Rep. Eric Burlinson Wants to Find the Smithsonian's Bones of Bible Giants

UFO-believing Christian congressman Eric Burlinson (R-Mo.) suggested that as a member of the House Oversight Committee, he could open an investigation into claims that the Smithsonian is hiding the bones of Bible giants. Burlinson, who spoke about his belief in Nephilim at a Nephilim conference this summer, credited Christian podcaster and gigantologist Timothy Alberino with radicalizing him to believe in the giant bone conspiracy, a popular but false belief among evangelical Christian extremists who oppose the evolutionary theory.

"I do believe [giants] were real," Burlinson said on a Blaze network show earlier this summer.

Regular readers will remember that the conspiracy theory about a Smithsonian cover-up appears to have originated with Ancient Aliens star David Childress, who accused the Smithsonian of covering up the lost white race of giant Mound Builders in a 1993 article. Childress's ideas were popularized by figures on both the far left and the far right, including Native activist Vine Deloria and reactionary creationist Ross Hamilton. 

Ultimately, the claims rested on a series of old newspaper reports claiming that the bones of giants had been dug up in some part of the country and sent to the Smithsonian, which claims to have no Bible giant bones. As Ales Hrdlička, the former head of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, told Science News Letter in 1934, such stories reflected locals measuring bones incorrectly or mistaking mammoth and mastodon bones for those of human giants. When they arrived at the Smithsonian, they were correctly cataloged for what they were, not what believers imagined them to be.

I have covered this claim so many times (including in my study The Mound Builder Myth [2020]), and it is depressing that an idiotic conspiracy theory made from fabricated evidence and mythology is now yet another bit of fake science and conspiracy theory polluting Congress thanks to grifters who profit from bad research and false claims. And with the Trump Administration vowing to bring the Smithsonian's content in line with the president's vision of history, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that Mound Builder conspiracies could one day return to the Smithsonian, more than 130 years after they were scientifically disproved by the Smithsonian itself.