Hikers didn’t discover Dead Sea Scrolls-esque artifacts in Tennessee

In July 2026, posts appeared online claiming that hikers in Tennessee had found new versions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient documents discovered in a cave near the Dead Sea that contain the oldest known fragments of the Hebrew Bible.

The alleged discovery, if real, would upend centuries of historical and archaeological work, given the presence of languages like Aramaic on the supposed scrolls. Snopes readers contacted us looking for more information about the purported finding.

The story wasn’t real, however.

We found no record of the discovery published by reliable news outlets or academic sources, as would be expected if the finding were real, given its significance.

Instead, it originated from videos posted to various social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube by a creator named Scott Whitehead, who describes his content as parody and satire. Snopes attempted to contact Whitehead for this story, but did not receive a reply. 

On top of the satire label, some of the claim’s phrasing suggested it wasn’t real — the state of Tennessee isn’t known for its jungles (though the Great Smoky Mountains are classified as a temperate rainforest), nor for particularly grand cliff faces, for instance. It would be quite remarkable, though not entirely impossible, that such a dramatic natural feature had never been previously documented by either Native Americans or European colonists. After some digging, we discovered why: The footage shown behind Whitehead’s video was shot at the Pinara archaeological site in southwestern Turkey.

The idea that ancient European or Mesopotamian cultures traveled across the ocean and settled in the Americas is not new. It forms a belief of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and some settlers believed that the cultures who built massive earthworks at sites like Cahokia in Illinois were not Native Americans, but some unknown, “civilized” white race. While the United States is certainly filled with archaeological wonders, decades of research from archaeologists has concluded that the sites are definitively from pre-Columbian cultures who have lived in the Americas for thousands of years. 

Snopes has checked similar satirical claims from Whitehead in the past, including one of a supposed discovery of Roman helmets in North Carolina.

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