Transcription
George Bush, Justin Bieber, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, every Chinese emperor, Queen Elizabeth, Mark Zuckerberg. What do all these people have in common? Well, all of them hide a dark and cold secret just beneath their artificial skins, according to four percent of Americans. That is.
Explain yourself. In 2013, public polling revealed that a small but not entirely negligible portion of the United States population subscribed to the idea that a race of shape-shifting lizard people control our world by taking on human form and gaining power. By comparison, the same poll found that seven percent of respondents believe the moon landing was fake, and five percent claim the Beatles member Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was secretly replaced with a body double.
Ever since around the early 2000s, there has been this idea floating around in our popular consciousness that a collection of famous people, from our political leaders to celebrities, are secretly reptile-like aliens disguised as humans. These mysterious beings from another planet have been delicately influencing us throughout our distant and not-so-distant past for malicious purposes. They control the government and popular culture, telling us what to think and what to do. We could be a food source.
Admittedly, it is one of the more absurd and nutty conspiracies out there, and to most people, it has rightfully become a sort of widespread joke. However, for others, it is no joke at all. There are people who emphatically believe in this conspiracy, often citing evidence from history, cultural mythology, and archaeology that supposedly supports its existence. Where does this reptilian conspiracy come from, exactly? What is the alleged evidence held up in its defense, and why are there people who actually believe in it?
To answer these questions, I have a special guest joining us today, Dr. David Miano from the World of Antiquity channel. Hi Trey, thanks for having me. I am really excited to be talking about reptilians with you. It's going to be fun. I'll offer my observations as they come up. Let's get into it, so sit back and enjoy this installment of Behind the Conspiracy.
Reptilians. Despite the claims of many of its proponents, the idea of reptilians is relatively young. It appears that we only need to go back a little under 100 years to see its origins. This specific origin story is often mentioned in various pieces of reptilian media. As the story goes, on January 29th, 1934, the Los Angeles Times newspaper reported that an engineer by the name of George Warren Schufeldt had conducted a mining survey beneath the city of L.A., specifically under Fort Moore Hill. Shufelt claimed to have discovered, with the help of a so-called radio x-ray machine, a complex labyrinth of underground tunnels and catacombs. His x-ray pictures revealed rooms of solid gold and massive subterranean passages going as deep as a hundred feet below the surface, and according to him, this intricate network formed the shape of a lizard.
After consulting with a Hopi Indian by the name of Little Chief Greenleaf, Schufelt concluded that the tunnels were, in fact, something out of an old Hopi legend: the remains of a vast underground city built five thousand years ago, not by humans, but by the lizard people. According to Chief Greenleaf, there were once three such cities along the Pacific coast of North America, constructed in order to escape some kind of great fiery cataclysm. One thousand families of these lizard people dwelled beneath the earth, keeping records on gold tablets. This ancient race was also incredibly intelligent; the intellectual accomplishments of their nine-year-old children were equal with those of present-day college graduates.
We are told that all of Schufelt's attempts to excavate this forgotten city beneath the city were unsuccessful, to say the least. We will talk about this more in depth later, but according to most retellings, funding on his project dried up, and his findings never saw the light of day. The ruins of the lizard people and their dozens of gold treasures are allegedly still down there in the dark, just beneath the bustling streets and sidewalks of America's second largest city.
From Schufelt's original discovery, we see the emergence of several similar conspiracies. Soon after, in the 1940s, occultist and writer Maurice de Real wrote a little-known pamphlet entitled Mysteries of the Gobi, where he describes a serpent race with bodies like man but heads like a great snake. These snake men had the ability to take human form. In an unspecified prehistoric era, they engaged in a violent war with humans and were driven to near extinction. Where de Real got this information is anyone's guess.
In the 1990s, Dariel's writings would later influence conspiracy theorist David Icke. Icke's writings are a whole other story, but essentially just expanded on these original concepts that a race of ancient lizard-like creatures from another star live underground in bases throughout the world and have disguised themselves as influential humans, mainly royal bloodlines and wealthy dynasties (the Bush family, the British Royal family, and the Rothschilds, etc.). These creatures secretly feasted on human flesh or had some other malicious purpose in mind for us. Icke's influence took these relatively unknown ideas to the mainstream, and as a result, the conspiracy of the reptilians or reptoids took on a new life and resonated particularly well among right-wing conspiracy theorists.
It is claimed that humans for thousands of years have been encountering these beings, and evidence of these interactions have been preserved in the artwork and stories of ancient humans. In the wake of this surge, believers searched the past for corroborating evidence. Ancient Aliens featured several of these in their episode, and I will give a brief overview of them before we take a closer look.
One of the most common examples used to prove the existence of reptilians are these mysterious figurines from Neolithic Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. They are one of the few pieces of physical evidence, tangible artifacts, used by proponents. Archaeologists know them as the Ubaid Lizard People figurines, excavated from several Mesopotamian sites such as the prehistoric cities of Ur and Eridu. The clay statuettes are all dated to the Ubaid period of the region and depict humanoids with thin and elongated bodies, coffee bean-shaped eyes, and pinched noses that give their faces an overall reptilian-like appearance. Ancient Aliens posits that they are too realistic to depict mythological or fantasy creatures and are in fact based on the real deal, living, breathing lizard men and women encountered by our early ancestors.
In addition to these figurines, reptilian proponents use a wide variation of mythological stories and religious texts from cultures around the world to suggest they are all talking about the same thing. Several cultures mention reptile gods or powerful snake-like beings. As we mentioned before, Schufelt believed that the Hopi tribe of North America had one such story. Ancient Aliens primarily focuses on the Hebrew Bible. They claim that the Bible references the existence of a serpent race called the Saphiram. According to them, the snake or nahash in the Garden of Eden was just one of a race and was completely humanoid prior to God punishing it for tempting Eve in the garden.
South Asian mythology mentions the Nagas. Ancient Aliens defines them as a semi-divine race of serpent people, with the well of Sushana serving as the entrance to the underground city of the Nagas, named Patala. The Jinn in Islam and the feathered serpent gods of Mesoamerica are also viewed as lizardmen, too. I could go on, but according to legend, Alexander the Great was sired by a dragon. All of this is to say that according to these conspiracy theorists, many different regions around the world share unmistakable similarities that lend credence to the idea that humans have been interacting with a race of advanced subterranean reptile humanoids pretty regularly throughout history, from at least the Neolithic until relatively recent times, Hellenistic periods, and so on.
Now, this is a lot to unpack. At its surface, I'm so sorry, I know I really need to stop doing puns. The evidence for the reptilian conspiracy may seem a tad bit compelling, but this is only because of the way books and TV shows like Ancient Aliens have phrased and presented these examples. In reality, the reptilian conspiracy is built on nothing more than blatant lies and misinformation. Let's break it down.
Let's start with that lost city of the lizard people Warren G. Schufelt claimed to have discovered under Los Angeles. As this story seemingly jumpstarted the whole conspiracy in the first place, the count as told in the original L.A. Times newspaper and how many have since retold it is misleading, if not entirely wrong, as it leaves out many crucial details. For example, you might be asking, if these catacombs exist, why are there no pictures taken of them or of the supposed gold tablets? Well, it's because the whole story is itself a bunch of bunk. All the claims of Schufelt told to the press were completely unsubstantiated, as he never presented any kind of physical proof to back himself up: not a single tablet or engraved stone, not even pictures taken inside the tunnels. The radio x-ray device Schufelt claimed to have used to find the site in the first place was nothing more than a glorified dowsing rod, when looked at closer, as it had nothing to do with either radio waves or x-rays.
As many of you might have guessed, George Warren Schufelt was not the most trustworthy of individuals. If one looks back at the records, he had a long history of pulling publicity stunts just like this. According to the newspaper records, would-be treasure seekers have been looking for gold beneath L.A.'s Fort Moore Hill ever since the late 1890s, long before Schufelt even started. All of them turned up empty.
A couple decades later, on March 4th, 1933, a very familiar name appears in an edition of the L.A. Times, almost an entire year before that very same newspaper would run the lizard people's story. Wait a minute. Our old friend Schufelt and a group of men had decided to pick up where the 1890s gold hunters left off and began excavating Fort Moore Hill. Oh, not for reptilian gold, but conquistador gold. According to him, in his possession was an ancient sheepskin map indicating that Spanish treasure had been buried under the hill over a hundred years ago. Hundreds of gold doubloons were just waiting to be dug up. In this version of events, we get no mention of the fabled lizard people.
Warren Schufelt's adventures are subsequently detailed pretty extensively in the L.A. Times that year, from March to April. His team repeatedly petitioned the L.A. Board of Supervisors for extensions and funding on their project with the intent of splitting the treasure with the city once it was discovered. They would consistently claim they were just about to unearth their goal, if only they had a little more time. By September of 1933, however, Schufelt and all but one of his original team officially gave up the search. It's not that the project ran out of money; it's said it just found nothing, and the L.A. Board of Supervisors had begun to suspect that they were being duped. Even at the time, few believed the claims of Schufelt and his accomplices. One article claims that they were heckled by street-goers as they worked. As the months wore on, everybody seemed to realize that the story was just a bunch of hot air. Reporter Ed Ainsworth mockingly wrote, "Isn't it funny how early Spaniards seemed to do nothing but trapeze around the country with jackloads of gold bullion? They never apparently wanted to spin their gold." It was yet another version of the typical dying prospector story, one that many at the time had not only heard but had been fooled by before.
We should not forget that the backdrop for this whole incident was the height of the Great Depression in the United States. Thousands of unemployed men across the country were in dire need of work and a wage. The idea of uncovering a secret cache of Spanish gold to bring people from rags to riches was a tempting prospect. In fact, much of the digging was done by hand as a public works project to provide jobs for the city of L.A. during the depression. The story helped motivate people, even if it was all for naught in the end. Seriously, blame the Great Depression for giving us reptilians. The whole thing would have lapsed into obscurity if not for Schufelt's infamous reappearance in the L.A. Times in January 1934, in the article that we read before. Yes, Schufelt, after abandoning his project as a failure, for some reason decided to return to the press for a second time with a familiar but tweaked version of his original tale.
In this new version, there was no mention of a sheepskin map or Spanish conquistadors. Instead, Schufelt claims that all along he was searching for an ancient city belonging to the race of lizard people. This is also where we first hear about the character of Little Chief Greenleaf and the Hopi legend. So here's the thing: why change the story so drastically and suddenly? Well, as it turns out, it appears Schufelt made it all up, and I mean everything.
Let's start with his source, Little Chief Greenleaf. In reality, there is no record of such a person ever existing, according to the birth and death certificate databases of the Hopi Reservation. Now, this doesn't rule out his existence entirely, but I find it rather suspicious that the only reference I can find to this person ever existing is this single newspaper article. Wait a second, I feel like I've been in this situation before. I suspect that Schufelt might have created Greenleaf out of whole cloth, fabricating an Indian persona for himself to use as a puppet, and in doing so, lend credibility to his story.
Likewise, the supposed Hopi legend of the lizard people living underground doesn't appear to exist either. Skeptic Brian Dunning, after consulting tribal writings and ethnographic accounts, was completely unable to find any basis for the story in actual Hopi mythology. In fact, the Hopi don't even live in California. Schufelt might have actually meant the Zuni tribe, not the Hopi, as the Zuni do in fact have a vaguely similar legend about their ancestors living in underground caves. It goes like this: "Men and creatures were more alike than the now. Our fathers were black like the caves they came from. Their skins were cold and scaly like those of mud creatures. Their eyes were goggled like an owl's. Their ears were like those of cave bats. Their feet were webbed like those of walkers in wet and soft places. They had tails long or short as they were old or young. Men crouched when they walked or crawled along the ground like lizards. They feared to walk straight but crouched as before time they had in their cave worlds that they might not stumble or fall in uncertain light."
Schufelt's version is a bit of a bastardization of the original Zuni myth. The real legend isn't talking about the city of intelligent lizard people; it's a creation myth for humanity, like the story of Genesis. According to the Zuni, humans originated from caves and were once far more animal-like until they went to the surface. This mythology is definitely interesting, but not exactly evidence of anything but humans telling creative stories. Schufelt seemingly twisted the original myth to sound far more science-fictiony than it really was by adding falling stars and advanced technology. Scholars have also noted that his version is very reminiscent of pulp science fiction authors at the time, particularly the works of Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame and H.P. Lovecraft. Howard created the Serpent Men of Valusia, while Lovecraft created stories like The Nameless City. It is entirely possible that Schufelt was familiar with these stories and used elements of both in his claims about the lost metropolis beneath L.A.
If I were to guess, Schufelt saw that he had taken the old Spanish gold story as far as it could go after failing to produce results the first time. He needed additional funding and a new audience. Using a combination of Zuni myths and science fiction stories he had read about, he produced a fresh new tale to grab people's attention and get his treasure hunting business back on track. It doesn't appear like it worked for him, as I found little of note about Schufelt following 1934. He died in 1957, age 71. His grave is apparently still in Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood, if anyone wants to check.
As for L.A.'s Fort Moore Hill, it has been excavated extensively since the time of Schufelt. In 1938, a fair amount of dirt from the hill was used to fill Union Station during its construction. In 1949, the Broadway Tunnel was demolished to make way for the new Hollywood Freeway. Both projects were extensive but failed to produce any evidence of underground catacombs or gold. The origin of the reptilian conspiracy was essentially just some random guy's attempt to make a quick buck during the Great Depression, and here we are now.
But what about all those other artifacts and stories? Let's talk about those convincing figurines. The Ubaid figurines were first discovered by archaeologists back in the 1920s, who described them as "drab pottery figurine of a man." Evidently, they didn't find them the most exciting or interesting of ancient artifacts. Little did they know that their relatively minor discovery would be proclaimed almost a century later as one of the most central pieces of evidence to a grand conspiracy. I think all the attention that the lizardmen figurines get might be the result of the general lack of published studies on them by actual scientists. The absence of expert voices leading to nutty theories taking root. Let's hear what David has to say about them.
"Because of their elongated heads, pointed noses, dots on the torso, and coffee bean-shaped eyes, earlier treatments of these figurines called them ophidian, suggesting they are snake-like. It's true that because this isn't a period before writing, we don't know a whole lot about them, but they may very well be stylized human figures. The strange head could be a mask worn during ceremonies or other special occasions, or it could be artificial skull elongation, which was practiced. We know this in the area at the time. The marks on the body may be tattoos or scarification. There's been a lot of talk about what they look like and not as much talk about what they were used for. They've been found in graves and within settlements. They were not children's toys because they're not found in any children's graves, and they're not effigies of the deceased because, well, there are not enough differences between them as you would differentiate people, right? But people appear to have owned these figurines during their lifetimes and then they were buried with them when they died."
Yes, as David says, we don't really know what these figurines were used for or what they meant to these ancient people. Much attention has been brought to them, but in truth, there's just not much to go on or even talk about. We just picture these figurines as mysterious because we'd lack the writing or folklore to explain their purposes and meanings, not necessarily because they are particularly shocking. They could represent all kinds of things. They could be depictions of gods or guardian spirits or fantasy monsters, ancestors, priests and masks, or goofy hairstyles. Their vaguely lizard-like appearance could just be the product of art style. We just don't know and probably will never know their true meanings. But one thing is clear: that these figurines are likely not depictions of alien reptoids.
In a similar vein, let us examine the Nagas of South Asian folklore. The Nagas can indeed be found in South Asian myth. Our oldest source on the Nagas is the Indian epic Mahabharata, the earliest form of which dates to around the 8th or 9th century BCE, and since then, the stories about them have been expanded and embellished. They're depicted as serpents, sometimes holy snakes, other times part snake and part human, other times just human. The fact that they don't have a single form highlights the non-physical, magical aspect of the Nagas, and in the legends, some are said to have been rulers, the Nagarajas, and some claim they came from Sri Lanka.
As we can see, Nagas, an actual South Asian myth, are not the race of advanced humanoid reptiles Ancient Aliens claims. The stories about them have been twisted to say things they explicitly don't. For example, the underground Naga city of Patala is actually a type of underworld in Indian cosmology, like Hades or Hell. It exists in the lower depths of the universe itself. Reptilian proponents even use images of Indian stepwells as entrances to Patala, but these stepwells are not mysterious to archaeologists or even that ancient. The oldest of them were created in the 2nd century A.D., and most others, especially the more complex ones, were made much later, in the 900s and 1080s. And yes, we know that they were made by human hands for the very utilitarian purpose of collecting water, not entrances to reptilian cities. These wells are medieval. Claiming aliens built them is just as ridiculous as claiming aliens built Christian cathedrals in Europe.
Ancient Aliens also butchers the Bible by reading a little, well, let's be honest, a lot between the lines. Take their claim that the serpent and the guardian of Eden was a completely humanoid reptilian. The interpretation of the Genesis story, the Garden of Eden, has been the subject of great debate for literally centuries. Over time, many people, not just Ancient Aliens, have made the text say things that it explicitly does not state at all. The identity and importance of the serpent is one of them. As far as we can tell, in the original story, the Genesis serpent, or nahash, was just that: a serpent. The story, as the ancient Israelites understood it, was that this nahash was merely the first snake created by God, an ancestor to every snake afterwards. You can explicitly see this in the language of the text: "Now the serpent was more subtle than any other beast of the field which the Lord God had made." The word nahash is also used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible to refer to completely ordinary snakes.
Aspects of the Garden of Eden serve as a creation story, a story that was told by early humans to explain natural phenomena that they encountered in daily life, something that is universal to all religions since the dawn of time. People have always asked questions: Why does it rain? Or why is childbirth so painful? Why don't snakes have legs like other animals? The Bible is filled with these kinds of mythic explanations. According to the ancient Israelites, prior to God punishing it, the snake had legs like a lizard, but due to his cleverness, he was cursed to crawl on his belly. There are also similarities in the story to the ancient text, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the significantly older story, the king Gilgamesh wants to attain immortality and almost achieves this by consuming a magical flower. However, a serpent steals it from him at the last second, and as a result, the animal sheds its skin and retains its youth, thus explaining why snakes shed their skin.
The idea that the snake in Genesis was Satan or Lucifer in disguise is a much later reinterpretation, deserving of its own video. Many aspects of the story we interpret today are not found in the original text. Genesis, for example, later Christian art depicting the serpent as a female humanoid likely comes from, again, a reinterpretation of the narrative where the character of the serpent was fused with that of Lilith, a demon-like succubus that has a pretty complicated history in and of itself. I discussed this in a previous video, so you should check that out. Anyways, the point is, no, the snake in the Garden of Eden was not meant to be interpreted as a reptilian; it's just a dang snake.
Speaking of which, we should talk about that Saphiram in the Bible as well. Ancient Aliens describes them as a serpent race, the Garden of Eden snake just being one of them. Seraphim is the plural form of the Hebrew word saraf, seraph, which indeed does refer to a supernatural or heavenly being. The Hebrew root of the word, which means "to burn or incinerate," may refer to the seraph's act of burning or destroying the enemies of God. Iconography from ancient Judah has been found depicting a seraph, which is a winged serpent. It has similarities to the Uraeus of Egypt, a serpent that was believed to spit fire. This coincides with verses in the Bible such as Numbers 21:6-8 and Deuteronomy 8:15, which speak of fiery serpents, and Isaiah 14:21, which speaks of a flying serpent. All instances using the word seraph is a flying snake. A reptile, sure, but a winged serpent doesn't really coincide with the description of the reptilians that Ancient Aliens gives; they aren't humanoid. It's true that a passage in Genesis 3:14 has been interpreted by some to mean that the snake originally had legs, but this wouldn't automatically indicate it was humanoid. Humans aren't the only creatures with legs, after all.
Ancient Aliens does this a lot with mythologies where they take these magical and fantastical stories 100% literally, and this is simply a wrong way to view them. This is the type of show that sees a guy wearing a crocodile costume and thinks it's an eyewitness sketch of an alien lizard. That's what we're working with here. The truth is, humans are an incredibly creative and imaginative species. We love making things up. Mythologies around the world are filled with chimeras, absurd monsters made up of different parts of real animals haphazardly stitched together. Sumerian mythology had bulls with the faces of men and the wings of eagles. They had mermaids and scorpion men. Egyptians had jackal-headed men and crocodile-hippo hybrids. Creating stories about lizardmen doesn't seem like it would be beyond their imagination. As any child will tell you, just because we dream up monsters and draw them doesn't mean they are actually real.
What Ancient Aliens and other conspiracy theorists just don't seem to understand about mythologies is that they are built on human imagination. They grow and develop over time, changing with each retelling of the story to best suit the audience and the storyteller. Take for example the mythical creature Medusa. We know Medusa today as the beautiful woman in Greek mythology. She is typically depicted as a woman with venomous serpents for hair. However, she was not always envisioned like this. In her oldest surviving depictions, she looks much different, shown to be far more centaur-like with the hindquarters of a horse. That's right, Medusa was originally a horse girl. This fact actually makes way more sense in the original myth with her role as the mother of Pegasus. Interestingly, if we fast forward a couple centuries later, we can see that ancient Greek artists changed the story and re-envisioned her as a monstrous, ogre-like creature, and a couple centuries after that, she was viewed as far less grotesque, pretty similar to the image we have today. Mythologies are dynamic; they're not meant to be taken as literal history. They're often magical stories that exist to teach some kind of moral lesson.
Upon closer inspection, all these reptilian stories from around the world are very different. There's no uniformity to them. Conspiracy theorists like to play fast and loose with their definitions of what counts as a reptilian story. It appears that any mythology that describes a vaguely reptile-like monster or spirit is instantly jumped on as proof of ancient alien encounters. Snakes and lizards are everywhere; you can find them on all but one of the seven continents, so it's no wonder that snake or lizard-inspired monsters appear in a lot of religions and myths. At the end of the day, these stories are just that: stories. They don't prove anything except our species' ability to use our imagination.
And that's the really disappointing thing about the reptilian conspiracy: is that it's built on such flimsy, non-existent evidence. It's such a dumb story that you would hope that its origins would be much more interesting, but in the end, it's just a bunch of nothing built on plagiarism after plagiarism and nutty science fiction-inspired interpretations of old myths.
And this is where I'd like to take the time to acknowledge that the whole conspiracy has a rather unsavory undertone to it all. And as silly as it is, it is not entirely harmless. Fittingly, the idea of the reptilians is pretty much just a blatant plagiarism of an older conspiracy, one that has existed in Western culture for centuries: anti-Semitism, the belief that Jewish people are not only evil but secretly controlling the world's government. Christians even believed rumors that Jews drank the blood of children, just like the reptilians consuming humans like cattle. Let's please put this toxic mess in the waste bin of history where it belongs.
Well, this is kind of a depressing ending, so, uh, here's Lizard Bill Clinton. "We could be a food source." I'd like to thank Dr. David Miano again for joining me for this installment. Feel free to check out his channel for great archaeology topics, and with that, thank you so much for watching. I hope you learned something new. See you guys next time. Scary monsters, super creeps, keep me running, running scared. Okay, we're ending that right now. See ya.