# The Smithsonian Institution destroyed thousands of giant human skeletons to suppress evidence of a lost race of giants

**Verdict: Contradicted.** What is on the record is partly real: nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century newspapers printed many sensational reports of giant skeletons found in burial mounds, and the mounds themselves are genuine. But the reports were uncorroborated tall tales from a hoax-prone era, no authenticated giant human skeleton has ever been produced, and the anatomy of the human skeleton rules out a thriving race of twelve-foot people. The specific modern cover-up story traces to a 2014 satire article from World News Daily Report, and its keystone, a 1909 Supreme Court case forcing the Smithsonian to confess, does not exist. Meanwhile the institution accused of hiding a lost race is the one that showed, in an 1894 report, that the mounds were built by the ancestors of Native Americans. The claim of a real race of giants suppressed by the Smithsonian is debunked.

Category: Lost History & Ancient Mysteries · Era: Modern · First circulated: The underlying reports of giant skeletons in the mounds run through nineteenth-century American newspapers; the modern Smithsonian cover-up version dates to a 3 December 2014 satire article by World News Daily Report and spread widely from 2015 onward. · Believed by: Fringe alternative-archaeology and ancient-giants communities, some young-earth creationist and Nephilim-focused readers, and a broad social-media audience who met the fabricated story detached from its satirical source.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/smithsonian-giant-skeletons

## Summary
In December 2014 a satirical website published a story claiming the Smithsonian Institution had admitted destroying thousands of giant human skeletons, seven to twelve feet tall, to suppress evidence of a lost race of giants, and that a 1909 U.S. Supreme Court case had forced the confession. The story spread for years as though it were real. Underneath it sits a genuine historical record: nineteenth-century American newspapers did print many sensational reports of giant skeletons found in burial mounds, and those mounds are real. But the newspaper reports were unverified tall tales from a hoax-friendly era, the lost-race explanation was a racist myth the Smithsonian itself dismantled in 1894, and the 1909 court case was simply invented. This file keeps two things apart: what is on the record; and the claim it rates, that a real race of giants existed and the Smithsonian systematically destroyed the evidence. On that claim the verdict is debunked.

## The claim
That a race of unusually large humans (giants of roughly seven to twelve feet or more, often identified with the Nephilim of the Bible) genuinely existed in ancient North America, that their skeletons were repeatedly unearthed from Native American burial mounds, and that the Smithsonian Institution systematically collected and destroyed or hid these remains to suppress the discovery, a cover-up supposedly exposed by a 1909 United States Supreme Court case.

## Origin and timeline
- 1780s-1830s: As white settlers push into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and encounter thousands of earthen mounds, a popular belief takes hold that they were built by a vanished, non-Native lost race, sometimes described as giants. The idea conveniently implies the land's earlier inhabitants were not the ancestors of living Native peoples.
- 1840s-1890s: American newspapers repeatedly print sensational, uncorroborated reports of enormous human skeletons, from seven to twelve feet tall, dug out of burial mounds. The stories are second-hand and rarely verified, but the image of a giant past becomes embedded in popular lore.
- 1869: The Cardiff Giant, a ten-foot carved gypsum figure buried on a farm near Cardiff, New York, is unearthed and exhibited as a petrified prehistoric man before being exposed as a deliberate hoax. It typifies the era's appetite, and gullibility, for giant discoveries.
- 1882: The Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology creates a Division of Mound Exploration under Cyrus Thomas to settle the mound-builder question through systematic field research rather than folklore.
- 1894: Thomas publishes his Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, hundreds of pages concluding from the evidence that the mounds were built by the ancestors of known Native American peoples, not by a lost race and not by giants.
- 1930s: Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian's curator of physical anthropology, examines giant-skeleton claims. The reported giants resolve into hoaxes, misidentified animal or megafauna bones, and plain exaggeration; none yields a measured, preserved specimen.
- 2014-12-03: The satirical site World News Daily Report publishes a story headlined that the Smithsonian had admitted destroying thousands of giant skeletons, inventing an American Institution of Alternative Archeology and a Supreme Court case forcing disclosure. The site carries a disclaimer that its content is fiction.
- 2015-2022: Stripped of its satirical context, the fabricated story spreads across social media and fringe sites as if genuine. Snopes traces it to the satire article; PolitiFact does the same when it resurfaces in 2022; a Smithsonian spokesperson confirms it is untrue.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The Smithsonian destroyed thousands of giant skeletons, and a 1909 U.S. Supreme Court case forced it to admit the cover-up.
  Evidence: There is no such Supreme Court case. Court decisions are public records, indexed and reported; a ruling ordering a national institution to confess to destroying evidence of a lost race would be among the most famous in the country's history. There is no docket, no opinion, and no contemporary coverage. The claim traces to World News Daily Report, a satire site whose disclaimer states its content is fiction, and the American Institution of Alternative Archeology it cites cannot be found anywhere except the article and pages copying it.
- Claim: Nineteenth-century newspapers reported hundreds of giant skeletons, so the discoveries were real.
  Evidence: The clippings are genuine artifacts of their era, but they are not verified finds. They were typically second-hand, sensational, and anonymous, produced in a period that also generated open hoaxes like the 1869 Cardiff Giant. No specimen from these reports was preserved, catalogued, and confirmed by measurement, so the reports document a credulous press, not a race of giants.
- Claim: A lost race of giants built the burial mounds, and mainstream science hid it.
  Evidence: The mound-builder question was settled by the Smithsonian itself, in the opposite direction. Cyrus Thomas's 1894 report attributed the mounds to the ancestors of living Native Americans. That is the reverse of concealment, and the lost-race framing was a racist myth used to deny Native American achievement rather than a suppressed truth.
- Claim: The Smithsonian keeps giant bones locked away and refuses to display them.
  Evidence: No authenticated giant human skeleton exists in any collection, public or private. When curator Ales Hrdlicka examined such claims, they resolved into hoaxes, misidentified bones, and exaggeration. Anatomy also constrains height: because weight rises far faster than bone cross-section as a body scales up, a healthy twelve-foot human could not support its own frame with human bone structure.
- Claim: Institutions do lose and mishandle collections, so a cover-up is plausible.
  Evidence: True in general, but misplacing an artifact is not the same as destroying thousands of them to hide a truth. The specific mechanism claimed here (a Supreme Court order, a secret institute) is fabricated, and there is no catalogue entry, chain of custody, photograph, or measured specimen supporting the existence of the giants in the first place.

## Why people believe it
- The primary artifacts are real and easy to find. Scanned nineteenth-century newspaper clippings reporting giant skeletons, with place names and dates, look like evidence even though they are unverified tall tales. Real mounds plus real clippings make a fabricated conclusion feel documented.
- The Mound Builder myth had deep roots and a shameful appeal. For over a century, white Americans preferred to credit the mounds to a vanished lost race rather than to the Native peoples they were displacing. The giant-cover-up story is a direct descendant of that ready-made narrative.
- It fuses with Biblical belief. Tying the giants to the Nephilim of Genesis gives the claim a scriptural anchor, so a debunking of the archaeology can read as an attack on faith rather than a correction of fact, which makes the belief unusually resistant.
- Distrust of large institutions is easy to tap. The Smithsonian is powerful, federally linked, and authoritative, an ideal stand-in for the establishment. A story about it hiding the truth needs no proof to feel plausible to someone already inclined to distrust official bodies.
- Satire was laundered into news. The modern version came from a joke article dressed as a report, complete with a fake court case and institute. Re-shared without that context, it circulates as sincere reporting.

## Open questions
- Because the alleged remains were never preserved, the particulars of some nineteenth-century accounts cannot be re-examined; the honest note is that unverifiable does not mean real, only that the specific claims can no longer be tested.
- The exact tally of giant-skeleton newspaper reports is not fixed. How many trace to a handful of syndicated, embellished stories versus independent local reports is a question of press history rather than archaeology.
- Why the 2014 fabrication fixed on 1909 and a Supreme Court ruling is unclear. The details are invented, but the choice of specifics that sound authoritative is part of why the story travelled so far.
- Documented medical gigantism is real (individuals over eight feet, driven by pituitary conditions), which keeps a kernel of plausibility alive; the failure is in the leap from rare, frail, well-recorded individuals to a hidden, thriving race of twelve-foot giants.

## Sources
- Did the Smithsonian Destroy Thousands of Giant Human Skeletons?, Snopes (2017): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/smithsonian-giant-skeletons/
- The Smithsonian didn't admit to destroying giant human skeletons. The claim came from a satire site, PolitiFact (2022): https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/nov/03/viral-image/smithsonian-didnt-admit-to-destroying-giant-human/
- Giant human skeletons, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_human_skeletons
- White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest's Mysterious Mound Cities, Smithsonian Magazine (2018): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/white-settlers-buried-truth-about-midwests-mysterious-mound-cities-180968246/
- Busting 13 of the Smithsonian's Most Persistent Myths, Smithsonian Magazine (2016): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/busting-13-of-the-smithsonians-most-persistent-myths-135407460/
- Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution (Cyrus Thomas) (1894): https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/91661
- Mound Builders, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_Builders
- Did the Smithsonian Try to Cover Up Giant Skeletons in West Virginia?, Jason Colavito (2017): https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/did-the-smithsonian-try-to-cover-up-giant-skeletons-in-west-virginia-youll-never-guess-what-the-facts-say

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