The second coming of David Icke: Claiming he was the son of God made him a national joke. So why is America now falling at his feet?



Making a comeback: David Icke and his outlandish views are continuing to sell out tours in America, yet he is still one of the most ridiculed men in Britain

Americans love to hear about the mysteries of the Royal Family and David Icke wasn’t about to disappoint his 2,000-strong audience.

A seemingly innocuous picture of the Queen being greeted at the gates of Westminster Abbey for the royal wedding flashed up on the giant TV screen on the stage behind him.

‘He’s got the inverted pentagon on a circle, the classic symbol of Satanism,’ said Icke, ringing the decoration on one of the clergyman’s robe with his laser pointer. ‘It’s so obvious, I thought it must have been Photoshopped.’

But the devil-worshipper helping to officiate at the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton is apparently the least of the Royal Family’s faults. Later, the screen was filled with a photo of the Queen with slanted eyes, next to an image of a green lizard-man. This shows her Majesty in her true form, Icke explains, as a human-lizard hybrid.

Incredibly, Icke believes that the world is being run by a race of child-sacrificing, shape-shifting, reptilian aliens — and thousands of people seem to believe him.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of David Icke. But while wild claims such as these forced Icke to flee the spotlight 20 years ago — after he declared on a BBC chat show that he was the son of God — his conspiracy theories are now proving lucrative.



Icke, now 59, is, sadly, a man for our times. The messianic figure in the turquoise tracksuit (which supposedly channelled positive energy) was once the most ridiculed man in Britain. But looking at the 2,100 people who had paid £45 a head to listen to him in New York at the weekend, it seems Icke has had the last laugh.



Delusional: Icke makes his extraordinary claim that he was the son of God during an interview on Terry Wogan's chat show in 1991

The audience — many wearing Icke T-shirts, others taking down notes on their phones or posting minute-by-minute updates on Icke fan forums — sat and listened attentively as the former Coventry City footballer spent eight hours railing against U.S. government weapons, the satanic paedophile politicians leeching ‘energy’ from children and, of course, the lizard people and their plot for world domination.

He got a standing ovation and his audience headed back home to switch on their computers and immerse themselves in their world of conspiracy theory sites and chat forums.

No matter how hard they search, they’ll find few stories as unlikely as Icke’s. Goalkeeper for Coventry City before severe arthritis forced him to give up football at just 21, he became one of the BBC’s most high-profile presenters, before being sacked for refusing to pay the poll tax.

He then became a spokesman for the Green Party. By 1990, he was having mystical experiences. A psychic’s claims that Icke would ‘heal the Earth’ were widely reported, while Icke visited a burial ground in Peru — where he said a hill ‘talked’ to him.

His personal life was equally bizarre. He married Linda Atherton in 1974, but had an affair with psychic Deborah Shaw, and moved his mistress into the marital home in 1990 to live in a polygamous ménage à trois.



He subsequently divorced both Atherton and his second wife, Pamela Leigh Richards.

When, in 1991, he announced on Terry Wogan’s BBC1 chat show that he was the son of God and that the world would end in 1997, his own world fell apart.



Half lizard? Icke has bizarrely suggested the Queen and Barack Obama are part of an alien sect that run the world



Dawn-till-dusk lampooning followed and Icke retreated to his Isle of Wight home to develop his outlandish ideas. It also set him free to make far more money than he could have dreamt of staying in the Green Party.

He has written 18 books, published in 40 countries, under such titles as And The Truth Shall Set You Free and Infinite Love Is The Only Truth. His website receives 600,000 hits a week and he has a lucrative sideline selling DVD recordings of his performances for £35 a copy.

He is using his latest sell-out tour — which takes in Australia, the Netherlands, Croatia, a string of dates across the U.S. and a grand finale at Wembley Arena next October — to promote his new book Human Race Get Off Your Knees.

Americans are his biggest fans — it might explain the transatlantic accent Icke now seems to have — and it’s not hard to see why.

They have always been especially susceptible to conspiracy theories, which now constitute a multi-million dollar industry of radio shows and websites in the U.S.

Much of this is founded on a suspicion of people in power. Indeed, in a recent poll, only a quarter of U.S. adults said they trust their government.

Superstitious: Icke used to wear this fetching turquoise tracksuit as it supposedly channelled positive energy to him

So what, apart from a sore rear, does one take away from eight hours with the self-proclaimed son of God?

There’s some New Age waffling about overcoming negativity and humanity’s ‘infinite consciousness’ which cheers up listeners — but rather a lot more which alarms them.

Yet Icke’s scaremongering about a ‘New World Order’ of politicians, Zionists, financiers and secret societies — including the Jesuits, Templars and Freemasons — all plotting together to take over the world, is not all that original.

What’s different is that few of even the most wild-eyed conspiracists believe invisible alien lizard people are calling the shots.

Icke tells people we cannot ‘decode’ the reptilians because, conveniently, they are visible only on a light frequency that humans cannot detect.

Meanwhile, we have been brainwashed so that what we think is reality is only a hologram. Icke’s vision is all eerily reminiscent of the Matrix series of sci-fi films, starring Keanu Reeves, about a man who discovers we are all living in a dream world manufactured by evil supermachines.

He has plenty more of this hokey scientific gobbledygook, together with carefully cherry-picked quotes from scientists and rather longer extracts — which he laboriously reads out — from rather more dubious sources such as science fiction writers, fictional characters and even New York’s most famous serial killer, the ‘Son of Sam’ David Berkowitz.

Icke’s revelations include everything from the fact that the moon was built by aliens to the fact that the Rothschild dynasty of Jewish bankers are responsible for everything from the Russian revolution to the 2008 economic meltdown.



Popular: Icke has written 18 books while his website receives more than 600,000 hits a week. He also sells DVDs of his show at £35 a time

The lizard hybrids Icke believes in include every royal family in Europe, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Henry Kissinger, Arnold Schwarzenegger and — most mysteriously — the singer Kris Kristofferson.

The list includes plenty of Jews. Although Icke insists he isn’t anti-Semitic but only anti-Zionist, his diatribe against Jewish bankers such as Goldman Sachs and their ‘control of global bloody finance’ has alarming echoes of what the Nazis used to say.

His bombardment of ‘facts’ is so rapid that listeners barely have time to consider if they ring even remotely true. And so he argues that the New World Order is so obsessed with symbolism that it chose to assassinate Princess Diana in Paris’s Pont de l’Alma tunnel. Why? Because Pont de l’Alma means ‘passage of the moon goddess’ and Diana was named after the Roman goddess of the moon.

It sounds good — but it’s tripe: the Pont de l’Alma was named after a Crimean War battle. But who cares, Icke is on to his next revelation: that the reptilians are obsessed with twin towers. The Royal Family get married in Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s which both have twin towers and, yes, that’s why the lizards blew up the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Interviewed last week on a radio show, Icke couldn’t hide his delight that in parts of the world where he has previously ‘talked to a phone box’, he is now filling out 2,000-seat auditoriums.