Social Media Influencer Claims Space Aliens Helped Egyptians Colonize Kentucky

​Social media user Scott Whitehead made headlines earlier this month when he posted a short video to Facebook and YouTube falsely claiming that Roman helmets had been discovered in North Carolina. Whitehead has 877,000 followers, so his prank, which was posted April 1, spread faster than many social media users were able to process what day it was—prompting an article from Snopes debunking the claim. However, this April Fool’s Day prank is not Whitehead’s only video making outrageous claims about history, and it is distinguished from the others only by how obvious he made the lies. Most of his content is sensational clickbait made up of AI-generated videos, conspiracy theories, and animal videos—much of fake, and all voiced with borderline illiterate narration. And every so often he throws out a false history claim with implications of conspiracy. 

​While the videos are fake, comments on the videos and their spread across social media suggest that many, maybe even most, viewers are unaware that they are fabrications.
 
One of his most popular recent videos—which has more than one million views on YouTube as of this writing—claims that an ancient Egyptian tablet was discovered behind a waterfall in Kentucky shortly after the waterfall sprung into being from the side of a mountain last week. He claimed to have video of an Egyptian treasure chamber behind the waterfall, though it appears to be AI-generated footage. He then shows a picture of a large Egyptian monumental stone tablet, carved with hieroglyphs and several human and divine figures. He calls it a clay tablet and says that was found in the back of the cave; however, the tablet he shows is the Merneptah Stele. It is made of granite and is currently housed in the British Museum.
 
Whitehead, in his characteristically garbled syntax, claims that the writing on it—which is clearly Egyptian hieroglyphs—is “refracted or like a reformed Egyptian,” which gives the game away, since “Reformed Egyptian” is the imaginary language the supposed Nephites used to write the golden tablets Joseph Smith supposedly read to compose the Book of Mormon.
 
Whitehead then claims that the “reformed Egyptian” text gives a complete history of the world and states that the Egyptians met with space aliens who “transposed” them to the Americas. He then repeats the Book of Mormon idea, derived ultimately from the Mound Builder myth, that the original Old World colonizers of the Americas were killed off and replaced by Native Americans, “and that’s why we haven’t heard about it.”

In a podcast interview shared on TikTok, Whitehead states that he grew up Mormon. 
 
Another recent video alleges that scientists discovered a Roman aqueduct running through the “jungles” of Tennessee, a state that does not have a jungle. He illustrates this with what appears to be an AI-generated image of a broken stone path, revealing a round hole running through the center of the stones. Roman aqueducts, needless to say, did not feature pipe holes drilled through miles of stone. Indeed, the AI image does not even match the stolen CGI illustration of aqueduct construction to which he compares it.
 
I’m not sure what Whitehead’s deal is. The videos are poorly produced and not obviously funny, nor are they written carefully enough to serve as serious hoaxes. They don’t seem to be comedy, nor do they seem to promote any obvious product, service, or agenda. He charges $0.99 per month for subscription-level access to his content on Facebook, so I suppose the purpose is to pump out enough bullshit to attract a critical mass of subscribers.
 
Whitehead’s email address is linked to the domain owned by United Talent Agency, which claims to represent the “future of entertainment and media.”
 
If this is the future of media, heaven help us all.