Addressing The Lizard In The Room

Christian Reptilian Conspiracy Theorists

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Cults in the Wild | Someone tagged me in a clip of Eligio “Nature Boy” Bishop rambling about giving friends money versus lending money. This particular video is pretty innocuous, especially in comparison to his more harmful rhetoric and allegedly violent behaviors. I noticed in the comment section that many people were agreeing with him and asking for more information. Thankfully, there were also warnings to stay away from his content and the details about his recent arrest. 

I covered Bishop and the development of his cult, Carbon Nation in these videos: part one, part two, & part three.

That particular page is filled with 1-minute clips of Bishop talking about money, health, and wellness. There is something disingenuous about cutting out the relatively harmless bits of his speeches and sharing them online. A person introduced to Bishop through a series of these short clips, and not his intense YouTube videos, may develop a false impression of him. I do not know if the person/people running the account are intentionally spoon-feeding their followers Bishop’s “truths” or if they are just fans of some of his content. Either way, engaging with an admitted cult leader’s content in this way might be a really bad idea for a lot of people.

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The Big Post | You may have heard about Sherry Shriner and her reptilian conspiracy theories a few years ago when a woman accused of murder said that her involvement with Shriner’s cult led to an accidental murder. While researching Sherry for my series, I learned that the foundation of much of her rhetoric is the belief that Far Right Christians are God’s soldiers in the war against power-hungry reptilians.

The more I read about Sherry’s beliefs the more I wanted to understand:

1. Where did reptilian-political conspiracy theories come from?

2. How did Far Right Christians become God’s army in the fight against lizard people?

To be fully transparent I did not locate tidy answers to each of my questions. In fact, trying to get these answers kept leading me down conspiracy rabbit holes. In the interest of not permanently shifting my algorithms to far-right conspiracy content, I decided to condense my searches a bit. This is only kind of a joke.

Q1: Where did reptilian-political conspiracy theories come from?

Several researchers link the current version of this conspiracy theory to David Icke. David Icke is an anti-Semitic British conspiracy theorist whose book The Biggest Secret (1998) forwarded the idea that vampiric reptilians are in control of the world. However, Brian Dunning, a professional “debunker,” traced the origins of lizard people back to 1934. Dunning argues that G. Warren Shufelt and L. Macklin popularized a Hopi legend that gold-filled caverns, were once a 5,000-year-old underground city built by the Lizard People. Dunning’s research found that neither Shufelt nor Macklin were credible. Apparently, there was no actual proof the caverns existed and no one could locate in Hopi myths involving lizard people or underground cities made of gold. So, how did David Icke become the face of reptilian conspiracy theories? As I noted in my series on Shriner, “consistency is often mistaken for credibility.”