A Slither of Reptoids
A Slither of Reptoids
By Scott Corrales
The concept of sentient reptilian creatures has been around for a very long time. Anyone who doubts this should consult the Book of Genesis to learn about a certain serpent endowed with very good powers of persuasion.
Humans feel both attracted and repulsed by reptiles: ancient tribes venerated them as totemic animals, the emblem of wisdom and hidden knowledge; The Greeks coiled snakes around the Caduceus, the sign of medicine; in Middle Eastern tradition, the hero Gilgamesh returned from his adventures with a flower of eternal life, only to lose it to a snake, guaranteeing serpentkind the gift of immortality.
The early authors of pulp fiction pitted their heroes against entire races of intelligent reptiles, usually lizard-men deep in an African or South American jungle, or else occupying vast underground domains. Some authors, like Robert E. Howard, creator of such memorable barbarian warriors as Conan and Kull, wove reptilians into the tapestry of his sword-and-sorcery account, usually as the species that preceded humans as the masters of this planet. Michael Moorcock's early hero Sojan fought against muscular lizard-men, and in science fiction, reptilians ranged from the Lizard Men of the Flash Gordon serials to Alan Dean Foster's warlike AaNN in his "Flinx of the Commonwealth" series, and what memory could be more indelible than that of the hideous reptilian aliens disguised as humans in the V television program of the mid-1980's?
But the world of the imagination and mythology do not have an exclusive claim on the belief that advanced non-human civilization of a reptilian nature once roamed the Earth before the first primate descended from the trees. The argument for lizard people living underground to "reptoids" emerging from spacecraft continues to this very day...
An Ancient Evil
Intelligent reptilian entities make their first appearance in the Testament of Amram (4QAmram), one of the texts which form part of the collective known as the Dead Sea scrolls, set in the context of the Book of Exodus but containing the admonitions of Amram,son of Kehat, to his children. Discussing a vision or dream in which he has just seen two of the Biblical "Watchers" engaged in a dispute over him, Amram raises his eyes "and saw one of them. His looks were frightening [like those of a viper] and his garments were multicolored and he was extremely dark...and afterwards I looked and behold, by his appearance and his face was like that of an adder, and he was covered with...together...and his eyes..."
Unfortunately, the gaps in the text keep Amram from describing the ominous watcher more fully, but the intent of his words is clear. (See "Angels and Aliens, Fate Magazine, December 2000). It is possible that this passage echoes even older Mesopotamian chronicles, which suggest that humanity's forebears were non-human.
Controversial researchers like Tal LeVesque suggested historical backdrops spanning twelve millenia into the Earth's past, when a battle shattered our world's surface as the Reptoids and the Elder Race (allusions to Richard Shaver's own extensive mythos) slugged it out for ultimate dominion. The fight ended in a draw as some Reptoids headed to deep space while others burrowed deep underground, become a source of worship for the human tribes left on the scarred surface. "The Reptoids are fellow members of humanity," LeVesque notes. "We are the hu-man and they are reptilian man. They became self-conscious first, before we appeared on the scene. They taught us."
British researcher Lord Clancarty (Brinsley Le Poer Trench) produced some remarkable thoughts along these lines in regard to sentient reptilians in his book The Sky People (1960). Much like Tal LeVesque, Lord Clancarty suggested that humankind was the product of a series of breeding experiments allegedly substantiated by his readings of numerous ancient texts. Behind this sweeping process would have been the highly intelligent "serpent people" who created humans as biological robots (a notion to be developed in later decades by Zechariah Sitchin) to carry out a variety of tasks. The "serpent people"'s experiment failed, theorizes the author, when the biological robots managed to reproduce. These concepts would be developed in later decades by Zechariah Sitchin's own work. But John Keel, in commenting on Lord Clancarty's work in his Our Haunted Planet (Fawcett, 1971) adds a further wrinkle: that the newly emancipated humans now faced the wrath of the "serpent people" and their survival would probably have not been possible without the intercession of a "superintelligence" that would later be worshipped as God."God worked out new means of communication and control," writes Keel, always in conflict with the serpent people." (p.139).
While these references hardly constitute proof by any standard, we are faced with even more tenuous--but nonetheless intriguing--suggestions regarding the existence of reptilian protohumans. In 1983, Science Digest featured an article by palaeontologist Dal Russell regarding a purely hypothetical creature representing the probable evolutionary path that reptilian life in the Cretaceous age would have followed toward intelligence. His model of a two-legged, two-armed sentient saurian, was developed after Stenoychosaurus Inequalus, a ten-foot tall dinosaur having a brain-body mass ratio simlar to that of early mammals. Russell's reptile humanoid caused a sensation among ufologists, who were quick to draw parallels between it and the Grey aliens. A model of the remarkable "dinosauroid" is on display in Ottawa's National Museum of Natural Sciences and has been featured in documentaries and magazines worldwide.
Neighbors Under Our Feet
The legends of the Hopi tribe concerning the nameless lizard people declares that around 4000 B.C. (a curiously precise date) a natural disaster destroyed the reptilian people's city, prompting them to go underground, where they built a network of well over a dozen cities safe against any cataclysms. Much like Turkey's underground Derinkuyu, the cities possessed dwelling units, armories, refectories and vast storerooms not only for food, but for the golden "tablets of knowledge" that chronicled the history of their people allegedly back to the world's creation.
California's Mount Shasta occupies a special place in Hopi lore precisely due to its reptilian connection One of the more notable cities was rumored to be under Mount Shasta -- a curious detail, since in 1972, a hiker claimed to have seen a half-human, half-reptile creature making its way along the slopes wearing human garb. Some have noted that this highly memorable detail suggests the reptilians--if they exist at all--may steal garments off clotheslines (a humorous notion at first, although this has been suggested as a possibility in cases involving "little people" wearing incongrous, ill-fitting human togs) or are somehow able to come into towns and villages "masquerading" as humans through some kind of mental projection, relaxing this ability as they return home to their lairs. More on this intriguing possibility later.
Possible substantiation for the Hopi myth came about in 1934, when engineer Warren Shufelt told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that beneath the City of Angels lay one of the great cities reptilian cities built in ages past. Having allegedly spoken to a Hopi chief for background information, Shufelt drilled a four hundred foot test hole under Fort Moore Hill, with the blessing of the city authorities, to reach what he termed "a treasure vault". Unfortunately no treasure was ever found and Shufelt disappeared. This is not to say that the alleged "tunnels" did not exist: apparently, some of them can be found to this very day under the UCLA campus, and one of them is supposed to have played a critical role in the smuggling of Chinese immigrants in the 19th century.
The Reptilian Abode
Belief in presence of intelligent reptilian creatures reasserted itself in the late 80's and throughtout the 1990's in ufology and its related fields, creating firestorms of controversy and lengthy (and speculative) taxonomies of the "Reptoids" as they were now called and their place within the UFO alien pecking order. The first mention of "Reptoids" in this new context involved them in the operations allegedly occuring at a subterranean base in Dulce, New Mexico, in apparent collusion with the so-called Grey aliens. One of the more sensational claims involving the Reptoids had to do with a gunfight that allegedly took place in the depths of this facility between Delta Force elements and laser-toting snakemen. According to writer Alex Christopher, the elite forces managed to kill a number of them despite sustaining casualties of their own. "If you have the drop on them, they die just like everybody else. They consist of mass just like we do." (interview on KSEO radio, 4/26/96).
In his book "E.T. Friends and Foes", author George Andrews conveys a conversation between two unidentified sources regarding the nature of the Reptoids. One of the speakers unequivocally declares that the reptilian creatures want to make use of Earth as a "staging ground" in an operation that has been going on for thousands of years and which continues apace. Andrews has issued unequivocal warnings about the reptilian entities. "The first thing to do is to alert the people to the danger represented by the predatory reptilian ET's as a preliminary to ridding the planet of them." he writes in an issue of the Beyond Boundaries newsletter (July/August 1997).
The Mexican town of Tepoztlán, roughly an hour's drive from the urban sprawl of Mexico City, is probably better known than any other place in that country for its UFO visitations, which have been captured on video and still photographs by hundreds of witnesses and conveyed around the world through documentaries and live broadcasts. The town, which has become a "new age" mecca over the course of the last century due to its ancient ruins and reputation as a focal point for benign earth energies, also boasts stories of alien contact which are somewhat less known.
One of these is chronicled in Luis Ramírez Reyes's Contacto: México (Diana, 1995) concering the experiences of Concepción Navarrete, a poor woman who operated a food stand at the base of the majestic rock formation known as El Tepozteco, a favorite UFO haunt. One day, according to Mrs. Navarrete, she was startled by the presence of a very odd creature standing near a cross-like structure marking the site where the coronations of ancient Chichimec monarchs took place. "I was deeply shocked," said the witness, "because he was facing away from me and he looked like a giant lizard, upright, standing some two meters tall. His skin was green and covered in scales." She added that the lizard being's back had a leaden grey cast to it, and the whole creature seemed to have emerged from the mud.
What occured next was probably even more incredible. The reptilian entity made a sudden about-face, as if realizing that it was being spied upon. But at that very moment, its reptilian image was replaced by that of a "blond, cordial American tourist" who inquired-- telepathically and in a somewhat mocking tone--if she had been startled by his presence. Feeling her senses overwhelmed by the entity, Navarrete cried out for help as another tourist approached. The lizard man subsequently vanished as if he had never been there. The approaching tourist calmly told Navarrete, to her astonishment, that he was aware of the lizard beings and their penchant for adopting human guise to wander among us.
A story similar to Concepción Navarrete's appears in researcher Linda Moulton Howe's Glimpses of Other Realities II (Paper Chase,1998): abductee Jim Sparks was allegedly teleported to a nocturnal rendezvous with at least a dozen large, powerfully built reptilian creatures whose true appearance was concealed by superimposed, holographic human faces. When Sparks asked to see his interlocutor's real visage, he was cautioned that to do so could be a frightening experience for him, but his wish was granted. Sparks describes the entities' faces as resembling "a cross between a lizard and a snake."
Although his output has been the subject of heated debate, mention must be made of the comments issued by British author David Icke on the matter of reptilians. Icke claims to have traveled extensively around the United States in 1998 interviewing people who witnessed reptoid-to-human conversions and viceversa. One of the most remarkable cases, in view of the accounts mentioned above, has to do with a broadcast journalist who saw the face of the man he was interviewing momentarily assume reptilian feature and then resume normal human aspect. The TV newsman's female counterpart corroborated his astonishing, claiming to have witnessed the subject's hands acquire reptilian characteristics momentarily.
The Navarrete and Sparks cases suggest that the reptilian entities don these disguises to facilitate interaction with humans, whose aversion to reptiles might become manifest. Curiously enough, this was the reason given by the Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End for not revealing themselves upon their arrival on Earth--their batwinged, devilish appearance would been a source of global panic. But Icke's case involving the broadcast journalists hints at a near-perfect control of human guise for operating undetected in our midst.
Conclusion
It is interesting to note that in spite of their presence in ancient chronicles and native legends, sentient reptilian beings do not make an appearance in ufology until relatively recent times. A listing of alien creatures compiled by the late Otto Binder for SAGA UFO Report in 1975 under the ingenious heading "Unidentified Walking Objects" (UWO) reveals a motley array of saucer occupants worthy of the Star Wars Cantina: dwarves with hairy bodies, creatures with glowing orange eyes, ones with three-fingered hands, green skin and hair...but no reptilians. Could contemporary researchers be correct in their belief that the Reptoids are in fact a by-product of the abduction-filled late '80s and early '90s?
By Scott Corrales
The concept of sentient reptilian creatures has been around for a very long time. Anyone who doubts this should consult the Book of Genesis to learn about a certain serpent endowed with very good powers of persuasion.
Humans feel both attracted and repulsed by reptiles: ancient tribes venerated them as totemic animals, the emblem of wisdom and hidden knowledge; The Greeks coiled snakes around the Caduceus, the sign of medicine; in Middle Eastern tradition, the hero Gilgamesh returned from his adventures with a flower of eternal life, only to lose it to a snake, guaranteeing serpentkind the gift of immortality.
The early authors of pulp fiction pitted their heroes against entire races of intelligent reptiles, usually lizard-men deep in an African or South American jungle, or else occupying vast underground domains. Some authors, like Robert E. Howard, creator of such memorable barbarian warriors as Conan and Kull, wove reptilians into the tapestry of his sword-and-sorcery account, usually as the species that preceded humans as the masters of this planet. Michael Moorcock's early hero Sojan fought against muscular lizard-men, and in science fiction, reptilians ranged from the Lizard Men of the Flash Gordon serials to Alan Dean Foster's warlike AaNN in his "Flinx of the Commonwealth" series, and what memory could be more indelible than that of the hideous reptilian aliens disguised as humans in the V television program of the mid-1980's?
But the world of the imagination and mythology do not have an exclusive claim on the belief that advanced non-human civilization of a reptilian nature once roamed the Earth before the first primate descended from the trees. The argument for lizard people living underground to "reptoids" emerging from spacecraft continues to this very day...
An Ancient Evil
Intelligent reptilian entities make their first appearance in the Testament of Amram (4QAmram), one of the texts which form part of the collective known as the Dead Sea scrolls, set in the context of the Book of Exodus but containing the admonitions of Amram,son of Kehat, to his children. Discussing a vision or dream in which he has just seen two of the Biblical "Watchers" engaged in a dispute over him, Amram raises his eyes "and saw one of them. His looks were frightening [like those of a viper] and his garments were multicolored and he was extremely dark...and afterwards I looked and behold, by his appearance and his face was like that of an adder, and he was covered with...together...and his eyes..."
Unfortunately, the gaps in the text keep Amram from describing the ominous watcher more fully, but the intent of his words is clear. (See "Angels and Aliens, Fate Magazine, December 2000). It is possible that this passage echoes even older Mesopotamian chronicles, which suggest that humanity's forebears were non-human.
Controversial researchers like Tal LeVesque suggested historical backdrops spanning twelve millenia into the Earth's past, when a battle shattered our world's surface as the Reptoids and the Elder Race (allusions to Richard Shaver's own extensive mythos) slugged it out for ultimate dominion. The fight ended in a draw as some Reptoids headed to deep space while others burrowed deep underground, become a source of worship for the human tribes left on the scarred surface. "The Reptoids are fellow members of humanity," LeVesque notes. "We are the hu-man and they are reptilian man. They became self-conscious first, before we appeared on the scene. They taught us."
British researcher Lord Clancarty (Brinsley Le Poer Trench) produced some remarkable thoughts along these lines in regard to sentient reptilians in his book The Sky People (1960). Much like Tal LeVesque, Lord Clancarty suggested that humankind was the product of a series of breeding experiments allegedly substantiated by his readings of numerous ancient texts. Behind this sweeping process would have been the highly intelligent "serpent people" who created humans as biological robots (a notion to be developed in later decades by Zechariah Sitchin) to carry out a variety of tasks. The "serpent people"'s experiment failed, theorizes the author, when the biological robots managed to reproduce. These concepts would be developed in later decades by Zechariah Sitchin's own work. But John Keel, in commenting on Lord Clancarty's work in his Our Haunted Planet (Fawcett, 1971) adds a further wrinkle: that the newly emancipated humans now faced the wrath of the "serpent people" and their survival would probably have not been possible without the intercession of a "superintelligence" that would later be worshipped as God."God worked out new means of communication and control," writes Keel, always in conflict with the serpent people." (p.139).
While these references hardly constitute proof by any standard, we are faced with even more tenuous--but nonetheless intriguing--suggestions regarding the existence of reptilian protohumans. In 1983, Science Digest featured an article by palaeontologist Dal Russell regarding a purely hypothetical creature representing the probable evolutionary path that reptilian life in the Cretaceous age would have followed toward intelligence. His model of a two-legged, two-armed sentient saurian, was developed after Stenoychosaurus Inequalus, a ten-foot tall dinosaur having a brain-body mass ratio simlar to that of early mammals. Russell's reptile humanoid caused a sensation among ufologists, who were quick to draw parallels between it and the Grey aliens. A model of the remarkable "dinosauroid" is on display in Ottawa's National Museum of Natural Sciences and has been featured in documentaries and magazines worldwide.
Neighbors Under Our Feet
The legends of the Hopi tribe concerning the nameless lizard people declares that around 4000 B.C. (a curiously precise date) a natural disaster destroyed the reptilian people's city, prompting them to go underground, where they built a network of well over a dozen cities safe against any cataclysms. Much like Turkey's underground Derinkuyu, the cities possessed dwelling units, armories, refectories and vast storerooms not only for food, but for the golden "tablets of knowledge" that chronicled the history of their people allegedly back to the world's creation.
California's Mount Shasta occupies a special place in Hopi lore precisely due to its reptilian connection One of the more notable cities was rumored to be under Mount Shasta -- a curious detail, since in 1972, a hiker claimed to have seen a half-human, half-reptile creature making its way along the slopes wearing human garb. Some have noted that this highly memorable detail suggests the reptilians--if they exist at all--may steal garments off clotheslines (a humorous notion at first, although this has been suggested as a possibility in cases involving "little people" wearing incongrous, ill-fitting human togs) or are somehow able to come into towns and villages "masquerading" as humans through some kind of mental projection, relaxing this ability as they return home to their lairs. More on this intriguing possibility later.
Possible substantiation for the Hopi myth came about in 1934, when engineer Warren Shufelt told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that beneath the City of Angels lay one of the great cities reptilian cities built in ages past. Having allegedly spoken to a Hopi chief for background information, Shufelt drilled a four hundred foot test hole under Fort Moore Hill, with the blessing of the city authorities, to reach what he termed "a treasure vault". Unfortunately no treasure was ever found and Shufelt disappeared. This is not to say that the alleged "tunnels" did not exist: apparently, some of them can be found to this very day under the UCLA campus, and one of them is supposed to have played a critical role in the smuggling of Chinese immigrants in the 19th century.
The Reptilian Abode
Belief in presence of intelligent reptilian creatures reasserted itself in the late 80's and throughtout the 1990's in ufology and its related fields, creating firestorms of controversy and lengthy (and speculative) taxonomies of the "Reptoids" as they were now called and their place within the UFO alien pecking order. The first mention of "Reptoids" in this new context involved them in the operations allegedly occuring at a subterranean base in Dulce, New Mexico, in apparent collusion with the so-called Grey aliens. One of the more sensational claims involving the Reptoids had to do with a gunfight that allegedly took place in the depths of this facility between Delta Force elements and laser-toting snakemen. According to writer Alex Christopher, the elite forces managed to kill a number of them despite sustaining casualties of their own. "If you have the drop on them, they die just like everybody else. They consist of mass just like we do." (interview on KSEO radio, 4/26/96).
In his book "E.T. Friends and Foes", author George Andrews conveys a conversation between two unidentified sources regarding the nature of the Reptoids. One of the speakers unequivocally declares that the reptilian creatures want to make use of Earth as a "staging ground" in an operation that has been going on for thousands of years and which continues apace. Andrews has issued unequivocal warnings about the reptilian entities. "The first thing to do is to alert the people to the danger represented by the predatory reptilian ET's as a preliminary to ridding the planet of them." he writes in an issue of the Beyond Boundaries newsletter (July/August 1997).
The Mexican town of Tepoztlán, roughly an hour's drive from the urban sprawl of Mexico City, is probably better known than any other place in that country for its UFO visitations, which have been captured on video and still photographs by hundreds of witnesses and conveyed around the world through documentaries and live broadcasts. The town, which has become a "new age" mecca over the course of the last century due to its ancient ruins and reputation as a focal point for benign earth energies, also boasts stories of alien contact which are somewhat less known.
One of these is chronicled in Luis Ramírez Reyes's Contacto: México (Diana, 1995) concering the experiences of Concepción Navarrete, a poor woman who operated a food stand at the base of the majestic rock formation known as El Tepozteco, a favorite UFO haunt. One day, according to Mrs. Navarrete, she was startled by the presence of a very odd creature standing near a cross-like structure marking the site where the coronations of ancient Chichimec monarchs took place. "I was deeply shocked," said the witness, "because he was facing away from me and he looked like a giant lizard, upright, standing some two meters tall. His skin was green and covered in scales." She added that the lizard being's back had a leaden grey cast to it, and the whole creature seemed to have emerged from the mud.
What occured next was probably even more incredible. The reptilian entity made a sudden about-face, as if realizing that it was being spied upon. But at that very moment, its reptilian image was replaced by that of a "blond, cordial American tourist" who inquired-- telepathically and in a somewhat mocking tone--if she had been startled by his presence. Feeling her senses overwhelmed by the entity, Navarrete cried out for help as another tourist approached. The lizard man subsequently vanished as if he had never been there. The approaching tourist calmly told Navarrete, to her astonishment, that he was aware of the lizard beings and their penchant for adopting human guise to wander among us.
A story similar to Concepción Navarrete's appears in researcher Linda Moulton Howe's Glimpses of Other Realities II (Paper Chase,1998): abductee Jim Sparks was allegedly teleported to a nocturnal rendezvous with at least a dozen large, powerfully built reptilian creatures whose true appearance was concealed by superimposed, holographic human faces. When Sparks asked to see his interlocutor's real visage, he was cautioned that to do so could be a frightening experience for him, but his wish was granted. Sparks describes the entities' faces as resembling "a cross between a lizard and a snake."
Although his output has been the subject of heated debate, mention must be made of the comments issued by British author David Icke on the matter of reptilians. Icke claims to have traveled extensively around the United States in 1998 interviewing people who witnessed reptoid-to-human conversions and viceversa. One of the most remarkable cases, in view of the accounts mentioned above, has to do with a broadcast journalist who saw the face of the man he was interviewing momentarily assume reptilian feature and then resume normal human aspect. The TV newsman's female counterpart corroborated his astonishing, claiming to have witnessed the subject's hands acquire reptilian characteristics momentarily.
The Navarrete and Sparks cases suggest that the reptilian entities don these disguises to facilitate interaction with humans, whose aversion to reptiles might become manifest. Curiously enough, this was the reason given by the Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End for not revealing themselves upon their arrival on Earth--their batwinged, devilish appearance would been a source of global panic. But Icke's case involving the broadcast journalists hints at a near-perfect control of human guise for operating undetected in our midst.
Conclusion
It is interesting to note that in spite of their presence in ancient chronicles and native legends, sentient reptilian beings do not make an appearance in ufology until relatively recent times. A listing of alien creatures compiled by the late Otto Binder for SAGA UFO Report in 1975 under the ingenious heading "Unidentified Walking Objects" (UWO) reveals a motley array of saucer occupants worthy of the Star Wars Cantina: dwarves with hairy bodies, creatures with glowing orange eyes, ones with three-fingered hands, green skin and hair...but no reptilians. Could contemporary researchers be correct in their belief that the Reptoids are in fact a by-product of the abduction-filled late '80s and early '90s?
posted by Inexplicata (IHU) at 12:00 PM
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