David Icke
David Icke (born April 29, 1952) is a British former footballer and football commentator, now better known as a controversial writer and conspiracy theorist.
He was born in the city of Leicester in the English Midlands, into what he calls a "working class" family. Having wanted to be a professional footballer for quite some time, he left school to play for Coventry City and Hereford United in the English league, where he played as a goalkeeper.
His football career was brought to a premature end by rheumatoid arthritis, at which point he joined the BBC. He became fairly well known as a sports broadcaster in this period.
After leaving the BBC he became an activist for the Green Party rising swiftly to become their media spokesperson. He left the Green party in 1991 and began to express unconventional views. He began to wear only turquoise and in different interviews claimed that he was God or the son of God. In an interview on the Terry Wogan show in 1991 his announcement that he was "a son of the Godhead" and that Britain would be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes was met with laughter from the studio audience, derision in the press and suggestions that he was mentally ill. In a more general sense, his supporters note that he described all humans as 'children of God' or of some sort of god, and that the confusion resulted from his scrambling to explain his spiritual 'apotheosis'. After being widely derided and ridiculed, he disappeared from public view for a short time.
He returned to the limelight in the late 1990s with a book, The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World. In it he claimed to have discovered that the world was being run by a New World Order, controlled by a race of reptilian humanoids or reptiloid aliens (he does not state what exactly they are, only giving possible explanations). According to Icke, some of these aliens change from reptilian and human form, and he has even drawn parallels with the 1980s science fiction series V, in which Earth is taken over by reptiloid aliens disguised as humans.
The group, known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, implicates practically every world leader as either a reptilian, or working for them (he suggests that they are slave-like victims of multiple personality disorder). The evidence for this is often considered absurd by non-adherents; for instance, his apparent claim that the car-rental company Avis is a front for the Brotherhood because Avis spelled backwards is Siva, a member of the Hindu pantheon. However, his supporters tend to concentrate on the volume of other evidence he presents, such as the recurrence of the reptilian archetype in myths worldwide.
For example, the Ancient Sumerians worshipped apparently reptilian gods called the Anunnaki, and the Ancient Maya of Mexico claim that all their knowledge of the heavens came from their god of wisdom and astrology, Kukulcan, sometimes depicted in Maya art as a reptilian humanoid with a crest of feathers on his head (this god later became the Aztec god, the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl). The ancient Egyptians believed that the sun was swallowed by a snake in the evening and traveled through its bowels at night to return the next morning. Snake worshipping is also done by some Christian sects.
Icke links all of his data, both from mainstream sources, and from speculation, together into a set of grand conspiracy theories. The sheer volume of his writings, and the interconnectedness of his ideas, are enough to convince many of his supporters that "something must be going on". They regard skeptics as being either ill-informed or as stooges of the conspiracy.
Some anti-racist activists in the Western world have decried Icke's theories as being anti-semitic, saying that when he speaks of reptiles he is speaking of Jews. However, Icke has denied those allegations. He maintains that the reptilians are not humans of any race, but are extradimensional entities that enter and control human minds. He also says that what he calls the "white race" (those with blue eyes in particular) are most susceptible to reptilian influence.
He has since published a number of additional books following this theme at various levels of detail, the first being too large to be read by most casual readers. His latest work continues in this thread, an attempt to explain the September 11, 2001 attacks as being a part of this reptile-led conspiracy, with the reptiloid George W. Bush playing the key role. (See also Bush family conspiracy theory.)