Reptilian Aliens

What is a reptilian alien?

Reptilians are usually described as tall — anywhere from 6 to 9 feet — with green or brown scaly skin, vertical slit pupils, clawed hands and sometimes a tail or a crest. In the close-encounter version they're a rare reported being. In the conspiracy version, popularised by David Icke, they're interdimensional overlords who can shapeshift into human form and have been impersonating world leaders and royalty for centuries.

That second version is the one that went viral — and it's worth being clear from the start that it has no supporting evidence whatsoever, and a great deal arguing against it.

From pulp fiction to UFO lore

The lizard-person idea is older than UFOs. In August 1929 the writer Robert E. Howard — later famous for Conan — published The Shadow Kingdom in Weird Tales, featuring an ancient race of "serpent men" who could disguise themselves as humans and ruled from the shadows. It's often called the first true sword-and-sorcery story, and the hidden-reptile-among-us template was set decades before anyone claimed to have met one.

The word "reptilian" itself got a cultural boost from neuroscience. In the 1960s Paul MacLean proposed the "triune brain," labelling our oldest neural structures the "reptilian complex" — the supposed seat of cold, primal instinct. Neuroscientists now regard the model as a serious oversimplification, but the phrase stuck, and it quietly lent the lizard-alien idea an air of menace and primitivism it didn't earn.

The one documented witness case: Officer Schirmer (1967)

If you set the conspiracy theory aside and look for an actual reported encounter with reptilian-featured beings, you find essentially one case of note. On 3 December 1967, 22-year-old patrolman Herbert Schirmer logged a strange object on a road near Ashland, Nebraska, and noted around twenty minutes of missing time.

Invited to the Air Force-funded Condon Committee in 1968, Schirmer was hypnotised by the psychologist Dr Leo Sprinkle and described uniformed humanoids with grey-white skin, cat-like eyes and a winged-serpent emblem on the chest. That detail surfaced under hypnosis rather than in his original report — an important caveat — and the Condon investigators were careful to record that they had "no confidence" the experience was physically real. Some of what emerged, like the beings claiming an off-world origin, is exactly the sort of thing sceptics point to.

And yet the bare facts have never been explained away: a young patrolman with a clean record, a logged sighting, around twenty minutes of missing time, and an account he never recanted in the decades that followed. Whether something real happened on that road near Ashland, or the hypnosis assembled a story from an ordinary scare, is a question the original investigators couldn't settle — and neither can we. It's the best-documented reptilian-type encounter on record, and it has stayed open for nearly sixty years.

David Icke and the shapeshifter theory

The reptilian most people know comes from one man. In his 1999 book The Biggest Secret, the British former sports presenter David Icke claimed that shapeshifting reptilian beings from the Draco constellation secretly control humanity, impersonating politicians, bankers and royalty. The theory has no evidence behind it, and the central claim runs straight into basic physics: shifting between a human body and a much larger reptilian one would violate the conservation of mass, and no biological mechanism for anything like it has ever been observed or proposed.

There's a more serious problem, too. The political scientist Michael Barkun, in his study A Culture of Conspiracy (University of California Press, 2003), documented that Icke's reptilian narrative draws on and recycles older antisemitic conspiracy material — including content traceable to the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with "reptilians" or "the Illuminati" standing in for the original target. That's not a rhetorical insult; it's a documented scholarly finding about where the story's structure comes from, and it's the main reason researchers treat this particular theory as more than just harmless fringe entertainment.

So are reptilian aliens real?

It depends entirely on which reptilian you mean. The shapeshifting-rulers version is the easy call: no evidence, physically impossible, and — as the scholarship shows — a modern reworking of a very old and toxic conspiracy theory. That one isn't an open question, and this page won't pretend it is.

The witness side is genuinely different. Strip the conspiracy away and you're left with the Schirmer encounter — one strange night, recovered under hypnosis, that the original investigators could neither confirm nor explain. There's no artefact and no body, so it stays unproven. But "unproven" is not the same as "didn't happen," and a sincere officer's missing time has kept thoughtful people turning the case over for decades.

Above all of it sits the bigger question: whether anything genuinely unexplained shares our skies. That one is wide open — Congress and the Pentagon's own AARO office now treat it seriously, even though AARO reported in March 2024 that it had found no evidence of held non-human craft or remains. So the reptilian is part fiction, part unsolved puzzle, and part cautionary tale about where a story can come from. Which parts you weigh most heavily is for you to decide.

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