Inside the Great Reptilian Conspiracy

Inside the Great Reptilian Conspiracy: From Queen Elizabeth to Barack Obama -- They Live!

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A look at one of the more fascinating alternate universes of belief.
September 1, 2010

Early on a mid-October afternoon in 2009, news broke that 6-year-old Falcon Heene was lost somewhere in the air as high as 7,000 feet, riding an experimental 20-foot Mylar helium balloon that had taken off from his family's backyard in Fort Collins, Colorado. Falcon's father, Richard, a self-described "science detective" and meteorologist, was in the early phase of building what he called a "3D low-altitude vehicle." While Richard was apparently elsewhere, one of Falcon's brothers alleged that he witnessed Falcon untie the balloon, and that it had taken off into the sky. The parents first called a local Denver news station; then they called 911. A child hunt ensued. Police and rescue personnel were sent flying down dirt roads to find the balloon. National Guard scrambled two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters to assist search operations.

Five hours into the search, it emerged that Falcon was never aboard the balloon. He had apparently been hiding in a cardboard box in the rafters of the Heene family garage. A missing child story was now an amateur hoax story.

Reporters digging into the Balloon Boy scandal found that the parents were failed actors and serial publicity hounds, with thousands in tax liens filed against the husband in connection with a failed film company. Eventually, footage surfaced from the family's two appearances on the ABC network's role-reversing reality series Wife Swap, exposing Richard Heene's penchant for "looking for extraterrestrials." Anger over the deception suddenly gained a layer of ridicule in the media.

Even as the balloon hoax and the surrounding family drama continued to dominate the news, few mainstream outlets pursued the details about the Heene's eccentric interests and beliefs. For example, the New York Times mentioned in the 13th paragraph of one article that Richard had made a YouTube video in which he wondered whether Hillary Rodham Clinton was a "reptilian." The UK's Daily Telegraph went a little further, quoting Heene from the same video at more length:

In a bizarre YouTube posting from January 2008 Mr Heene is seen sitting on a sofa with his dog and making strange comments about Mrs Clinton. He says: "Fake or real? I want to know, is Hillary Clinton a reptilian? I see all these videos about Hillary Clinton, her fingers are growing, her face is moving, there all these things going on over here. It looks like CGI to me. "I mean, here's my dog right here. Could this dog possibly shape-shift into me?" He then takes his dog's head and puts it in front of his own, manipulating it with his hands. "No, I don't think so," he tells the camera. "But if you've got some real footage I want to see it. Fake or real?"

Without further explanation, the Telegraph article transitioned to a scathing critique of a YouTube rap video made by Richard Heene's three sons. Had the New York Times or the Telegraph delved deeper, they would have discovered that Richard Heene was demonstrating his intimacy with one of the modern world's most peculiar and elaborate conspiracy theories.

"[Heene] was motivated," his former assistant wrote in a tell-all a few days after the Balloon Boy hoax, by "the idea there are alien beings that walk among us and are shape shifters, able to resemble human beings and running the upper echelon of our government. Somehow a secret government has covered all this up since the U.S. was established, and the only way to get the truth out there was to use the mainstream media to raise Richard to a status of celebrity, so he could communicate with the masses."

Richard Heene, it turned out, wanted more than 15 minutes of fame. He had an important message for the world -- about Lizards and the New World Order. He is far from alone.

Tip Of the Iceberg

Richard Heene is one of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who adhere to an overlapping series of modern-day conspiracy theories sharing a central thesis: Lizard-like aliens from outer space inhabit human bodies and control the human race.

Videos similar to the footage of the "reptilian" Hillary Clinton that Heene referred to number in the hundreds on YouTube. They join part of a much larger body of thousands of videos uploaded by conspiracy theorists in the reptilian circle that purportedly show proof of live, on-camera, human shape-shifting from human to lizard form. The videos typically feature news interviews with national political figures like Hillary, Queen Elizabeth II or George H.W. Bush, or segments from TV news broadcasts. Some of the footage is doctored to place lizard-like slitted pupils in the eyes of political elites, or is slowed down to mutate the voice of the speaker and enhance the semblance of a lizard-like hiss emanating from the mouth of, say, a local TV news woman's tendency to sustain the "S" in plural nouns.

Amateur reptile video detectives can find lizard traces almost anywhere. Here's one lizard sleuth's account of discovering a shape-shifting event while watching WWE Smackdown posted on AboveTopSecret.com:

I'm not a fan of wrestling, but I turned the TV on preparing to watch a movie I'd gotten & started watching the WWE Smackdown. What caught my attention was that the announcer was saying that [the wrestling character known as] The Undertaker had been found in a vegetative state under suspicious circumstances. So, I kept watching & looking for symbolism like I tend to do, but I got more than I bargained for This ritual is then turned over to [The Undertaker's] luciferian brother Kane speaking about avenging his death. At the 8:30 mark, keep an eye on his neck & his eyes as the camera closes in on his face. When his neck (towards the back) starts to bulge, he starts to laugh, then pay closer attention to his eyes. I swear they morph into slitted pupils. The 10 minute video is the exact drama I watched unfold on TV. I found the video of it online just now & I haven't edited anything, nor would I. To those of you who are familiar with my posts, I'm not an IT professional & wouldn't know where to begin.

The most "damning" footage for reptilian conspiracy theorists, the kind that inspired Heene to wonder about Hillary Clinton, comes from direct recordings of satellite cable TV in which a reception snafu briefly distorts the broadcast of the picture. In Heene's interrupted transmission video, for example, Clinton's face turns gray, her eyeballs pixelate, and it briefly appears that she's literally melting on screen. This is gold for the reptilian researchers, who can present the recording of the footage without doctoring -- all it takes to believe that Hillary Clinton's face has transformed into that of a lizard live on national television is the refusal to recognize that mundane tech errors do happen in TV broadcasts. Debates rage over each video, with some believers complaining about planted fraudulent videos that "discredit the truth of these shape-shifting reptilians."

* * *

Long before the days of YouTube, long before the dawn of our civilization, buried deep in mythology and ancient imagination is the notion of shape-shifting -- humans and gods inhabiting different animal or spiritual forms in the real world. Equally ancient is the human belief in the correlation of world events with the patterns of the cosmos, the desire to associate their gods with stars and planets and comets, and the conviction that their cosmic deities played a hand in the fates of heroes and tribes.

These two threads of belief are the basic building blocks for a wide host of astral-reptile deities across human history: theMesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, a feathered lizard who in his travels between the earth and the sky established their boundaries and gave order to the universe. The many dragons of Chinese legends traveled from earth to the heavens using clouds for transportation; the most powerful of the four Dragon Kings, known as Long Wang, could shift from human to reptile form, and had the power to flood cities or cause droughts.

For updating this myth for modern conspiracists, we can thank Russian pseudo-scholar Zecheria Sitchin. It was Sitchin's unsubstantiated translations of ancient Mesopotamian seals that combined reptile shape-shifting with the origin myth of the Sumerian deities, known as the Annunaki,who inhabited heaven and hell, and that these are the same beings called Nephilim in in the Bible. Sitchin summarized his origin thesis in a 2010 New York Times profile:
It starts with the planet Nibiru, whose long, elliptical orbit brings it near Earth once every 3,600 years or so. The [Annunaki] were technologically advanced humanlike beings, Mr. Sitchin said, standing about nine feet tall. Some 450,000 years ago, they detected reserves of gold in southeast Africa and made a colonial expedition to Earth, splashing down in what is now the Persian Gulf. Mr. Sitchin said these Nibiru-ites recruited laborers from Earth's erect primates to build eight great cities. Enki, who became the Sumerians' god of science, bestowed some of the Nibiru-ites' advanced genetic makeup upon these bipeds so they could work as miners. This is how Mr. Sitchin explains what scientists attribute to evolution. He says the aliens' cities were washed away in a great flood 30,000 years ago, after which they began passing on their knowledge to humans the Nibiru-ites finally jetted home in their spacecraft, around 550 B.C.
Sitchin, now 90, believes the Annunaki bloodline still lingers here on earth. He has seized on the findings of a controversial 2005 study in the journal Nature -- the "human genome shares 223 genes with bacteria -- genes that do not exist in the worm, fly, or yeast," as Science magazine writer Elizabeth Pennisi summarized. For Sitchin, the study offered a scientific explanation for his theories about the human alteration process conducted by the Annunaki: "223 genes not through gradual evolution, not vertically on the Tree of Life, but horizontally, as a sideways insertion of genetic material from bacteria," leading to his triumphant conclusion, "It was in the image of the Annunaki, not of bacteria, that Adam and Eve were fashioned."

Sitchin has gone on a crusade to test the DNA of the 4,500-year-old remains of Sumerian Queen Puabi, whose corpse rests in the London Natural History Museum. Sitchin believes Puabi's DNA signature is genetically related to the Nibiru-ites. "Whoever created us deliberately held back from us a certain thing -- fruit, genes, DNA, whatever -- not to give us health, longevity, and the immortality that they had," Sitchin told MSNBC. "So what was it? Maybe by comparing her genome with ours, we would find out what are those missing genes that they deliberately did not give us. Maybe. I cannot guarantee that, but maybe."

* * *
Sitchin, who worked as a journalist in Israel and a shipping executive in New York, is not taken seriously by academic and professional research entities. But this hasn't gotten in the way of building a following that would make Thomas Friedman lizard-green with envy. Publishers have taken notice. Sitchin's first book, The Twelfth Planet (1976) has now passed its 45th mass-market printing, most recently by an arm of Harper Collins. His 14 books have sold millions of copies, and have been translated into over 25 languages. Treated as one of the high sages in the conspiracy theory media universe, Sitchin received a Lifetime Acheivement award from George Noory, host of conspiracy radio's syndicated flagship, Coast to Coast AM.

Sitchin's work has spread far into the conspiracy theory universe -- and into other realms of subaltern belief. It underpins, for example, the New Age obsession with the Mayan calendar and the very in-vogue idea that the world will end in the Roman calendar year of 2012. The 2012 concept has even made its way to Hollywood, in the form of an eponymously titled 2009 Columbia pictures film, directed by Roland Emmerich and grossing $769 million.

How the kernel of an idea mutated from Sitchin's writings to a Hollywood blockbuster is a case study in the fascinating ways marginal propositions can take root in the most mainstream locations in our culture. Skeptic magazine got curious about the fascination surrounding the 2012 idea, and an investigation by Dr. David Morrison, director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute for the magazine found Sitchin as the seed-layer:

Nancy Lieder, a self-declared psychic who claims she is channeling aliens, wrote on her website "Zetatalk" that the inhabitants of a fictional planet around the star Zeta Reticuli warned her that the Earth was in danger from Planet X or Nibiru. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was recalculated (a standard procedure for doomsdayers) and moved forward to December 2012. Only recently have these two fables been linked to the end of the Mayan long-count at the winter solstice in 2012 -- hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.

2012 director Emmerich didn't explicitly credit Sitchin or Leider and her Zetatalk site for his film, but he did give Sitchin's Nibiru theories credit for inspiring another cult film he directed, the time-space dimension traveling 1994 fantasy film, Stargate -- good for $196 million at the box office.

The obsession with 2012 continues to grow. As Skeptic's Morrison concluded, "The volume of mail I receive about Nibiru (along with various alignments and pole shifts) keeps increasing -- now more than 20 per week. Clearly there is money to be made from people's fear about an approaching doomsday."

Clearly there is, and from much else besides. Just ask David Icke.

* * *

Born in Leicester, England David Icke's career took many turns before he embraced the reptiles. He played soccer professionally for Coventry and Heresford City in England before becoming a BBC sports commentator, and later a spokesman for the UK Green Party. Icke had a life-altering experience in 1990, when a psychic he went to see for his rheumatoid arthritis conveyed through spirit messages that Icke was "a healer who is here to heal the earth and he will be world famous." Soon after, Icke found himself reborn as a crusading truth-teller and scholar. Today Icke regularly sells out venues of 1,000 people or more from Kiev to Las Vegas, sometimes charging as much as U2, the Rolling Stones or Madonna for a seat to watch his presentations.

Icke's early work was focused conspiracy theory centered on the power of world-dominating elites, but he has gravitated over the years to the belief that the world-dominating elites are themselves not human, arguing this explicitly in his third and most popular book, The Biggest Secret. Icke summarizes his thinking in a preface to a reptilian "Millenium Ritual" warning by his colleague, Arizona Wilder:

The Illuminati, the clique which control the direction of the world, are genetic hybrids, the result of interbreeding between a reptilian extraterrestrial race and humanity many thousands of years ago. The centre of power is not even in this dimension -- it is in the lower fourth dimension, the lower astral as many people call it, the traditional home for the "demons" of folklore and myth. These fourth dimensional reptilian entities work through these hybrid bloodlines because they have a vibrational compatibility with each other. This is why the European royal and aristocratic families have interbred so obsessively, as do the so called Eastern Establishment families of the United States which produce the leaders of America. Every presidential election since and including George Washington in 1789 has been won by the candidate with the most European royal genes.

Yes, the WASPS from New England and the Bilderbergers are controlling human affairs, argues Icke, but they are only "hybrids," "possessed" and controlled by "full-blooded" extraterrestrial lizards from the constellation Draco that exists in the fourth dimension, some of whom reside on Earth. Icke sold 30,000 copies of The Biggest Secret within months of publication, yet he quickly accumulated criticism from within the conspiracy world for his attempt to escape the known laws of the universe.

According to Michael Barkun in his book, Culture of Conspiracy, moving his reptiles from the orbit of the solar system to another dimension was a line believers in the community could not cross: "Some of the most fierce abuse that I've had since the book came out has not been from the public, actually, it's been from some other conspiracy researchers who can't get their head beyond anything in the physical." As Barkun points out, locating his conspiracy in another dimension liberates Icke from having to explain where the reptilians are at any given moment, while allowing Icke to "castigate his critics as stodgy materialists unable to grasp a new paradigm."

What Icke's critics probably haven't grasped is Icke's insight that humans function as a kind of dimensional anchor for the reptile aliens. The skeptical need only turn to Chapter 15 of his magnum opus, The Biggest Secret, where he shares Arizona Wilder's explanation that "without human blood the reptilians cannot hold human form in this dimension."

* * *

Since bursting onto the scene in the 1990s, Icke has succeeded in fusing the wide scope of existing "scholarship" and established audience of believers in the Illuminati conspiracy theory universe with the Sumerian theology-12th Planet conceptual template established by Zecharia Sitchin. For Icke, it's a conspiracy match made in heaven, especially in the United States, where fears of looming New World Order verge on acceptable discourse in right-wing circles, and the Illuminati powers that run it are only around the corner. The marriage of these two concepts has provoked an altogether different set of critics to attack him for bringing a 200-year-old racist narrative to a sci-fi and New Age-inclined conspiracy theory audience.

Author Will Offley, writing in 2000 for the hate group-tracking Public Eye magazine, reported that Icke in his first book had endorsed the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Found in Icke's second book, And the Truth Shall Set You Free, were clear signs that Icke had incorporated standard anti-Semitic dogma into his worldview. He quotes Icke: "I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War.They then dominated the Versailles Peace Conference and created the circumstances which made the Second World War inevitable. They financed Hitler to power in 1933 and made the funds available for his rearmament."

Icke has used this kind of thinking to bolster his argument that the Illuminati are tied to the reptilian crowd, which in turn has made his ideas more palatable to audiences on the far right. Offley found that Icke has sold and promoted his books in Canada through an extreme right group called the Preferred Network, and that Tom J. Kennedy, his event organizer for a speaking tour in Ottawa and Ontario, was an active supporter of Canada's DeTax group, an imitator of the notoriously anti-Semitic Christian Patriot movement.

On the other side of the pond, members of Combat 18, a neo-Nazi group with a violent history, attended one of his lectures in London, giving Icke a "glowing review" in their newsletter, Putsch. Combat 18 credited Icke's clever use of code words commonly associated with anti-Semitic talk, references to scheming bankers and such to make his points. And the neo-Nazis seemed inclined to believe his references to lizards covered Jewish people as well.

Icke alleges these attacks are an attempt to smear him, and claims he doesn't believe that the Jewish people are in control or exploiting the rest of humanity. "This is not a plot by Jewish people," Icke told Jon Ronson in The Lizard and the Jews, a 2001 documentary about the anti-Semitic controversies he provoked -- it's that the Rothschilds and other leading members of the Jewish hierarchy are members of the reptilian shape-shifting society themselves. After learning that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was concerned about Icke's seeming use of racial code words, his response was that the ADL was an "Illuminati front." And when Icke was confronted with UK neo-Nazi group Combat 18's admiration for him, he alleged that a high-level British intelligence figure once told him that Combat 18 was a creation of the ADL.

Icke has used the outpouring of anti-Semitic accusations against him as an opportunity to go whole-hog on a host of Jewish stereotypes. Once you've been called anti-Semitic 1,000 times, seems to be his logic, there's no escaping the charge, and with an alibi like his -- that Jewish elites are either reptilians or controlled by them -- why not say it with a bang? There's no bigger Jewish target for Icke and his colleagues than the Rothschilds. Icke's Web site links to articles from other conspiracy sites with titles such as "Democrat 'Progressivism' Is Prime Rothschild Domination Tool" and "How Edmund de Rothschild Managed to Let 179 Governments Pay Him for Grasping Up to 30% of the Earth," which in turn relies heavily on a conspiracy theory staple for the paranoid crowd of Federal Reserve theorists, Andrew Hitchcock's "The History of the Money Changers."

Icke's official Web site hums with his activity and that of his legions of adherents. A steady stream of new speeches, news items and videos bang the reptilian drum. Evidence can come from anywhere for Icke: The discovery in March 2010 that a 16th-century painting of Queen Elizabeth I originally portrayed her holding a small serpent, a common allegorical symbol of wisdom and prudence, before it was painted over with a bouquet of roses, fits directly into his grand theory like a puzzle piece. The death of Icke's colleague Susan Reed, author of The Body Snatchers: A True Story of Body Snatching by the Reptilians -- A Real Alien Conspiracy, is drenched in meaning, because of course, Reed had long warned that one day she would be "removed."

By dabbling in material that reaches the shores of the American far right, such as the unhealthy obsession with the Rothschild family, Icke has been a regular guest of Austin-based American right-wing conspiracy radio superstar Alex Jones. Jones agrees with most of Icke's claims, but he draws the line with extraterrestrials. He told documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson:
He talks about the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, these Global Elitists, these power structures all demonstrated by bills and executive orders and prime ministers, and premiers, and presidents. Something that is easily demonstrable. And then you've got David Icke and at the end of all this, he says, 'By the way, they're blood-drinking lizards.' Al Gore needs blood to drink, so does Prince Philip. I mean, it's asinine. It's being picked up by people, and it discredits all the reality we're talking about, and that's the problem with David Icke. He's got a good line to a point, and then he discredits it all. It's like a turd in the punchbowl.

* * *
The Wider Reptile World

If Sitchin hadn’t sat down and written The 12th Planet, or if Icke hadn’t quit his gig as a sportscaster and Green Party politician to assemble his catch-all theory, the rafts of related, predated material kicking around and the armies of ambitious theorists who have lost out to Icke’s spotlight would probably have taken form to meet the demands of the believer’s need for this kind of material. If The 12th Planet doesn’t work for you, there’s Erich Anton Paul von Däniken’s Chariot of the Gods or Alan F. Alford’s Gods of the New Millennium. Some of it is arguably more lurid, bizarre and intriguing than Nibiru, or the wild claims of Arizona Wilder, as shared by David Icke.

Take this L.A. Times story from 1934, Lizard People's Catacomb City Hunted: Engineer Sinks Shaft Under Fort Moore Hill to Find Maze of Tunnels and Priceless Treasures of Legendary Inhabitants:

Busy Los Angeles, although little realizing it in the hustle and bustle of modern existence, stands above a lost city of catacombs filled with incalculable treasure and imperishable records of a race of humans further advanced intellectually and scientifically than even the highest type of present day peoples, in the belief of G. Warren Shufelt, geophysical engineer now engaged in an attempt to wrest from the lost city deep in the earth below Fort Moore Hill the secrets of the Lizard People of legendary fame in the medicine lodges of the American Indian. So firmly does Shufelt and a little staff of assistants believe that a maze of catacombs and priceless golden tablets are to be found beneath downtown Los Angeles that the engineer and his aides have already driven a shaft 250 feet into the ground, the mouth of the shaft being on the old Banning property on North Hill street overlooking Sunset Boulevard.... Their city is laid out like a lizard, according to the legend, its tail to the southwest ... streets, its head to the northeast. ... The city’s key room is situated directly under South Broadway, near Second street, according to Shufelt and the legend.

The Shufelt account channels an ancient disaster, Gilgamesh-style, similar to Sitchin: According to the legend as imparted to Shufelt by Macklin, the radio X-ray has revealed the location of one of three lost cities on the Pacific Coast, the local one having been dug by the Lizard People after the great catastrophe which occurred about 5000 years ago. Instead of the mask of a deep scholar presenting his translations to the audience, Shufelt offered more of an Indiana Jones-type experience. The cave strain of the reptilian origin theory still has echoes today. In an entry on the blog UFO Experiences, one J.W. claiming to live in Missouri shared his account of a bizarre experience he claims he had on June 7, 2004:

It all started on your typical Sunday ATV ride in Carthage, Missouri: A friend and I were riding two ATVs in a place called The Underground. It is a public and private storage facililty .... holding thousands and thousands of food containers, all dehydrated for the Navy. I have seen them and it is public knowledge around here. It is also a fall out shelter able to hold some 40,000 to 50,000 people. . ...We were approximately 8 miles in and I'd say maybe 500 feet deep when we took a turn down an area that was marked "Navy-1 Authoritative Zone." ... The walls became more defined as in polished or finished and this was striking because this was supposed to be a newly blasted area ... still thinking nothing was wrong we kept going. ... We came up on an unusual painted pattern on the floor and I thought, cool graffiti...kids have been down here... we're safe... won't get into any trouble. We passed into a whole new road system. This one was large, and much older than where we came from. ...

Miles deep into the complex, J.W. claims to have experienced a Hollywood-quality scene:

Two creatures, one was very tall at least 7 feet, maybe more and very powerfully built, reddish in color and the other was smaller about 6 feet but it was not red in color but pale, like an albino and it was not as powerfully built as the other. They looked like REPTILES ... They said nothing but I did get a strong sense from the big one. A malevolence, evil presence of some kind. My friend screamed and we turned around.. a power turn. We started to go back out when my friend said, the big one was after us. I looked back and it was following us. ... We passed through the wall projection and I looked back and saw the thing raise it's [sic] arm and it had a weapon of some sorts. It fired and hit the ATV my friend was on. The engine died and he stopped. I told him to jump on.. and he did. ... I looked back and the thing had stopped at the graffiti on the cave floor/road. The ATV was on it's [sic] side of the graffiti/symbol. It was obvious the thing would not cross the marking.

What Does It All Mean?

The imaginative and detailed material proffered by the likes of Sitchin, Icke and a host of others is a breeding ground for their audience -- from the Illuminati to reptile aliens from the 12th planet to Sumerian gods and biblical references. The material congregates in the minds of the believers according to their taste, and materializes in an unlimited series of combinations. Upon close inspection, the belief in the reptilian belief system functions as a connective tissue for dozens of seemingly divergent conspiracy theories, a theoretical space for them to co-exist, lend credibility and a measure of coherence to each other.

With reptiles positioned at the helm of the grand conspiracy, Icke can confidently bring into his fold the paranoia around microchipping, America's post-9/11 "war on terror," UFO activity, global government, and secret societies. Connected in this way, they build a kind of meaning in citing each other, with the contradiction of ideas and theories interpreted by the believers serving to reinforce the larger belief system, not discredit them -- in the same way Christian theologians handle the inconsistencies in the accounts of the Gospels in the Bible. As always, the paranoia that the whole idea itself is part of a conspiracy covers this mesh of theories like a blanket.

Lurking in the background of the thousands of personal accounts of reptilian encounters, available online and on YouTube and Conspiracy radio, are hints of broken families, child abuse and molestation, troubled childhoods, failed professional lives, and a hundred other kinds of personal trauma. Talking about reptiles for some believers can serve as a kind of crude therapy, and a way of describing and sharing personal trauma through metaphor without having to consciously address what happened.

Given the perverse psychodrama of today's conspiratorially minded right-wing grassroots, it is not surprising that Barack Obama has become a target of reptilian theorists. "I suspect Obama is a hybrid puppet being controlled by our alien Repto Sapien cousins," writes conspiracist Art Greenfield. "Let's examine Obama as a living tool of the Repto Sapiens, both from a hardware and software angle. Let's look at the pedigree on the hardware. Obama's human DNA comes from Caucasian, Negroid, and Arab slave-trader stock. The slave trader info comes from other sites where his ancestors were researched."

Greenfield then takes a Limbaugh-like turn.

"What is interesting about Barack Obama," he writes, "is that he was programmed by radical Communists, crooked Democrats, and radical Islamists. The major influences from those groups were Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Lewis Farhakhan, Frank Marshall Davis, William Ayers, Bernadette Dorhn, and various Saudi radicals. One Saudi paid for Obama's college tuition."

Jan Frel is AlterNet's senior editor.