In 1965 soul singer Otis Redding recorded his third album, “Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul”. On that album was his second breakout single. This song reached the top five in 1965’s Black Singles Chart (the 60s were really racist) and even crept over to the ‘regular’ music chart, where it would peak at 35. In 1967 the song was covered for a debut album by Aretha Franklin. That song was called “Respect”, and you know it. It is very likely you know this song as Franklin’s and not Redding’s. This is because Franklin’s version is the one that caught on (it also helps that it is the objectively superior version), and when people cover the song, they don’t cover Redding’s they cover Franklin’s (the most important difference is that Redding’s doesn’t have the “r-e-s-p-e-c-t” section). While Redding was the first person to record the song, it’s no longer his song, it belongs to the Queen of Soul.
This came to mind because A) it’s just a really cool fact and B) I received feedback that I should not attribute the reptoid hypothesis to David Icke, but rather to a different person named John Rhodes (you might be able to guess who the feedback was from). The message stated that while 1999’s “The Biggest Secret” was the earliest published work containing Icke’s theory, Rhodes had been publicly advocating for a different version of the reptoid hypothesis several years beforehand.
For a quick reminder, the “Reptoid Hypothesis” is the claim that there exists a species of reptile humanoid hybrids that secretly live among us. Rhodes’ theory doesn’t claim magical powers or domination over the world, but it’s still a reptoid hypothesis. While it’s a fantastic theory that is borderline absurd, we should not take the lizard conspiracy theorists lightly. Forget the believers in the theory, there is very little that can be done to pull them out of that well. The problem the lizard people present is that the theory becomes a joke; we’ve probably retorted to someone, “next thing you’re going to tell me is that the King is a lizard alien.” Such dismissiveness creates a defensiveness in the conspiracy theorist even if the conspiracy they believe is much more reasonable. The second problem is that conspiracy theorists use that comparison to make their own theories sound more plausible, “Look, I’m not a lizard alien guy but don’t you think it’s odd that…”
No matter how unbelievable a theory is we should always take it seriously. Let my country serve as an example – we re-elected a guy who said Haitians were eating pets.
I’ve called it “Icke’s theory” in a few articles because, like Aretha Franklin’s Respect, it’s how everyone knows the theory. Icke made it famous. The claim that Rhodes is making is testable, so I will test it and it’s true – Rhodes was making a reptoid claim before Icke’s publication. His very 90s-era website supports his claim.
The dispute over who we should credit with a theory is not a new one. A Catholic priest named Georges Lemaitre first postulated that the universe was expanding in 1927. In 1929, Edwin Hubble published his findings with better data, and we’ve been calling the discovery “Hubble’s Law”, while also naming a space telescope after Hubble (that is until 2018 when the IAU renamed it the “Hubble-Lemaitre Law”). Perhaps more infamously was when James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their contribution to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, when their work was based on the work of Rosalind Franklin, whom they knew and whose lectures they attended.
To add one more for you English, there is the debate over who is responsible for calculus: Gottfried Leibniz or Isaac Newton (I side with Newton, because I hate Leibniz and his “theodicee”). There exists a Wikipedia page for discovery controversies just like this.
While Lemaitre might have been first, it’s still called the Hubble Telescope. It’s not correct, but Rhodes’s theory is like Redding’s “Respect” – it might have been first, but it lacks the hook that made Franklin’s version the dominant one. Rhodes’s theory doesn’t have the Illuminati, the infiltration into the halls of power, or the magic of Icke’s (I mean that literally, not that Icke’s theory has a certain charm).
The difficulty I have with calling it Rhodes’ theory is that, even though he was prior to Icke, he wasn’t the first person to claim a reptile-humanoid theory. This was a spiral of discovery.
In any talk I give on the subject of David Icke, I like to mention that his “revelation” of the reptoid conspiracy theory comes after the release of the science fiction miniseries “V” (broadcast in the UK in 1984) and the John Carpenter cult classic “They Live” (1988), both of which deal with a secret society of lizard-like aliens who control society and lack bubblegum.
Both of these ‘inspirations’ are presented as fictional, but there is precedent for Icke (and many other conspiracy theorists) taking fiction as inspiration for conspiracy theories they will claim are factual. Any Atlantis theory is based on a fable that Plato tells in the Timaeus, and the triad of 1999 movies about people trapped in computer simulations are all cited as evidence for the same happening to us.
Icke’s theory is preceded by Rhodes, but Rhodes is not the first person to claim a factual reptoid theory. Rhodes’s theory, according to his web page, cites a predecessor theory – Prof. Dale Russel’s Dinosauroid theory. I mentioned this theory previously when I discussed the Crypto-terrestrial Hypothesis (CTH). For a quick refresher, this theory was a speculation of what a divergent evolutionary path might look like had the Troodon (the smartest dinosaur) survived into the modern age. Russell did not claim the theory as a history of events, rather he was offering it as a thought experiment. Russell’s theory also predates the accepted evolutionary change from dinosaurs to birds; his 1982 paper will be published (paywall, sorry it’s the best the clankers and I can do) right around when the modern debate is going to begin.
Russell never claimed that the reptoid existed. For someone preceding Rhodes who did, we can turn to Zacharia Sitchin’s 1976 book, “The 12th Planet.” That has it all – alien races, Nibiru, human-alien hybrids – and a lot of it seems very similar to Icke’s theory.
Our path gets weird from here. According to the above cited article, Sitchin could be basing his theory on that of German Cryptozoologist and science writer Willie Ley. Ley’s belief was that the “Ishtar Gate”, which depicts several animals including the now-extinct Auroch, only depicted real animals. This would include dragons. Ley also relies on Bantu folklore of the Mokele-mbembe. I’ll be fair to Willie Ley as he seems to be buying into only a cryptozoology angle, rather than a secret race of reptile hybrids that control everything.
Circling back to the reptoids that run everything, we can find the earliest mention (ignoring Egyptian gods) in Maurice Doreal’s 1940 book, “The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean.” This is a story featuring reptoids that descend from Atlantis, have snake heads, and can take human form. Professor Michael Barkun argues that Doreal likely took his theory from the fictional work of Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom”, which follows Kull’s encounter with the serpent men who use magic to disguise their serpent form.
The story of the reptoid theory interests me because it raises the question of ownership of a conspiracy theory. Rhodes doesn’t own the theory, because conspiracy theories are presented as factual. No one can own a conspiracy theory when they present as a record of an actual event. Marvel can own the conspiracy laid out in Captain America: The Winter Soldier because it’s a fictional movie, while Icke/Rhodes and whoever else cannot, even though their theories are very similar.
This is important to philosophers like myself, because it raises the question of who should get the credit; if all these reptoid conspiracy theories track back to Kull the Conqueror, then the credit must go to the person who ‘discovered’ it as non-fiction – in the current era we have to ascribe it to Maurice Dorreal. It’s a strange story made altogether weirder by someone wishing to claim credit for ‘discovering’ the theory. Sometimes it’s the oddest things that bring us to the more interesting questions.
