Shape-Shifting Lizards from Space - An Exercise in Logic

An Englishman named David Icke has spawned a subculture of people who accept his claims that the Earth is ruled by a conspiracy of shape-shifting reptilian aliens posing as human, from a planet around a star in the constellation Draco. Most people would shrug and laugh this off. I know I do. I think I can show how unlikely it is. I am not a scientist and I don’t play one on TV, but I know a thing or two about a thing or two, so here goes.
David Icke is a former football (soccer, to Americans) star who became a successful sportscaster and spokesperson for the Green Party in the UK. One day, on Terry Wogan’s popular BBC talk show he announced on live primetime television that he was the son of God and that he would only wear turquoise-colored clothing, among other things. Now this article is not an ad hominem attack on David Icke, but an examination of the heart of his claims, so let’s leave his alleged divinity and his sartorial tastes and look at the implications of his allegations about aliens.
When analyzing a claim it’s useful to apply Occam’s Razor. Simply put, it’s a logical principle that the explanation based on the fewest unprovable assumptions is one the more likely to be true. If my dog gets out of the yard, you may argue that a helicopter came down and tossed a line around Spot and carried him out of the yard. Without solid evidence that this happened, it is more reasonable to assume that I left the gate to the yard open. Dogs get out because gates get left open all the time. Even if the gate is now closed we can find lots of everyday reasons why it might have been open before and now is closed. It is vanishingly rare for helicopters to abduct dogs from suburban yards and drop them in the street or for freak mini-tornadoes to lift them over the fence. Let’s apply this principle to our alleged alien overlords.
It seems they come from a planet around a star in the constellation Draco. “Draco” means dragon and dragons are imaginary reptiles. This is an awfully big coincidence. Not impossible, but an awfully large coincidence nonetheless. Okay, so somewhere in Draco there is a star, and this star has at least one planet. That’s not an incredibly huge leap. This planet is special – it has life on it. Again, not impossible. Earth has life on it and if it happened on one planet it could happen on another. Now, knowing what we are told about the beings from this planet, we can make some assumptions about it.
First, this life is remarkably similar to Earthly life. These reptilians can live and reproduce here in some degree of comfort. This implies that their planet has gravity similar to ours. The relationship between our bodies and our gravity is an ancient one, one that we have usually taken for granted. Our adventures in space are only beginning but we already see that gravity has effects on our bones, muscles and circulatory systems. It seems reasonable to assume that it has an effect on gestation, too. It appears that our gravity is near enough to their world of origin for them to get along here. The next point is that the composition of their world must be fairly similar to ours, too. They do not appear to suffer any serious ill effects from the overabundance or absence of any minerals in our food and water, or from the balance of gases in the atmosphere. Given two planets with similar gravity and chemical composition, it’s fair to assume they’re of similar size orbiting similar suns. Backing this assumption is that our sunlight doesn’t seem to have any seriously harmful effect on them, or lacks something they can’t do without. Add to this that they tolerate our range of temperatures you must place their planet in an orbit around its sun similar to Earth’s around our sun. Pretty amazing, that. Two planets of roughly the same size, composition and orbit. That’s got to be pretty rare - astronomically rare. It gets better.
You see, they breathe oxygen, just like us. Now Earth didn’t always have much oxygen free in the atmosphere, and on a world so similar to ours it’s a fair assumption that it was that way too. Free oxygen is not readily found in environments that are friendly to newly-evolved life. Oxygen was once a deadly poison to most living things and still is to some Earthly organisms. Early plants liberated the oxygen from the carbon dioxide they breathed in and used, letting the oxygen go as a waste product. So, on this very similar planet, some living things excreted a lot of oxygen into the air and other things evolved to take advantage of this oxygen, just like on Earth. There is no clear reason why they should be carbon-based like us, or why they should breathe oxygen instead of say, hydrogen sulfide. Their atmosphere has other similarities to ours, too. The amount of nitrogen in our atmosphere doesn’t faze them at all. We can live with far less nitrogen than we do, but if we absorb too much, it’s poisonous to us. Divers used to die from nitrogen poisoning (“nitrogen narcosis”) in days gone by. Even too much oxygen can be almost as harmful as too little. Atmospheric pressure is also crucial in determining how our bodies interact with the gases we breathe. The reptilians breathe here without a hitch – virtually identical atmospheres, and with the implication that plant and animal life evolved in a similar manner on both worlds. Amazed yet? It gets even better (worse?).
The next shocker is that these reptilians look a lot like us. They have a body plan virtually identical to ours. They stand on two legs; have two arms, an abdomen, a chest, a head at the top of a neck, and all in very similar proportions to ours (I imagine them as looking like Albert Alligator in the old Pogo comic strip.). Their heads have two eyes, two ears, one mouth with teeth, all remarkably similar in appearance and layout to their human equivalents. Their size is also similar. We are told they range in size from about five to about twelve feet in height. There is no really good reason why they should share any of these characteristics with us. I have seen no claims that they have five digits on their limbs, but I would say it’s a good bet. Why not three, six or eight limbs? Four hands? Ten eyes? Why do they even have a body plan based on bilateral symmetry (a body divisible into essentially similar left and right sides)? I don’t know and you probably don’t either. As near as our science can tell, we just came out that way and we could have evolved differently than we did. If they are real, it is a pretty amazing example of convergent evolution. I hope your mind hasn’t boggled too much yet because there’s more to come.
At this point, any idea of convergent evolution goes right out the window. In addition to sharing our biochemistry and body plan, they use DNA for heredity. Earthly DNA uses four chemicals, referred to as bases, to spell out its instructions. It appears that the possibility exists that other bases could function in DNA. But these alien lizards can mate with humans! They not only use the same DNA for their heredity but they must also use the same kinds of RNA that transmits the DNA’s instructions. Their cells must also have the same basic structures inside them to be so compatible with ours, structures that evolved very early, when there was only single-celled life on Earth. There are several major implications here. To mate with humans they must have two sexes. These two sexes must function just like ours in terms of having sperm and eggs and the proteins on the surface of their sperm must be essentially identical to those of human sperm, or they would never fertilize human ova. Likewise for their egg cells if they mate their females with our males. Their DNA has to be arranged in forty-six chromosomes, just like humans, and unlike most other creatures on our planet, too. Our closest Earthly relatives, the great apes, share about 98 to 99% of their DNA with us, but we can’t mate with them. Their DNA is arranged differently in their chromosomes and the differing part is too different to be compatible. Apparently the reptilians also find at least some humans sexually attractive in some way. Here on Earth, physically and socially healthy individuals have no sexual interest in members of other species. Very few gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orang utans or humans have any interest in mating with any other species, not even our fellow primates - their sex organs are very different and their mating habits aren’t any too similar either. Yet here are these human-like but nonhuman green skinned lizard types who have come from untold light years away happily crossing with hairy pink and brown, moist, probably overheated primates. Did I say convergent evolution went out the window? Actually, it has left the yard, gone down the road to the highway and on to the nearest spaceport and when last seen it was heading for the edge of the Universe at warp speed, taking probability and reason along for the ride.
You are probably asking yourself by now, “If they’re here, why don’t we see them?” Well, there’s an app for that. They are shape-shifters. That’s right, just like countless aliens of science fiction, they can alter their appearance at will. They must also alter their mass, because a twelve-foot tall lizard that weighs one hundred and seventy pounds would be painfully skinny and fragile. Likewise, if a twelve-footer weighs a more appropriate three or four hundred pounds, then when it is disguised as a five-foot-something human what does it do with the extra mass? This is a remarkable property. I wonder, how do they alter their bones? Changing the appearance of skin is not impossible. Chameleons and octopuses do it all the time. An octopus can also change its shape to some extent because it has no bones and no shell. Bones, on the other hand, are made of a very hard mineral. They grow over years and take months to heal from the slightest break because they have only limited blood circulation and demand large amounts of mineral salts that are less common in our diet than the elements we use for most of our chemistry. Yet here are these creatures who have exactly the same DNA, body structure and biochemistry that we do, and they apparently change the size and shape of their bones at will. They also seem to be able to shed mass in violation of all known physics without any of that messy creation of massive amounts of heat that seems to be required of instant mass loss, and regain it just as fast without eating a couple of elephants or carloads of vegetables. Had enough yet? It gets weirder from here.
You see, these beings came here to rule over us. In spite of having the technology to fly across the Universe, they are pretty incompetent rulers. Our cousins, the apes, are comprehensible to us because we are so similar. The reptilians, appearances aside, must be even more similar to us, so it’s reasonable to assume that their behaviors must also be broadly similar to ours. Now if we found a planet that was so improbably similar to ours and we could reach it, it would be a treasure. We would want to explore and study it, maybe colonize it. If it were found inhabited by even somewhat intelligent beings of lesser development it would set off a great debate as to how to deal with them. There are three basic approaches: beneficent, neutral and malign. The beneficent approach might mean trying to help them and speed their development. It would be interference with good intent. A neutral approach might call for taking some remote uninhabited place for a base or colony, keeping out of the way until they were ready to encounter us. The reptilians, we are told, drink human blood, molest human children and secretly manipulate human society for their own ends: malign it is, then: they came to our planet to dominate us. Humans, we know, are commonly violent, deceitful, curious, stubborn, and generally resistant to being conquered even by our own kind. The reptilians are said to have come here about three thousand years ago. At that time, humanity was scattered and less numerous than today, and our best weapons were the bow and the bronze sword, and not everyone had them. We are also not very different among mammals in our biochemistry. If they didn’t want any trouble, why not use their superior technology to wipe us out and use the immense herds of large animals worldwide for blood? Why not go on to terraform (dracoform?) the entire planet to make it more to their liking? Assuming we had some value as slaves, or our blood had some special value, say for ritual purposes, why not domesticate a few humans, wipe out or isolate the rest and selectively breed the captive population for docility? Some say they’ve already domesticated us and made us docile – they use the word “sheeple” a lot; if it happened, they haven’t done a very good job. Instead, they hide among us in human form to rule as if they were humans, in a secret cabal, occasionally mating with us. This is the worst way to keep power that I can think of. They supposedly make up the ruling classes and yet they disseminate their genes with their super-secret power of shape-shifting among us slaves. One of their supposed clans is the British royal family. Everyone knows that the British royals never kept their genes to themselves but have produced endless numbers of royal bastards, at least up to the time of Victoria and most likely well beyond (This would also suggest that we are sexually attractive to them in spite of being a different species. Perverts From Space!) They also rule through the Rothschild family, or so we are told. Good thinking. If you want to rule secretly, do it as members of a minority that is already distrusted, feared and discriminated against. It must be far more effective than infiltrating the Borgias of the 15th Century to gain the Papacy, or the Manchus, or the dynasty founded by Julius Caesar, or the Habsburgs. Or did they? If they did, it didn’t work too well since all those families have become as irrelevant as the British royals are fast becoming. They also leaked a document that lays out their plans for world domination. It’s none other than the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. If you’re already a secret cabal, why risk a book at all, especially one so poorly written? Why not just require everyone to memorize the plan? Why cast it as a plan involving that same oppressed minority? Why do you need one that seems to have plagiarized a third-rate ghost story by an obscure 19th Century German novelist and an even more obscure 19th Century pamphlet attacking Napoleon the Third? And why did it take three thousand years to come up with a plan for global domination? Why ignore all their super alien technology? Why bother with manipulating politics, finance, and the mass media in an increasingly technological society when they could so easily have crushed the simple societies of the Bronze Age? Why even set out to rule a world thirty centuries away from inventing the flush toilet and the sewage plant? Why would they be so indolent as to need thirty centuries to get their act together with so little result? And why would they be so careless as to let a jock with no scientific training, no experience in government, intelligence or investigation, tumble to their plot and spread it all over the world?
Given the unlikelihood of their even existing at all, you’d have to be massively ignorant and a little warped to believe in them. Assuming even for one second that they do exist on Earth, there’s no reason to fear such hapless incompetents.
Let the lizards bring it on. They don’t stand a chance.