David Icke, English footballer and sportscaster
David Vaughan Icke (; born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist and a former footballer and sports broadcaster. He has written over 20 books, self-published since the mid-1990s, and spoken in more than 25 countries.In 1990, he visited a psychic who told him he was on Earth for a purpose and would receive messages from the spirit world. This led him to state in 1991 he was a "Son of the Godhead" and that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes, predictions he repeated on the BBC show Wogan. His appearance led to public ridicule. The books Icke wrote over the next 11 years developed his world view of New Age conspiracism. His endorsement of an antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in The Robots' Rebellion (1994) and And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995) led his publisher to stop handling his books, which have been self-published since then.Icke believes the universe to consist of "vibrational" energy and infinite dimensions sharing the same space. He claims an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings, the Archons or Anunnaki, have hijacked the Earth and a genetically modified human–Archon hybrid race of shape-shifting reptilians – the Babylonian Brotherhood, Illuminati or "elite" – manipulate events to keep humans in fear, so that the Archons can feed off the resulting "negative energy". He claims many public figures belong to the Babylonian Brotherhood and propel humanity towards a global fascist state or New World Order, a post-truth era ending freedom of speech. He sees the only way to defeat such "Archontic" influence is for people to wake up to the truth and fill their hearts with love. Critics have accused Icke of being antisemitic and a Holocaust denier with his theories of reptilians serving as a deliberate "code". Icke denies these claims.