because the ancient Egyptians would not have been advanced enough to do it, except that, this time, instead of aliens we have giants.

It’s true that the Smithsonian played an important role in promoting that view. The book by Squier and Davis was hugely influential and widely accepted in the scientific community. Although, just to be clear, they never suggested giants, they just said it wasn’t Native Americans. They were more inclined to create a connection to Mesoamerican cultures like the Aztec, and indicate that maybe one of them was responsible.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the scientific community began shifting away from this thinking. By the new millennium, thanks in no small part to ethnologist Cyrus Thomas, it became established that Native Americans did, in fact, build the mounds. Although some people still retained other beliefs shaped more by their own prejudices and desires rather than any empirical evidence.

Oh, and that Lincoln quote? It’s real, but people argue that it was simply a metaphor, or that he was referring to giant extinct creatures like the mammoth or the mastodon.

Big, But Not Giant

You’ve probably noticed that a huge part of the argument for the pro-giant camp is based on old newspaper articles from the 19th and early 20th century that mention the discovery of the bones of giants.

There are dozens, probably hundreds of examples. Although we cannot verify the authenticity of the claims made in those articles, let’s look at a few choice samples. Here’s a headline from the August 2, 1936, edition of the Salt Lake Tribune:

Archaeologists Mystified At Finding Skeletons Of Men Who Were Seven Feet Tall

The Baltimore American ran in its November 15, 1897, edition an article with the headline “Prehistoric Men Seven Feet Tall Who Once Lived In What Is Maryland.” In 1911, the Oakland Tribune wrote “Bones Of Seven Foot Californian Giant Found In South”

Here’s a snippet from the New York Times in 1885:

Last week a small mound near Homer was opened by some school boys. Today further search was made and several feet below the surface of the earth, in a large vault with stone floor and bark covering, were found four huge skeletons, three being over seven feet in length, and the other a full eight feet.

It wasn’t just newspapers, either, but also books, such as The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, written by John Haywood in 1823. He wrote:

Human bones were taken out of a mound on the Tennessee River below Kingston, which Mr. Brown saw measured by Mr. Simms. The thigh bones of those skeletons, when applied to Mr. Simms’s thigh, were an inch and a half longer than his, from the point of his hip to his knee: supposing the whole frame to have been in the same proportion, the body it belonged to must have been seven feet high or upwards. Many bones in the mounds there are of equal size… .

Some years afterwards, Mr. Cassady dug up a skeleton from under a small mound near the large one at Bledsoe’s lick, in Sumner County, which measured little short of seven feet in length.

There seems to be a pattern developing here. All of the articles I just mentioned (and many more) mention finding the bones of people who were seven feet tall, which is 2.13 meters. But being seven feet tall, while extremely unusual, is not supernaturally so. They would have been giants in the same way that Andre the Giant was a giant. Sure, they would have looked intimidating on a wrestling poster, but they would not have been outside the realm of possibility.

Just for the sake of comparison and to get us back into the world of cold, hard facts, let’s remember that the tallest human on record was Robert Wadlow from Alton, Illinois, who was measured at a peak height of 8 ft 11.1 in, or 2.72 m. The second-tallest was John “Bud” Rogan who, by comparison, stood at a diminutive 8 ft 9 in, or 2.67 m. So we know for certain that people can grow to extremely large heights, given specific circumstances, without belonging to some long-lost mystifying race of giants.

Could They Even Measure It?

We should point out that a lot of these articles don’t even mention a specific height. They just use words like “giant,” “gigantic,” “unusually large,” and “abnormal size” in order to convey to the reader that these people were really, really big.

And speaking of specific heights, who exactly was doing the measuring? The people who wrote the articles? The workmen who stumbled upon the bones while doing some digging? Did the reporters do any fact-checking or did they simply accept whatever number was given to them at face value?

Few of these old entries say that the bones were actually examined by an anthropologist, an archaeologist, or any other expert who would know how to establish a person’s size by looking at their bones. And, to be honest, there were only a handful of people in the country who would have been able to do this. Forensic anthropology, which is the field of research you’d want for something like this, was very much in its infancy at the time.

The formulas used for this work were still primitive and unrefined. They existed, but it wasn’t until the early 1950s that two separate teams of scientists consisting of Mildred Trotter and Goldine Gleser, and C. Wesley Dupertuis and John A. Hadden Jr., respectively, came up with their own equations to estimate stature using bones, which became widely used in their field.

But even their formulas needed more information than just a bag of bones. Variables such as age, sex, and ethnicity had an impact on the accuracy of the calculation. As did the actual bones available for measurement. It’s not like all the skeletons that were dug up were intact, and you can’t determine a person’s height by measuring their big toe.

You needed the long bones in the legs for that. Arm bones were also good, but, ideally, you would have them all. The femur, tibia, fibula, humerus, ulna, and radius are the bones most commonly used to calculate stature. The more of them you have to measure, the more accurate the calculation, but even in an ideal scenario, there is still a margin of error of about an inch-and-a-half, maybe even more.

In summary, most of the old articles do not specify how the height of those so-called giants was calculated. And during the 19th century, even if you had an anthropologist and all the bones you could ask for, their calculation probably would not have been incredibly accurate, anyway.

When Did the Smithsonian Get Involved?

One tricky question to answer is when exactly the Smithsonian became involved in the anti-giant conspiracy.

The idea of skeletons being unearthed all over America might be 200 years old, but the Smithsonian playing a part in their destruction certainly is not. Few newspaper articles of the ones I read mentioned the Smithsonian at all, and those that did made no suggestion that the institution might be up to something nefarious.

One thing that’s definitely true is that the Smithsonian had been deeply involved in the study of Native American culture during the 19th century, particularly when it came to mounds. It’s true that the institution’s first ever publication was about the mounds and their builders. It’s also true that the Bureau of American Ethnology fell under their purview and was run by John Wesley Powell. And it’s true that Aleš Hrdlička debunked giant bones in the 1930s.

However, it does not appear that any of these prompted the conspiracy. Books and magazines that deal with government conspiracies, fakes, and that sort of thing published throughout most of the 20th century make absolutely no mention of the Smithsonian being involved in them. At most, they played the role of debunker rather than perpetrator. As recently as 1991, Stephen Williams’ Fantastic Archaeology which supposedly lists all the fringe archaeological claims made in North America still said nothing about the Smithsonian destroying giant bones.

As far as I can see, the whole conspiracy surrounding the Smithsonian started in 1993 with David Childress and Smithsonian Gate. I only included bits from the article because it was quite large, but reading through it, all the aspects of the conspiracy are in there. It didn’t focus solely on the destruction of giant bones, but rather took the scattershot approach where the Smithsonian was seemingly responsible for all the archaeological cover-ups in the country. I guess that if you make enough accusations, one of them might turn out to be true.

But the “overwhelming evidence” he kept mentioning seemed to be unverified secondhand accounts from some people he didn’t even identify. And the act Childress deemed “the most amazing suppression of all?” Covering up the discovery of an Egyptian tomb in Arizona? That was definitely a newspaper hoax. Look up “1909 Grand Canyon hoax” and you’ll find it. And Professor S. A. Jordan never existed, let alone worked for the Smithsonian.

Even “Smithsonian Gate” mentions the possibility of it being a hoax, but then quickly backtracks by reasoning, and I use the term loosely, that the story contained way too many details to be fake. “It is hard to believe such a story could have come out of thin air,” he said.

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, after about a thousand alleged giants found at burial sites all over the world, over the course of 200 years, the only “evidence” we have are some photoshopped pictures and old newspaper articles. For you and me, that’s nowhere near good enough, but some people have always found it easier to believe.

People who take this for granted are people who want to take it for granted. It’s silly to say, but… We’re preaching to the choir. The majority of people who share it understand that it’s a joke, and the others share it because they want to believe it, not because they really believe it.

You can invent almost anything and people will believe it. Honestly, it’s a little worrying when you realize that. As long as you confirm what they want to believe, they’ll share it. If you go against their opinion, they’ll immediately think it’s fake news. But if you agree with their opinion, they’ll share it right away. They lose their critical thinking.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the World News Daily Report?

The World News Daily Report was a website run by two Canadians, Olivier Legault and Janick Murray-Hall, that published pure, 100 percent fake news under the guise of satire. It was one of the biggest sources of false information on the internet at its peak.

What was the Smithsonian’s role in the giant bones conspiracy?

The Smithsonian was accused of being responsible for the destruction of giant bones and forcing them to declassify their files. However, this conspiracy started in 1993 with David Childress and Smithsonian Gate, and there is no credible evidence to support these claims.

What is the origin of the photo of the giant skeleton?

The photo of the giant skeleton was created by a Canadian illustrator known as IronKite for a Photoshop contest titled ‘Archaeological Anomalies 2.’ It was not intended to deceive anyone but was later circulated as if it were real.

What is the story behind the photo of the giant footprint?

The photo of the giant footprint is genuine but misinterpreted. The man standing next to it is Robert Schoch, who explained that it is a natural weathering and erosion feature known as tafoni.

What is the significance of the Lenape migration story?

The Lenape migration story, which includes an encounter with the giant Allegewi, is considered a hoax. The original document, the Walad Olum, is believed to have been created by Constantine Rafinesque, who translated it from English into Lenape and then back into English.

What do historical accounts say about the Si-Te-Cah?

Historical accounts, such as Sarah Winnemucca’s book ‘Life Among the Paiutes,’ describe the Si-Te-Cah as cannibals with red hair but do not mention them being giants. They were referred to as mean, contemptible, and degraded cannibals, but their stature was not emphasized.

What was the role of racism in the study of Mound Builders?

Racism played a significant role in the study of Mound Builders. Many people believed that Native Americans were too primitive to construct complex mounds, leading to theories that the mounds were built by Europeans, Asians, biblical giants, or Atlanteans.

What is the significance of the old newspaper articles mentioning giant bones?

Old newspaper articles often mentioned the discovery of giant bones, but these claims are not verifiable. Many of these articles described people who were seven feet tall, which is unusual but not supernatural. The tallest humans on record are Robert Wadlow and John ‘Bud’ Rogan, both over eight feet tall.

How accurate were the measurements of giant bones in the 19th century?

The measurements of giant bones in the 19th century were likely not very accurate. Forensic anthropology was in its infancy, and the formulas used for estimating stature from bones were primitive and unrefined. Variables such as age, sex, and ethnicity also affected the accuracy of the calculations.

When did the conspiracy about the Smithsonian and giant bones start?

The conspiracy about the Smithsonian and giant bones started in 1993 with David Childress and Smithsonian Gate. Before this, the Smithsonian was involved in the study of Native American culture and mounds but was not accused of destroying giant bones.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Smithsonian’s Giant Cover-Up
• https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Giants-Who-Ruled-America-ebook/dp/B00HDGKYS2/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0
• https://archive.org/details/jim-vieira-hugh-newman-giants-on-record-americas-hidden-history-secrets-in-the-m/mode/2up
• https://dn720109.ca.archive.org/0/items/lenptheirleg00brin/lenptheirleg00brin.pdf
• https://archive.org/details/fraudsmythsmyste0000fede_n9k9/page/132/mode/2up
• https://dn720709.ca.archive.org/0/items/lifeamongpiutes00manngoog/lifeamongpiutes00manngoog.pdf
• https://newrepublic.com/article/199224/right-hatred-smithsonian-bible-giants
• https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/cau2ce/myths_about_the_smithsonian_hiding_skeletons_of/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_human_skeletons
• https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/smithsonian-giant-skeletons/
• https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-Smithsonian-Institute-hide-giant-skeletons
• https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a65666938/eric-burlison-missouri-representative-ancient-giants-nephilim/
• https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/claims-that-the-smithsonian-destroyed-thousands-of-giant-skeletons-are-many-ye-idUSL1N2ZG1I0/
• https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-029442241800
• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/skeleton-giant-photo-hoax
• https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/pdfy-89lVitXmp_iBnVTu/Tradition_Giants%20Indians.pdf
• https://www.scribd.com/doc/155774326/Archeological-Coverups
• Hero image source by TCP04 / openverse, by.