This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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In 1983, there was an exciting sci-fi miniseries that aired on television called V. The story follows the arrival of seemingly friendly aliens who come to Earth and seem to want to cooperate and benefit humanity.
At some point, there’s a shocking reveal when we discover, along with actor Mark Singer’s character Mike, that the aliens are not what they seem.
They look human, but actually they’re rodent-eating lizard people and they’re not here to help us after all.
The whole thing’s a thinly disguised metaphorical warning about fascism and the lack of humanity which that political approach inherently conceals.
I say conceals, at least until it can get away with not having to hide its nastier components.
In other words, V’s very clearly based on the premise that fascism is bad.
Thus, it was extraordinarily ironic to see these same story beats of V being used as a framework for online conspiracy theories like those used in QAnon.
The reversal, of course, being that instead of the lizards being the fascists in the conspiracy theories, these lizard people are coded to be Jews.
On the surface, to a rational, educated person with at least a modicum of biology training, the idea of lizard people is laughably naive and impossible.
but conspiracies don’t really thrive in an ecosystem of fact-checking and slow, deliberate consideration.
The story of lizard people is older than the 1980s, and it’s more complex than this single example, but being a child of the 1980s, when I think of lizard people, I can’t help but remember the alien Diana swallowing a whole guinea pig.
I re-watched that segment while prepping this intro, and it holds up pretty well.
at least as well as her big 1980s hair.
Honestly, now I want to go rewatch that whole show.
But first, let’s stop and have a chat with return guest in front of the show, Dr. Joe Laycock, who’s going to share some of his research into the fascinating and often troubling topic of lizard people.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
All right, today we’re joined again by friend of the show and master of the monstrous in the academic world, Dr. Joe Laycock.
Joe’s an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University.
He holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Boston University.
He’s the co-editor of the journal Novo Religio and the author of several essential books for any Monster Talk library, including The Exorcist Effect and his latest book, The Penguin Book of Cults.
I’m pretty sure this is Joe’s eighth appearance on the show, and he’s here today to help us peel back the skin on his latest research, the fascinating, bizarre, and often troubling world of lizard people.
Monster Talk.
We’re glad to have you back.
Yes, very, as always.
It’s always fun to do Monster Talks.
I’m glad to be back.
When you told me you were researching lizard people, I got simultaneously really excited and also worried because it’s one of those topics that’s got some darkness in it, but it’s got some good stuff.
So I’m really interested to talk to you.
We actually were just talking about you because…
we had just covered sort of the rip from the headlines, Morgan Geyser updates about the Slender Man attacks.
And so if listeners want to hear that, that was episode 10 of season five, which was just a few weeks ago.
But yeah, so, but that was, you came up because you and Natasha had talked to us and that was the episode where we also discussed the real history of Tulpas versus how they’ve been sort of
repurposed in pop culture um new age thinking etc so yeah yeah but but lizard people joe lizard people what’s up with lizard people why dear god why yeah the lizard people conspiracy theory it’s become kind of metonymy for everything insane uh on the internets
And it’s been covered, you know, kind of in passing in books on conspiracy theories or books on cryptozoology.
But no one has ever really kind of done the history of this idea from beginning to end.
And it’s an old idea because Michael Barkun traced it back to the story The Shadow Kingdom, published in 1929 in Weird Tales by Robert E. Howard, which means this is almost 100 years old.
We’ve had 100 years.
of lizard people.
David Icke was actually extremely late to the game coming in the late 90s, and he was kind of the Paul the Apostle of lizard people, right?
He made it a global phenomenon, but it had been around for a long time before that.
So I wanted to kind of see how we got from Robert E. Howard to kind of where we’re at today, especially with…
this bombing that happened Christmas morning 2020 in Nashville, where this guy blew up an AT&T tower, or he tried to, and left this manifesto that he was out to fight the reptilian shapeshifters.
So that’s another piece of it, is that the more I’ve kind of looked into newspaper archives, I’ve found about 20 crimes, including…
bombings and attempted bombings and murders and suicides connected to this conspiracy theory and of course the irony is i start to sound like a conspiracy theorist myself right where i have all these clippings about crimes and i’m saying no one sees the pattern but me this means something
So anyways, I’ve got this book project I’ve been working on.
I would like to do it as a trade book.
I would like this to not be a university press book that costs like $50 and you can only order online.
But getting my foot in the door with a trade press is difficult.
It’s a new process for me.
And it’s just hard to get your foot in the door with lizard people.
People see lizard people and they just assume you have nothing serious to say.
This is not anything that anybody is going to want to hear.
Why is there this connection then between these stories, these cases that you’re finding and lizard people?
What’s the link there?
Well, I mean, a lot of these people seem to have symptoms of schizophrenia and so forth, right?
So it is one thing to read about lizard people on the Internet and say, you know, I wonder if there’s something to this.
Who knows?
Those are some pretty spooky YouTube videos where they zoom in really close on somebody’s eye.
It’s another thing, though, to say, I can see people shapeshifting around me, right?
So one of these people who was arrested for stabbing his brother with a sword when he was being interrogated by the sheriff’s department said, I can see you turning into lizards right now, right?
So there are places where kind of mental illness intersects with other things going on in the culture, right?
But I don’t think this is reducible to mental illness.
I think there’s other factors here.
One of the things that I started looking at when I was trying to see if this is an older pattern is things like, well, your listeners may have heard of Bridget Cleary in Ireland who was set on fire by her husband who thought that she was a changeling.
I know we’ve talked about that case at least once.
Yeah, of people killing other people because they think you’re not who you say you are.
You’re some sort of supernatural creature.
And this is a place where folklore kind of fills in the nature of people’s sort of delusions or anxieties.
So even though there’s a medical dimension to this, there’s also a cultural one.
Yeah.
So let’s assume that some of our listeners may not be as read into this material as we are.
How would you introduce the shape-changing lizard person to someone who is monster curious, but not conspiracy defined?
That’s a weird question.
Yeah.
I think it helps to begin in the beginning.
It’s a very good place to start.
Robert E. Howard, famous for creating Conan the Barbarian.
He writes this story in 1929.
Some people have said this is the first true sword and sorcery story.
Because it’s in entirely fictional settings.
And it’s not a Conan story.
It’s a Call the Conqueror story, who I think is vaguely Conan’s ancestor from Atlantis.
And terribly played by Kevin Sorbo.
Oh, don’t even get me started.
Very forgettable film.
But Cull the Conqueror has conquered this kingdom called Volusia, and it’s explained to him that there’s these ancient snake people, and they sort of fought a war against humans at the beginning of time, and they lost, and everyone thought they were extinct, but they’re not.
They can shapeshift, and they’ve used their shapeshifting powers to take over the kingdom, and so they rule the kingdom by proxy.
And since this is a Robert E. Howard story, when his character finds out about this,
He just kills everybody and that solves the problem, right?
Lovecraft characters all just faint and go insane.
Robert E. Howard characters just kill everything with weapons.
But this is a really successful story.
They lead by example, right?
That’s right.
This makes Howard kind of one of the best writers or most famous writers in Weird Tales at the time.
And we actually went out to Cross Plains, Texas, where Robert E. Howard is from.
And this sort of cult of Robert E. Howard went and found the writing desk.
A cult of cults, if you will.
They found the writing desk that he used to write on, and it’s at his old house.
So we could see this is the room where serpent people were unleashed onto the world.
And then Howard was friends with…
Lovecraft and this whole circle of pulp writers.
And so other people begin writing stories about ancient serpent men from Atlantis and this kind of thing.
And it becomes almost a kind of meme.
And this story keeps showing up again and again in pop culture.
So in the 1960s, there was this cult soap opera called Dark Shadows.
They did a season with these antagonists called Leviathans, who are vaguely serpent themed.
That was Dan Curtis’s show, right?
I think that was Dan Curtis.
Yeah.
Yeah, these extra-dimensional entities, and they were banished in an ancient war, but they’re coming back, and they have this device called the Naga Box that they can use to mind-control people.
Even the 80s cartoon G.I.
Joe…
Did an episode where there are these snake people that live in the Himalayas.
Tibet comes up a lot in this lore, and they lost a war against humanity thousands of years ago, but they’ve been ruling from the shadows, and they’re going to take it back.
I mean, you could argue Cobra is all snake people.
Sure.
They’ll fight for freedom wherever there’s trouble.
G.I.
Joe is there.
G.I.
Joe.
A real American hero.
G.I.
Joe is there.
Right, yeah.
But now we know, well, they’re not just snakes because they’re deceptive or venomous.
It’s because they’re literally controlled by snake people who were wiped out in the Ice Age.
Are You Afraid of the Dark on Nickelodeon did an episode about this called A Tale of the Hatching.
Even South Park had episodes with the crab people who live underground in the Hollow Earth and were banished thousands of years ago and sort of corrupting human culture.
So even if you’ve never read The Shadow Kingdom, you’ve encountered this idea through all these different places.
So what happens next is someone says, this isn’t just a story.
This isn’t just fiction.
This is real.
This is an occult secret.
And that is this figure called Maurice Dorial, who starts a group out in Colorado called the Brotherhood of the White Temple.
Sorry, Colorado.
That group still exists, by the way.
And if you look at their website, it says, yes, we’re called the Brotherhood of the White Temple.
We promise it doesn’t have anything to do with white supremacy.
Wow.
You need that disclaimer.
In the 30s, it wasn’t such a controversial name.
But during the Great Depression, you had a lot of these kind of mail order occult groups, right?
And you could kind of send away and they would mail you the secrets of the Rosicrucian order and things like this.
Actually, in Weird Tales, in the 1929 issue where The Shadow King was published, in the margins, it says, you know, do you want to learn…
Ancient occult secrets we’ll send away to the Rosicrucians, and we’ll give you a correspondence course on the occult.
So there were a lot of groups like this, and Maurice Dorial tries his hand at it, and the kind of special sauce that he gets to make his group stand out is, serpent people are real.
And it’s this kind of ancient occult secret.
And people have gone through some of his writings and they found references to not only the Shadow Kingdom, but to several other pulp stories, all of which were published in Weird Tales in 1929.
So we have kind of this image of this guy sort of going through the pulps and thinking, oh, this could be an ancient secret from Atlantis.
And then he even gets through Ray Palmer crossover with the Shaver Mysteries.
Oh.
Wow.
Yeah.
So he writes in to Ray Palmer and Ray Palmer says, gosh, this sounds so much like the Darrow.
You know, do you think the serpent stuff means the Darrow are real?
And there’s this kind of cross pollination that goes on there.
So I found everything I could find archivally.
on the Brotherhood of the White Temple.
And it was actually a pretty successful group.
It went from being a mail order group to having a physical building and finally to having its own community.
Maurice Dorial began saying that the end of the world is going to come.
There’s going to be a nuclear war and everybody has to go and live in this valley in Colorado.
And he said the…
These mountains contain a lot of lead, which is going to shield us from the radiation.
And then they even got a bunch of dynamite and they said, if we need to, we can blow up the pass into the valley so that, you know, post-apocalyptic warlords or whatever cannot come in here and get us.
And this whole community was built.
And then he passed away in the early 60s and the community kind of continued to limp along.
And actually one story I found, which was pretty interesting, was from the 70s.
And the community had like an OK relationship with the town.
And they had some Halloween party for the kids out in one of their empty buildings.
And one of the guys from town is trying to fill up a bucket for bobbing apples.
And the water is switched off.
So he goes down to the basement to see if he can switch it back on.
And he finds piles and piles of dynamite in this room where they’re about to have a children’s Halloween party.
Holy moly.
Oh, that’s right.
That’s where we put the dynamite that we had to make sure that we could blow up the pass if we need to.
We forgot about that.
And listeners, remember, if you’re storing dynamite, first don’t.
And over time, it starts to sweat nitroglycerin.
It’s not really great.
Yeah, so.
It’s worse than raisins and apples, yeah.
Yeah, quite a bit worse.
So, I mean, of course, nothing bad happens, and eventually they get the ATF out there, and they confiscate the dynamite, and they dispose of the sticks that had gotten sweaty and deemed dangerous.
No children were harmed, but it’s a pretty kind of…
interesting item to find, right?
Historically, it’s interesting in a lot of ways because you have all these elements that would later be a sure indicator that somebody’s going to get shot or blowed up real good.
And none of that happens.
That’s amazing.
Right.
Yeah.
I love stories like that, right?
Where I have to ruminate over something tragic that happened.
And so the Brotherhood of the White Temple is sort of what puts this idea out there in the public consciousness as being something that could be real.
And it’s still framed in kind of an occult register of these are these ancient beings and they’re extra dimensional and the Atlanteans knew about them.
And then after 1947, we get UFOs, and very quickly it shifts from they are coming from deep inside the Earth, they’re coming from another dimension, to these are aliens, right?
These are shape-shifting aliens coming from other planets.
And so there’s just a lot of layers to this.
And then in the 80s and early 90s, we get the…
The mythology of the Dums, the deep underground military bases, and legends about things like a base in Dulce, New Mexico, where lizard people and the U.S. Air Force kind of work side by side.
The Montauk Project lore kind of sticks a finger in this.
They say, oh, I remember talking to reptilians working at Montauk, and they would drink bleach.
I don’t know, it was ammonia or something like this.
That was sort of this peculiar habit attributed to them.
And then the question sort of forms of what do they want?
And at first it’s, you know, they want to eat us.
And then it’s they want to drink our blood.
It’s kind of a adrenochrome type of thing.
And where the conspiracy theory has evolved to now is that they actually feed on human pain and suffering.
And that’s really what they want.
And so they do all these terrible things and they orchestrate wars and they do all of this to create more suffering.
And eventually this has become almost a complete Gnostic religion where there are people online claiming that the whole universe as we know it is this sort of…
you know, farm designed by the lizard people to harness all the drama and suffering of human existence.
And there are even people online who say, you know, when you have a near-death experience and you see a light, don’t move towards the light.
That light is a reptilian trick to kind of recycle your soul back into this physical universe so they can, you know, harness more of your pain and suffering.
And so out of this, I have found people claiming that
Reptilians are causing meth addiction because that leads to more suffering.
That reptilians are causing unrequited love.
They’re sort of programming you to fall in love with someone knowing it won’t be requited.
That they are changing people’s sexual orientations.
Not because one sexual orientation is necessarily better than another, but because the reptilians understand this is a homophobic society.
And so therefore, if they can make you gay, you’ll have more suffering that they can feed on.
So it’s really interesting to see how we’ve kind of got a mythology where now everything bad in the whole world…
is coming from these reptilians.
And even the bad things that we do, that’s not really our fault either because they would claim, well, we have this reptilian brain and that comes from the lizard people tampering with our evolution thousands of years ago.
So…
Were it not for them, we would be this totally lovely, peace-loving species.
So everything bad that happens is their fault.
It’s a comforting idea, but the cost of this is that some people are not really people.
And that can lead to all kinds of problems.
But in extreme cases, such as one of the ones I’ve looked at, actually killing people.
Actually killing people you know of being a reptilian.
Oh, wow.
I just can’t believe this story.
I mean, what a tangled web and just so many questions about all of this.
But earlier you name dropped and Blake and I were talking about this earlier.
How do we pronounce his name?
We’ve heard David Ikey, David Ike.
We’ve kind of settled on David Ikey, I think, instead.
But can you tell us a bit about him and his involvement in all of this and why his beliefs and theories have taken off?
so much more than other ones.
Sure.
I’m 99% certain it’s Ike.
Not Icky.
We’ll stick with that.
Icky is how he makes us feel though.
So David Ike, he was a footballer in the UK.
He developed arthritis.
He became an announcer and then he became a politician.
He was involved in the Green Party for a while.
He got interested in sort of holistic medicine, looking at ways to improve his arthritis and met a psychic who I think had worked actually with a lot of football players.
And this kind of sets him on this sort of mystical journey.
He begins kind of…
hearing inner voices and things like this.
He goes on the Terry Wogan show during a period where he was wearing only turquoise because he said turquoise is, I guess, a positive frequency that keeps away negative energy.
So it goes on Terry Wogan and, you know, begins talking about how he is the Godhead and there’s this kind of imminent disaster that’s coming and everybody begins laughing at him.
And he says, well, you know, laughter is a really good way to keep away negative energy.
And Terry Wogan kind of doubles down and says, yes, but the audience isn’t laughing with you.
They’re laughing at you.
You know, the best way of removing negativity is to laugh and be joyous.
So I’m delighted that there’s so much laughter in the audience tonight.
But no, it’s a…
But just let me say this.
They’re laughing at you.
They’re not laughing with you.
So pretty brutal.
And to what you said later, I do feel bad about how I treated David Icke on my show.
And supposedly this had been one of his greatest phobias for a long time was sort of public ridicule.
So he kind of disappears from public view for a while.
And when he comes back, he’s pretty much begins writing these books on conspiracy theories and rapidly becomes probably the most famous conspiracy theorist in the world.
with the possible exception of Austin, Texas’s own Alex Jones.
But his genius, if you call it that, is simply voraciously absorbing every conspiracy theory that exists and weaving it into this kind of grand tapestry where it’s all true.
And so in 1999, he puts out this book called The Biggest Secret, where he explains that reptilian aliens basically control the world.
But if you read the book, it has consequences.
kind of every bizarre conspiracy theory you can think of.
Bigfoot shows up at one point.
Elvis being alive is mentioned at one point.
There’s also this kind of bizarre contrarianism to it where everything that we take as a fact in history just has to be wrong.
And at one point he says, you know, most Americans won’t know this about the Boston Tea Party, but most of those people throwing a tea into the water, they weren’t even really Indians.
They were colonists dressed up like Indians.
Shocking.
He’s not an American.
I thought, well, that’s actually true, but it’s not the biggest secret or even a tiny secret.
But the way that he really sold this was he would travel, he would give these basically PowerPoint presentations that could go for up to 12 hours.
I mean, there’d be like a lunch break and some bathroom breaks, but he would keep people there for 12 hours and was an engaging speaker.
The people who showed up were really impressed by this.
And he would start off with kind of talking about films like The Matrix and John Carpenter’s They Live.
And sort of get his foot in the door that way and gradually kind of lead to don’t you feel like there are forces in the world screwing you over?
Haven’t you noticed that you work so hard, but your money never seems to add up and your health never gets better?
And then finally, around hour 10 or so, we get to it’s because lizard people control everything.
Say what you want about him.
He does have a type of charisma.
He does have a way to kind of reach people and make his ideas accessible to him.
The other thing that’s interesting about David Icke is some of his followers are straight up neo-Nazis who have said, oh, this is great.
You just call these people lizards.
And then you can say the kinds of things that we’ve always wanted to say in public.
And now we can finally do it.
And then he has other people who are on the far left and they’re saying, you know, it’s clear that Monsanto and corporate greed, this is all environmental devastation.
This is all the lizard people.
And those people will be in the same audience.
both kind of cheering on what he’s saying.
And David Icke has insisted that he’s not an anti-Semite, that he loves all people, including Jews, but that some of the people who present as Jews aren’t really people.
They’re actually reptilians.
And he has included in his publications the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
which is this very famous anti-Semitic hoax created in Russia.
And he said, well, this isn’t really written by the elders of Zion.
This is actually written by the reptilians.
But one interpretation of that, which actually Aaron Agulias from the podcast The Saucer Life noted this about people like David Icke, is it seems like he is trying to get the widest audience possible.
And and so he would still like to have neo-Nazis buying his books and coming to his shows.
And by including the protocols there, he can he can still have that.
And he can kind of cover his butt a little bit by saying, well, this is this isn’t really a Jewish conspiracy.
It’s a reptilian conspiracy.
But he could have just as easily said this was a hoax put out by the reptilians to make us hate Jews.
He didn’t do that.
He said it’s a real document.
He’s got something for everyone there, hasn’t he?
Yeah, so the best spin I can possibly put on him is pretty irresponsible.
And the worst is openly anti-Semitic.
Yeah.
I remember watching the Secret Rulers of the World documentary.
And that’s John Ronson’s book, like his first big blow-up book about that stuff.
You know, he’s following Ike around Canada and sort of like trying to get him to answer the question, are these really, are you really talking about the Jews?
Like, it’s pretty obvious you’re talking about the Jews.
But I found that fascinating.
But Ike got, I mean, I guess in my opinion, this is a statistics thing.
If you keep saying enough things, one of them is bound to come out to be true eventually.
But the one that he kept saying was that there was a secret cabal of child molesters.
And then when Prince Andrew, formerly, the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, when it came out with his relationship with the Epstein stuff, you know, Ike was like, I was right.
I was right.
So he’s been very excited about all of these.
revelations about that sort of stuff and and it is it’s frustrating to know that rich and powerful people do get together and collaborate on stuff but that doesn’t mean they’re secretly in charge right like it is it’s a it’s kind of a jump right well well they’re you know they’re
there are incredibly powerful billionaires in the world who have way more control over elections in the media than they ought to.
That’s a fact.
And some of these people are involved with the kind of stuff that was going on with Epstein.
But the more that I look into the Epstein revelations, and we’re getting a little bit off topic from lizard people, but it seems to me that this wasn’t that much of a secret.
It’s more that in the 1990s, we kind of had an attitude that…
If you’re wealthy, it’s okay for you to groom 15-year-old girls, right?
And then we got this kind of collective amnesia that that was our attitude.
And so in that collective amnesia has become this kind of –
sense of, you know, it’s this hideous secret that we’ve discovered, you know, and it proves all these conspiracy theories are true.
It’s hideous, but I think that’s the reason that we kind of chose to forget about it.
You know, and one kind of off the cuff remark Trump made at one point is, well, people don’t remember what it was like in the 90s.
Which is not a defense, right?
But I do think that kind of – I don’t think Epstein proves these conspiracy theories were right.
I think it more so it just demonstrates that we kind of changed the way that we talk about things that have always been horrible but that were once more or less kind of accepted.
Yeah.
And a lot of these people are from that when they were at their peak in the 90s and they’re aging out now, the stories that are coming out are across the board pretty crazy.
And yeah, I don’t I don’t want to say this is not an excuse.
It was a different time.
But, you know, every decade is a different time from the previous decade.
So I don’t know.
But that.
Anyway, that that aside, I, you know, I think he’s an interesting combination of charisma and mental illness and lucky timing, because if we didn’t live in the Internet age, you know, he would just be that guy who wrote those pamphlets, you know, you know, but we do.
He isn’t.
Although I don’t know what his footprints now.
I don’t I haven’t heard anything from him in a while.
Whereas Alex Jones, even with his show being canceled, is still out there, you know, so.
Yeah, as far as I know, David Icke is still writing books.
He’s still productive.
I think his audience has moved into kind of increasingly niche spots on the internet.
But I think if you go to like Rumble or something like that, you’ll still see a lot of people talking about David Icke’s latest books.
The other thing that’s interesting with Alex Jones is he initially said that David Icke was a turd in the punch bowl.
Those were his words.
That is sort of…
saying things that are so patently ridiculous that no one will believe a conspiracy theorist who’s hardworking like Alex Jones.
That’s before they found out about the frogs being turned gay, though.
But after a while, he just figured, you know what, I don’t really care.
He started having David Icke on his show and just figured, I could use the extra fans, too.
If you want to talk about extra dimensional aliens controlling the Illuminati, fine.
Content is content.
when you’re tackling this, we’ve got this century of lizard people, but in the bigger picture, there’s other historical lizard people from mythology that I would call, I think of it as big M mythology.
I don’t know how you deal with that in religious studies, but versus like current myths or, you know, evolving beliefs.
And then there’s also the cryptozoological lizard people like the Bishopville lizard, swamp lizard person.
So how do you do you treat those as a subset?
Are they completely separate or like how are you breaking that material?
Because they don’t seem exactly related.
Yeah, so you have mythology about humanoid lizard people who are often shapeshifters all over the world.
And so that is a big talking point for someone like David Icke, who will say, look, our ancestors knew about these things, right?
So the Naga in India comes up a lot.
Nagas are these kind of serpent people.
They often live underground or underwater, and they are shapeshifters.
And so we have Buddhist texts where if you wanted to go become a Buddhist monk, one of the questions they would ask you is, are you a human being?
And that was an actual part of the procedure.
You have to tell.
And if you ask them, well, how come I have to answer I’m a human being?
I say, well, one time somebody joined and they turned out to be a naga.
And we went into their cell while they were asleep and they had turned into this gigantic snake and we had to kick them out of the monastery.
It’s interesting, too, because in the story, the Naga is like crying that he can’t be a monk and has to leave.
And I’m like, why can’t you just let him be a monk, right?
He’d be cool.
And in China, when I was in China most recently with my wife, Natasha, we saw an image of Naga attending a sermon by the Buddha.
And he looks exactly like…
the drawings of reptilians that I see on sort of contemporary conspiracy theory websites.
And then you have a story that folklorists sometimes call the serpent woman and the holy man.
And we think this story probably originated somewhere in the Punjab, but we have versions of it in China, where we have an opera about a white snake woman.
It’s actually a snake who, through kind of intense Taoist practices, learns to shapeshift, is going to marry this young man.
And then this Buddhist monk says, you can’t marry her.
That’s a snake.
And there’s kind of different versions of the story.
But in one version of the story, the monk actually becomes the bad guy.
And it’s sort of like love conquers all.
If you want to marry a snake, you can marry a snake.
There’s a version of the story in ancient Greece where the philosopher Apollonius says that’s a Lamia.
That’s a shape-shifting serpent woman.
And then there’s a version of it in France and Europe where you have – it’s called like –
You’ll have to look it up later.
Joe was trying to remember Melusine, and for patrons, I’m going to drop in a mini-history of that fascinating monster of folklore and marketing.
But the Starbucks logo is actually a shape-shifting serpent woman.
She’s not a mermaid.
That’s why there’s two serpentine tails.
So there’s stories like this all over the place.
In fact, I was in Hawaii this summer, and just on a lark, we took a folklore tour, and I just asked…
Are there stories about reptile creatures?
And the woman giving a tour opens up her binder and shows me this picture of what looks again like something from these conspiracy sites.
And so we call them mo’o, and they’re lizards, and they can shapeshift.
And one of them had helped Kamehameha or some Hawaiian hero in the past.
So it was actually quite common.
And so what interpretation is, well, obviously they’re real, and that’s why everybody knows about them.
I think another is I could probably pick any animal that exists on all continents and say, are there any folklore about these animals being sentient or shape-shifting?
I would probably find that, yes, there are.
Humans are fairly creative creatures.
But it is interesting kind of collecting all the serpentine folklore from around the world.
But I’ll tell you, the trick is that they work at scale.
Boy, well, so you’ve spoken a little bit, Jo, about what you’re wanting to do with all this research.
You’re wanting to put it into a book.
But do you have any idea at this point where these stories and these legends are going and what this could potentially lead to in future?
Yeah, I mean, it could be that it sort of sputters out and we move on to something else.
I mean, if you look at, you know, the Shaver Mysteries and the Darrow, that was very, very big in the 50s.
Not too many people are still talking about…
darrow today so it could take that kind of turn um but i’m seeing on on you know social media a lot of people are now making uh ai videos of uh you know what the reptilians look like um i am hearing kind of weird podcasts with rumors of did you know the reptilians and the bigfoots are at war
And they’ve been fighting each other.
So I think there’s still lots of kind of further mutations that are going to take place in the reptilian folklore online.
Wow.
Amazing.
Which means good stuff for Monster Talk, maybe bad stuff for society.
Lots for us to talk about.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, I should give a shout out to Natasha because when she was on and we talked about Tulpa, she also, I think if I’m not, I might be mistaken, but I think she said her favorite monster was the Naga.
So I believe that’s true.
I mean, you have to pick when you’re on the spotlights.
You got to say something.
What else is going on monster-wise in your life?
Because I know, I mean, monsters is only a tiny part of the world’s religions, but it’s one of my favorite parts.
Well, we could talk about the conference in the spring, or we could talk about the Penguin Book of Cults.
Tell us about that.
Let’s talk about the Penguin Book of Cults.
I’m sure I’ll be yakking about the conference more.
But yeah, what you got?
Yeah, so the Penguin Book of Cults, it’s my second reader that I put out with Penguin Classics.
They do this whole series, the Penguin Book of Vampires, the Penguin Book of Witches, and so forth.
I was a little anxious to do this because in my field, I try to kind of…
unpack the label of cult, right?
Not because I think that some groups are not doing really awful, abusive things, but because I think that the label cult has led to a lot of bad things and has become kind of a cudgel that people use against their enemies.
So I decided I was going to do the book.
I was going to call it The Penguin Book of Cults.
But I also wanted to kind of show how throughout history we have been scared of other people with weird religions.
So the first text is actually from the Roman Republic.
And they’re saying, you know, did you know the cult of Dionysus, they do these weird sex orgies and they’re corrupting the youth and they’re probably poisoning people.
And we’ve got to give a lot more power to the government to regulate religion, right?
And so that’s before Christianity.
And then I have texts where they’re describing Christians, you know, murdering babies.
And then I have texts with Christians burning heretics and so forth.
And then as we get into more modern times, I was able to find some original documents about what in my field we call the big five.
The big five are…
Let’s see if I can name them all.
People’s Temple, 1978.
The Branch Davidians, 1993.
The Order of the Solar Temple, 1994, 1995.
Aum Shinrikyo, 1995.
Heaven’s Gate, 1997.
The UFO guys got in there.
Yay.
That’s right.
So when you ask people to name a cult, they usually name one of those five.
And so it gives the impression that sort of the destiny of every cult is to commit mass suicide or to have some really violent episode.
Actually, those are all very rare kind of unique incidents.
Generally, if you start a cult, what’s going to happen is a few people will join and then it’ll kind of die out and no one will ever know it ever existed.
It’s
Statistically, that’s what’s most likely to happen.
But those are the cases that people want to read about.
So I tried to get some new things.
So Texas State University actually has 10 linear feet of government documents from the Waco siege.
So I went through those and found some things that the public has never seen before, including this really chilling memo from an FBI…
a psychiatrist who says, you know, if we screw this up, a bunch of children are going to die and no one will ever forgive the FBI.
So I found things like that.
For Aum Shinrikyo, I actually was able to tap a colleague who reads Japanese and get some court documents from the sentencing hearing that describe this kind of…
weird idiosyncratic version of Buddhism that Aum Shinrikyo taught that said it’s actually compassionate for us to poison people on the Tokyo subway.
For the People’s Temple, I am…
co-workers on the journal with someone who lost her two sisters in Jonestown.
And so there is a document called The Death Tape, just called The Death Tape, that was the recording of the final moments of Jonestown.
And so we included that in the book and we annotated it.
And I consulted with Rebecca Moore on the annotation.
And for the audio book, they actually, I understand, they were able to get multiple actors to read it.
And it’s macabre stuff, but it’s worth listening to because these people do not appear to be mindless and brainwashed.
There’s actually a lot of debate about why are we going to do this?
I don’t want to do this.
Let’s do something different.
And I think that’s important because people get so dismissive when saying that anyone that they disagree with has simply been brainwashed and there’s nothing here to talk about.
This is topical.
You know how people say, you know, you drank the Kool-Aid and it’s really changed meaning.
I mean, it generally is inclined.
People think it means, you know, you’ve you’ve you’ve accepted the marketing.
You’ve joined the group, you know, and it’s like in a lot of people don’t.
I mean, obviously, we’re older.
I know I am.
A lot of people don’t even really remember the original case.
You know, I remember when it happened from watching it on TV unfolding and.
But I was at work in one of my jobs in the early 2000s, and I was in a meeting, and I said something to the effect of, you know, they’ve drank the Kool-Aid.
And one of my coworkers got very upset.
And took me aside and said, don’t ever say that in front of me again.
My parents died at Jonestown.
That was closer to the time as well.
Yeah, it was.
And, you know, it’s sad, but I was, even back then, I was pretty freaking skeptical.
And I went and fact-checked him.
He totally was telling the truth.
It’s like, you know, it’s just, you never know.
Anyway, that’s not really…
Super important.
But it is one of those things where we get desensitized over time to the significance of some of these events.
And, you know, they especially some of the big ones, they’ve got really lasting impact.
We should all stop saying that.
Yeah, yeah, basically, yeah.
It doesn’t mean what, I mean, language, if we had a language, I’m sure they could confirm it.
We have no control over that as a group.
We sort of make things mean whatever.
But yeah, it’s really not a great phrase.
Certainly over time, we lose that connection to what it originally meant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if you’re listening to this, it’s it’s it’s it’s not a cool thing to say.
For one thing, there was never any Kool-Aid.
Absolutely.
It was it was flavor aid.
They had to use the off brand.
But also people were not drinking it willingly.
And there are survivors.
This was not a suicide.
This was a murder suicide.
Exactly.
You know, the.
Some people drank it willingly, but only because they had been told you have moments until, you know, the CIA and mercenaries arrive here and kill all of us and torture your children.
Or they had just seen their children murdered.
Right.
And some people were reportedly injected with it.
Yes.
They didn’t drink it at all.
So it is.
And as you point out, people, you know, people who were at Jonestown are still alive today.
you know, I just heard an interview with one of Jim Jones’s sons.
So it wasn’t that long ago.
So it’s, you know, I think most people just don’t really know much about Jonestown, but it’s a, it’s a slogan that we should try to get out of our, out of our.
Yeah.
Doesn’t work like that though.
But I think we’re gonna have to bring you back on Joe to talk about this book.
Has it come out?
Yeah, it came out in October.
So, you know, I can’t normally say this about my books, but I think you can get this anywhere books are sold because it’s from.
And it’s also on audible.com or wherever you get your audio books.
That’s really cool.
Really important book.
Yeah, absolutely.
And Karen’s not wrong.
We probably should have you back soon because you’ve done so many cool things and are interested in so many topics that completely overlap here.
So, yeah, I want to hear more about this book.
Yeah.
And we should talk more about the conference.
Maybe you and Natasha come on together and we’ll talk about the conference sometime in the time.
Yeah, that’s a good idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That’d be a lot of fun.
So.
Jo, thank you so much for coming back to talk to us.
Thank you.
Always good to talk to you.
We’ll put links to your books in the show notes.
And I have to say, I’m super hopeful you find a really good venue for your Lizardman research stuff because it’s so fascinating.
And you’ve gone further than me.
And I love being able to chat with you about stuff that I don’t have to.
You can explain stuff to me.
It’s a real release of the cognitive load.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, well, if there’s any editors out there who are looking for an exciting conspiracy theory book, please hit me up.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Let’s wind up.
Say good night to you, Joe.
Thank you so much for coming back.
Get my regards to Natasha.
Happy holidays.
Yes, please do.
Thanks so much.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Joe Laycock of Texas State University talking about his research into lizard people.
Check out the show notes for links to Joe’s books and lots of stuff that we talked about in today’s discussion.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete’s Dealing Monkeys.
Here’s wishing you a happy new year and a very sincere wish that next year will be better.
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