David Icke

David Vaughan Icke ( vawn EYEK; born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist, author and a former semi-professional footballer, sports journalist and sports broadcaster. He has written over 20 books, self-published since the mid-1990s, and spoken in more than 25 countries.

An aspiring professional football goalkeeper in his early years, he retired aged 21 from playing due to rheumatoid arthritis. He subsequently became a sports journalist. In 1981 he became a sports broadcaster for the BBC, but his contract was terminated in 1990 over his vocal opposition to the Community Charge.

In an effort to relieve his arthritis he began to engage with alternative medicine and New Age philosophies in the 1980s, and this encouraged his interest in Green politics. He joined the Green Party and became a national spokesperson within six months, but left the party soon after.

In 1990, Icke started visiting Betty Shine, a psychic who told him he was on Earth for a purpose and would receive messages from the spirit world. This led him to claim in 1991 to be a "Son of the Godhead" and that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. He repeated this on the BBC show Wogan. His appearance led to public ridicule. Icke wrote various books over the next 11 years which developed his world view of a New Age conspiracy. Reactions to his endorsement of an antisemitic fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in The Robots' Rebellion (1994) and in And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995) led his publisher to decline further books, and he has self-published since then.

Icke contends that the universe consists of "vibrational" energy and infinite dimensions sharing the same space. He argues that there is an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings, the Archons or Anunnaki, which have hijacked the Earth. Further, a genetically modified human–Archon hybrid race of reptilian shape-shifters – the Babylonian Brotherhood, Illuminati or "elite" – manipulate events