No, This Isn’t a Photo of US Troops Shooting Reptilians

What happened

On 10 October 2026, the X account @Skriptkeeper17 shared an image of soldiers firing at reptilian humanoids, along with a narrated video. The post opened with: “This is why they gotta pull the plug on the internet. @grok analyze this picture and listen to the story.” In the video, the narrator says the photo “allegedly supposed to be a actual caption of the Iraq war in early 2000, and this is what they was over there really going against, some damn reptilians.”

Lead Stories reporter Uliana Malashenko published a fact check on 12 October 2026 rating the image fake.

The footage

• @Skriptkeeper17, X, 10 October 2026: the image plus a narrated video clip. The image appears both in the clip’s background and as a separate attachment. Lead Stories archived the post on the Wayback Machine.
• @JinxedHorizon, X, 4 October 2026: the earliest copy Lead Stories found through Google Lens. Its caption begins “A crashed Tic Tac. Dead ‘Grays.’ Seven-foot reptilians still alive. Then US troops opened fire. That’s the story David Grusch says he heard.” This post has since been deleted, and an archived copy survives.
• @JinxedHorizon, X, 7 October 2026: a video of a similar scene. Its description ends: “This is an AI rendering.” It carries the hashtags #AIArt and #Reptoids.
• Joe Rogan Experience #2560 – David Grusch (PowerfulJRE on YouTube, 30 September 2026, 2:30:26). Lead Stories logs the relevant timestamps:
• ≈00:59:20: a “recent” crash
• ≈01:10:10: “reptilian-looking” beings from “retrievals”
• ≈01:16:00: a “Tic Tac-looking” craft
• 02:07:12: the shooting exchange

Timeline

• 26 July 2023: David Grusch testifies before a House Oversight subcommittee about alleged UAP recovery programmes.
• 8 March 2024: AARO publishes Volume I of its historical record report on US government involvement with UAP.
• 30 September 2026: Grusch appears on Joe Rogan Experience #2560.
• 3 October 2026: The New York Post reports on Grusch’s podcast claims.
• 4 October 2026: @JinxedHorizon posts the earliest known copy of the image.
• 7 October 2026: @JinxedHorizon posts a similar video that it labels “an AI rendering”.
• 10 October 2026: @Skriptkeeper17 reposts the image as an Iraq-war “photo”.
• 12 October 2026: Lead Stories publishes its fact check.

What believers claim

The image is said to be a real photo from the early-2000s Iraq war of US soldiers fighting reptilians. Sharers tie it to Grusch’s account of living reptilians shot after a crash.

What the research found

1. The image is AI-generated. Lead Stories tested the older, better-quality copy with three tools. Sightengine put the probability of AI generation at 92% and Hive Moderation at up to 96%. Google’s SynthID detector found its invisible AI watermark in the image.