The Reptilian Conspiracy Theory: Where the Lizard People Came From

ARCHIVE FILE · Theory explainer. Key dates: 1888, 1903, 1921, 1929, 1940s, 1994, 1999, 2013, 2019, 2022. This is not breaking news. It’s part of the Redacted Weekly evergreen archive. We explain conspiracy theories; we don’t endorse them.

What happened

“Lizard people” is the conspiracy theory most people bring up as a joke. Its history isn’t one. It starts in pulp fiction, passes through occultism, became famous through a former BBC sportscaster, and has been documented by scholars as a vehicle for one of the oldest antisemitic hoaxes there is.

According to political scientist Michael Barkun of Syracuse University, whose book A Culture of Conspiracy (2003) is the standard scholarly account, the idea begins in fiction. In his 1929 story “The Shadow Kingdom,” Conan creator Robert E. Howard wrote about “serpent men” with human bodies and snake heads who could imitate humans at will and lived in underground passages. Howard drew on Theosophy, in particular Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888), with its reference to “‘dragon-men’ who once had a mighty civilization on a Lemurian continent,” as summarized in Wikipedia’s sourced article.

In the 1940s, the American occultist Maurice Doreal (also known as Claude Doggins) wrote a pamphlet, “Mysteries of the Gobi,” describing a “serpent race” able to take human form. Barkun argues that “in all likelihood” Doreal took the idea from Howard’s story.

The modern version belongs to David Icke. He was a BBC sports broadcaster until 1990 and briefly a national spokesperson for the UK Green Party. In 1991 he announced on the BBC show Wogan that he was a “Son of the Godhead,” which earned him public ridicule. He kept writing, and in 1999 he published The Biggest Secret.

The footage

The “evidence” for this theory is almost entirely video: clips of public figures whose eyes seem to turn to slits or whose skin seems to flicker. We’re not embedding them. They’re compression and interlacing artifacts on low-bitrate video, and embedding them spreads the claim.

The best-documented example is a clip of a U.S. Secret Service agent guarding a speech by President Barack Obama, spotlighted in a Wired report on 4 March 2013, per Wikipedia. The White House answered with a joke. National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said “any alleged program to guard the president with aliens or robots would likely have to be scaled back or eliminated in the sequester.” The original uploader and length of that clip are not documented in the sources used here.

Timeline

• 1888: Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine mentions “dragon-men.”
• 1903: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is first published in Imperial Russia.
• 1921: The Times of London exposes the Protocols as a forgery; the Frankfurter Zeitung follows in 1924.
• 1929: Howard publishes “The Shadow Kingdom.”
• 1940s: Doreal’s “Mysteries of the Gobi” pamphlet.
• 1991: Milton William Cooper publishes Behold a Pale Horse, which reproduces the Protocols in its chapter 15. Icke appears on Wogan.
• 1994–1995: Icke’s The Robots’ Rebellion and And the Truth Shall Set You Free endorse the Protocols.
• 1999: Icke’s The Biggest Secret introduces the reptilians.
• 27–30 March 2013: Public Policy Polling puts the reptilian question to U.S. voters.
• 20 February 2019: Australia cancels Icke’s visa ahead of a speaking tour.
• 3–4 November 2022: The Netherlands bars Icke for two years, which also bars him from the Schengen Area.

What witnesses reported

There are no witnesses to reptilians, only claims. These are claims, not facts:

• Tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system live in underground bases.
• These beings, or human-reptile “hybrids,” secretly run the world’s governments, banks and media.
• Most of the world’s ancient and modern leaders are related to them.
• Video glitches showing “slit eyes” or “flickering skin” on public figures prove it.

We won’t repeat the “bloodline” lists. They are the trope.

What the research found

The poll is real, and small. The Public Policy Polling release and its full results PDF show the survey asked 1,247 registered voters, from 27 to 30 March 2013, whether “shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies.” Four percent said yes, 88% said no and 7% were not sure, with a margin of error of ±2.8 points. PPP president Dean Debnam said: “But most Americans reject the wackier ideas out there about fake moon landings and shape-shifting lizards.”