Was Viking ship discovered in Mississippi River? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

Internet stories claim a Viking ship was discovered near the Mississippi River.

FALSE

This reoccurring story often appears online, circulated prolifically across social media, and it actually traces back to 2014, when spoof news website WorldNewsDailyReport.com penned an article claiming that a Viking ship (or rather, its remains) were unearthed on the banks of the Mississippi.

But for those inclined to believe such a tale, it’s worth noting that WorldNewsDailyReport.com publishes exclusively spoof news. The original article reads in part –

A group of volunteers cleaning up the shores of the Mississippi River near the biggest city in Tennessee have stumbled upon the remains of an ancient boat encrusted in mud.
A team of archeologists from the University of Memphis that was rapidly called to the site, confirmed that the ship is most certainly a Viking Knarr, suggesting the Norse would have pushed their exploration of America a lot further than historians previously thought.

There has been no Viking ship discovery in the Mississippi. The image used to illustrate the original WorldNewsDailyReport article was actually a 1997 discovery in Roskilde in Denmark.

The WorldNewsDailyReport.com website has a disclaimer that reads –

World News Daily Report is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. All news articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fiction, and presumably fake news.

As such, the story is false.

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