Of all the strange conspiracy theories that bedevil our time – the idea that we’re being ruled by lizard people has to be the oddest.

An article in The Atlantic in 2013 estimated that 12 million people in the United States believe that lizard people run their country. That’s small beer compared to the 66 million who think that aliens landed at Roswell in 1948. But it’s still a very significant number.

Lizard people and David Icke

Conspiracy theorist David Icke has been a leading proponent of the idea that reptiles have gained access to the levers of power. The Icke sympathetic ufochick.com site explains how lizards can take over human bodies with compatible DNA.

They have apparently been doing this for centuries targeting people in positions of power – who then intermarry to preserve the reptilian bloodline.

Apparently, lizards might also go for humans who “live in a state of negativity, fear, anger, violence, aggression and or abuse of drugs or sex”. A form of invisible grooming takes place to lower the individual’s guard.

This allows the lizard to “hop into the human energy field” manipulating the subject’s emotional state to change their “vibrational energy”, which allows the lizard to mount a full takeover.

Lizard people – aliens breeding with humans!

Lizard people theorists seem keen to emphasise that they are not talking about shape shifting. It’s something way more subtle and long established. Icke claims that reptiles came from the constellations of Orion, Sirius and Draco and interbred with humans long ago – though not physically. They did it by altering human DNA.

Basically, to put it crudely, there’s a bit of lizard in all our brains but not all of us have embraced our inner reptile. You can tell those who have by certain traits such as eye colour, scars, mannerisms, etc.

Anyway, that’s the theory in a nutshell.  There are, needless to say, some famous lizards in human guise. Queen Elizabeth II is one. Several US presidents. Global corporate executives. And…of course….the Illuminati and Freemasons.

Lizard people in history

Reptiles as super-powerful people and deities is a recurring theme in many mythologies throughout history.  For example, Kekrops – the founder of the city of Athens – was reputedly half-man and half-snake. He established the cult of the goddess Athena and dedicated her shrine on the Acropolis.

Another half-man, half-snake was Fu Xi, the first mythological emperor of China. He was also the creator of mankind. After a huge flood, Fu Xi and his wife Nu Wa – who were brother and sister – married and repopulated the planet. Both had snake bodies.

The name of Fu Xi’s wife Nu Wa is similar to Noah and some have wondered whether the flood story was shared between China and the Hebrews. Anyway, the bit that should interest us is that this couple, our common ancestors, were 50% reptile. And the idea of reptile gods recurs in many cultures from the ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs.

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Madame Blavatsky and her theory on lizard people

In the 19th century, the mystic Elena Petrovna Blavatsky – known commonly as “Madame Blavatsky” – claimed knowledge of a long lost land called Lemuria. The Lemurian culture had existed 14,000 years ago and the Lemurian people were a race that could lay eggs, had psychic powers and were bisexual. They were wiped out by a huge catastrophe that also engulfed Atlantis.

In 1983, the notion of reptiles from another galaxy coming to Earth and taking over humans was popularised in the science fiction series V.  The “visitors” claim to come in peace but a small band of plucky humans see through their lies and heroically resist. V was remade in 2009 though failed to make the same impact the original series did in the 1980s.

Social media has heralded a revival in lizard people theory

Today, largely thanks to social media, we are witnessing a surge in the belief that lizard people run our society. A few years ago, I found myself arguing with somebody convinced that a well known celebrity was a lizard because their eyes flickered “unnaturally” in a YouTube video. I tried to explain the concept of pixelation but got nowhere.

I can only conjecture that as people feel less in control of their surroundings and lives, theories that claim alien reptiles are running the show seem increasingly plausible.