The motto is carved into the institution

itself for the increase and diffusion of

knowledge. That’s the founding mandate

of the Smithsonian Institution signed

into law by President James K. Pulk on

August the 10th, 1846. Funded entirely

by the estate of a British scientist

named James Smithson who never once set

foot in America. A man who left his

entire fortune to a country he’d never

visited so it could build a temple

dedicated to one thing. Knowledge. The

preservation of it. the sharing of it,

the protection of it for all of

humanity. I want you to hold that phrase

in your mind, the increase and diffusion

of knowledge, because everything I’m

about to show you is a direct

contradiction of those seven words. I’ve

spent the last several weeks following

the trail I uncovered in my last

investigation. The giant skeletons

reported in newspapers across America

throughout the 1800s.

Hundreds of accounts, mainstream

publications, credible sources, all

describing the same thing. Bones of

extraordinary size unearthed from mounds

and burial sites from Ohio to

California. And every single account

ends the same way. The remains were sent

to the Smithsonian Institution for

further study. That sentence, that exact

sentence, it appears in report after

report after report. And it’s always the

last line, always. Because after the

bones arrive in Washington, the story

stops. No follow-up study published, no

findings released, no display mounted,

just silence. [snorts] So, I started

asking a very simple question. What

happened when the bones got there? And

the answer I found is worse than

anything I expected. Not because of what

the Smithsonian did, but because of the

system they built to make sure no one

could ever prove it. Let me start with

something most people don’t know. The

Smithsonian today holds over 157 million

items in its collections. That number is

real, verified, published on their own

website. But here’s what they mention

quietly and hope you don’t think about

too carefully. Only about 1% of that

collection is on display at any given

time. 1%. That means over 105 million

objects sit in storage facilities,

vaults, climate controlled warehouses,

and restricted archive rooms that the

public has never seen and likely never

will. The largest of these is the museum

support center in Sutland, Maryland.

Five massive buildings they call pods,

each roughly the size of a three-story

football field. 435,000

square ft of storage containing 54

million items. The Department of

Anthropology collections are housed

there. The National Anthropological

Archives are housed there. The Human

Studies Film Archives are housed there.

It is not open to the public. Access to

the biological anthropology collections

requires a special human remains

research approval form submitted at

least 90 days in advance and subject to

additional review and approvals beyond

the standard process. Restricted access

layered inside restricted access.

And here’s the detail that stopped me

cold. The Smithsonian Institution is not

subject to the Freedom of Information

Act. It is technically classified as a

trust instrumentality of the United

States, not a federal agency. You cannot

file a foyer request with the

Smithsonian. They operate under their

own internal disclosure policy,

Smithsonian Directive 87, which means

the Smithsonian decides what the

Smithsonian releases. They are the

gatekeeper and the gate, the judge and

the evidence locker. and they have been

for nearly 180 years

now. Let me take you back to January 24,

1865. A bitter cold afternoon in

Washington. Joseph Henry, the first

secretary of the Smithsonian, is working

in his second floor office inside the

iconic castle building on the National

Mall. He hears a crackling above his

head. Within minutes, the building is

engulfed. A stove pipe had been inserted

into a wall cavity instead of a flu days

earlier. Embers had been smoldering

inside the walls undetected. When the

fire finally broke through, it consumed

the picture gallery, the apparatus room,

the lecture hall, the regent’s room, and

Henry’s entire office. Destroyed in

hours were over 200 irreplaceable oil

paintings of Native American leaders by

artist John Mick Stanley. All of James

Smithson’s personal effects, his

manuscripts, his minerals, his

scientific notes gone. Nearly 100,000

letters and reports documenting the

institution’s first two decades of

research, every piece of founding

correspondence, every early intake

record, every collection log from 1846

to 1865, all of it ash. The New York

Times called it a national calamity. And

I want you to understand why this

matters for everything that comes next.

When researchers today ask the

Smithsonian to account for specific

items received during those first 19

years, the answer is always the same. We

have no records, not because they were

never created, because they burned. In a

building dedicated to the preservation

of knowledge, the foundational records

of that knowledge were destroyed. And

there is no independent way to verify

what walked through those doors and what

didn’t during the Smithsonian’s most

formative years. But the real story

begins in 1879 when Congress creates the

Bureau of Ethnology within the

Smithsonian and appoints a man named

John Wesley Powell as its director.

Powell was a Civil War veteran who lost

his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh.

He was famous for leading the first

expedition down the Colorado River

through the Grand Canyon. He was

brilliant, ambitious, politically

connected, and he had a very specific

vision of what American history was

supposed to look like. In 1882, Congress

gave power 5,000 and a direct mandate.

Investigate the mound builders.

Thousands of massive earthwork

structures stretched across the eastern

United States from the Great Lakes to

the Gulf of Mexico. Enormous burial

mounds, some containing chambers,

vaults, artifacts of copper and mica,

and unknown alloys. And inside many of

them, bones. Bones that didn’t match

anything in the established record. The

American public was captivated. Who

built these structures? What

civilization existed here before? What

happened to them?

Pal’s answer was decided before the

investigation began. He appointed a man

named Cyrus Thomas to lead the division

of mound exploration. Thomas was an

entomologist, a bug specialist, not an

archaeologist, not an anthropologist. A

man who studied insects given authority

over the most significant archaeological

question in American history. Thomas

spent 12 years on the project and

published his conclusions in 1894.

Over 700 pages that said exactly what

Powell wanted them to say. Native

Americans built the mounds. No lost

civilization. No anomalous remains. No

further questions necessary. Case

closed. But Pal didn’t just close the

case on the mounds. He closed the door

on an entire category of inquiry. He

issued directives through the bureau

declaring that no anthropological

research should consider theories of

lost tribes or pre-Colombian contact

with other civilizations. He wrote that

any pictographic or artifactual evidence

from before Columbus was, and this is

his word, illegitimate for historical

purposes. Think about what that means.

The director of the Smithsonian’s

anthropology division declared that

evidence predating a specific date was

inadmissible, not because it was

examined and found lacking, because it

was categorically excluded from

consideration. He didn’t investigate and

find nothing. He decided what the

conclusion would be and then constructed

the investigation to confirm it. And the

Bureau of Ethnology under his authority

actively encouraged people across the

country to send their mound discoveries

to Washington. This was official

Smithsonian policy. dig something up,

ship it to us, we’ll study it." So they

did. Farmers, railroad workers,

construction crews, local historians,

they boxed up bones and artifacts and

sent them east. The Smithsonian’s own

1883 field team, led by professors

Norris and Thomas, excavated 50 mounds

in West Virginia and documented in their

own report a skeleton measuring 7 1/2 ft

tall adorned with heavy copper

bracelets. They found a circle of 10

skeletons surrounding another oversized

skeleton inside a burial chamber. They

cataloged underground vaults containing

copper ornaments, micer ceremonial

objects. These details appear in the

Bureau of Ethnology’s own annual

reports, except here’s what I found when

I compared early editions to later

printings. The size descriptions were

edited. References to unusual dimensions

were softened or removed entirely. The

same report published by the same

institution told a different story

depending on when you read it. The early

version documents something

extraordinary. The later version makes

it ordinary. Same data, different

narrative. Then in 1903, the Smithsonian

hired the man who would become the most

consequential gatekeeper in American

archaeological history, Alles Hordicker,

curator of physical anthropology.

a position he would hold for nearly four

decades until 1941. Herdicker’s

institutional policy was absolute. There

was no race of giants. There never had

been. Every report of oversized skeletal

remains was the product of amateur error

and public credility. His standard

explanation was that untrained people

measured thigh bones incorrectly,

holding the femur against the outside of

the leg without accounting for the hip

socket, and therefore overestimated

height by several inches. a reasonable

critique in isolation. But Herdlicker

didn’t apply reasonable critique. He

applied blanket dismissal. Hundreds of

documented reports from dozens of states

spanning half a century, all waved away

with a single explanation. And the bones

themselves already in the Smithsonian’s

possession, already beyond public

access, already filed in the restricted

collections that Hericker himself

oversaw. But here’s what makes this so

much darker than simple academic

stubbornness. In 2023, the Washington

Post published a major investigation

into Hoodlicker’s legacy. What they

uncovered should disturb anyone who

trusts the Smithsonian’s historical

judgment. Hoodlicker was an active

proponent of eugenics. He believed in

the biological superiority of white

Europeans. Under his direction, the

Smithsonian amassed over 30,700

human body parts, including 255 brains,

most collected without the consent of

the individuals or their families. He

traveled repeatedly to Kodiak Island in

Alaska where he paid Aluti children 10

cents each to dig up human bones from

indigenous graves. He shipped over

thousand sets of remains from a single

community back to Washington. In August

of 2023, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie

Bunch publicly apologized for what he

called abhorrent and dehumanizing work

carried out under the Smithsonian’s

name. This is the man who decided which

bones were real and which were mistakes.

This is the man who determined what was

anomalous and what was normal for four

consecutive decades. A man whose racial

theories have been formally discredited,

whose collection methods have been

officially condemned, whose ethical

standards were so bankrupt that his own

institution had to issue a public

apology over a century later. And yet

his conclusions about anomalous skeletal

remains, his blanket denial, his

categorical dismissal of hundreds of

documented findings that still stands as

the Smithsonian’s official position. No

one has revisited it. No one has

reopened the files. No one has pulled

the bones from the restricted pods in

Sutland and measured them again with

modern equipment and unbiased eyes. I

want to be honest about something here

because credibility matters more than

spectacle. In 2014, a satirical website

published a fake article claiming the

Smithsonian admitted to destroying

thousands of giant skeletons and that

the Supreme Court forced them to release

classified documents. It was fiction,

complete fabrication from a site that

publishes madeup stories for clicks. But

it went viral. Millions of people shared

it as fact. And it did something

incredibly effective, whether

intentionally or not. It poisoned the

well. Now, anyone who raises legitimate

questions about the Smithsonian’s

handling of anomalous remains gets

associated with a debunked internet

hoax. The fake story became a shield.

You can’t ask real questions because

someone once asked fake ones. And I’ll

concede something else. 19th century

newspapers exaggerated. Yellow

journalism was rampant in the 1880s and

1890s. Not every giant skeleton report

should be taken as gospel. Some were

likely hoaxes. Some were misidentified

animal bones. Some were genuine

measurement errors exactly as Herdlicker

described. But that’s not the question.

The question isn’t whether every single

report was accurate. The question is why

the Smithsonian’s own field teams

documented unusual remains in official

reports and then those descriptions were

altered in subsequent publications. The

question is why prior to 1990, the

Smithsonian collected over 18,000 Native

American skeletal remains and still

holds approximately 10,000 today, stored

in facilities the public cannot access,

cataloged under systems the public

cannot search, gov, earned by disclosure

policies the public cannot challenge.

The question is why the institution that

holds the evidence also controls who

examines the evidence under rules. It

writes and enforces itself. Here’s the

timeline that keeps me awake. 1879,

Powell takes control of the Bureau of

Ethnology. 1882, the Mound Survey begins

with its conclusion already written.

1894, Cyrus Thomas publishes 700 pages,

confirming what Pal decided 12 years

earlier. 1903, hard liquor takes over

physical anthropology and institutes a

policy of categorical denial. By the

1920s, newspaper reports of anomalous

skeletal discoveries stop entirely. Not

because the discovery stopped, because

the reporting stopped, because the

pipeline had been perfected. Bones flow

in, silence flows out, discoveries enter

the institution and never emerge as

published findings. The public loses

interest because there’s nothing new to

report. And the collections grow quietly

in climate controlled darkness curated

by gatekeepers who answer to no external

authority. The same decades, the same

pattern I keep finding no matter which

thread I pull. Maps redrawn,

encyclopedias rewritten, physical

evidence collected and locked away by an

institution that was founded, literally

carved in stone to increase and diffuse

knowledge. So where did the knowledge

go? What’s in the 155 million items the

public has never seen? What did Herd

Licker’s team catalog and file in the

anthropology collections that no

independent researcher has examined

since? What’s in the restricted pods in

Sutland behind the 90-day approval

process and the additional review

requirements and the internal disclosure

policies and the foyer exemption that

makes the Smithsonian answerable to no

one but itself. I’m not claiming secret

vaults of forbidden artifacts. I’m

describing something worse. A system

where the institution that controls the

evidence also controls who sees it, who

studies it, who publishes on it, and

what conclusions are acceptable. That’s

not conspiracy. That’s institutional

architecture built over 80 years and

maintained through bureaucratic inertia

and professional gatekeeping. And when

you ask about it, when you point to the

edited reports, the missing specimens,

the restricted collections, the

ethically disgraced curator whose

conclusions still define the official

record, the answer is always the same.

Trust us, we’re the experts. Stop

asking. The Smithsonian was built to

increase and diffuse knowledge. But

somewhere between the founding and now,

between the castle fire and the pods in

Sutland, between Powell’s predetermined

conclusions and Herdlicker’s blanket

denials, the mission reversed. Knowledge

flowed in. And it never flowed back out.

The buildings remember, even if we

don’t. And somewhere in Sutland,

Maryland, in a climate control facility

the size of three football fields, the

bones remember, too. They’re just not

allowed to