The Super-Weird Origins of the Right’s Hatred of the Smithsonian

The year-long media and political firestorm, and the attacks on historians as unpatriotic fantasists, helped fuel the politicization of the Smithsonian, but they did so in tandem with a development occurring on the nascent internet.

A year before the Enola Gay controversy, in 1993, future Ancient Aliens star David Childress, then a self-described “world explorer,” introduced the world to his new conspiracy theory, that the Smithsonian was actively trying to suppress the “truth” about various lost races of white giants, ancient Egyptians, and assorted what-have-you that allegedly occupied prehistoric America. He wrote about this in his self-published magazine, World Explorer, and in the New Age Nexus New Times that year. He dubbed the conspiracy with the not-so-original moniker “Smithsonian Gate.”

Childress gathered a passel of unconvincing evidence and wrapped it up in a sort of homage to the 1981 Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, whose final scene showed the U.S. government secreting away the fabled Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse, never to be seen again. “To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups,” he wrote, “there are disturbing indications that the most important archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institute [sic], an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.”