It's a laughable theory and David Icke gets laughed out of most places he visits. But the British man and former BBC reporter also has a growing, loyal base of believers.
Thousands of Australians are paying hundreds of dollars to sit in a room for 12 hours and hear a conspiracy theorist talk about a race of shape-shifting reptiles who control human behaviour.
And he's coming to New Zealand.
It's a laughable theory and David Icke gets laughed out of most places he visits. But the British man and former BBC reporter also has a growing, loyal base of believers.
Huge numbers of Australians believe him when he tells them September 11 was a set-up, or when he talks about the moon being a hollowed-out space station.
I sat down for an hour with Icke, arguably the world's best-known conspiracy theorist. I wanted to know why people believe him when, even he admits, his theories make him sound like he needs to see a therapist.
He was smart, but I expected him to be. He was articulate, also no surprise given his background in the media. But I was surprised by how personable he was. Dare I say, he seemed "normal".
It's a big part of the reason people take his word for it when he breaks away from traditional narratives about controversial topics including mass shootings at Sandy Hook and, recently, Orlando.
It's why his books get published and are so well received. It's why his social media accounts attract almost a million people and his YouTube videos have each been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Before our conversation ended, he asked me to come to his show in Sydney and hang around afterwards so we could grab a beer and chat.
I told him I would because, even after an hour, I wanted to know more. He was persuasive and I will hear him out, but he won't convert me. I'm too sensible for that. Right?
Big gaps in September 11 story
Icke, 64, believes the attacks on the World Trade Centre's Twin Towers were part of a wider plan to control the public.
He believes they were manufactured by America to establish what he calls "order out of chaos". He says the attacks were used to justify the war on terror, a war that is ongoing today.
"Wherever you look, it doesn't make sense," he told news.com.au. "The story of how those planes were flown and who flew them makes no sense at all.
"How those buildings came down makes no sense, either. It's not just me saying it, it's experts in those fields saying it."
Specifically, Icke says he takes exception with small details of the White House story on how events unfolded.
"How many people realise that on that same day, September 11, 2001 - of all days, of all years - there were a series of military exercises involving planes being hijacked, including one scenario of a plane being flown into a building in Washington?
"It took a lot of planes that would've been in a position to respond away from New York City. And you've got responders saying: 'Is this real or is this exercise?' It completely bewildered them. Pinch me, ouch, yes, it actually is real."
He said a story about a hijacker's passport being found near the World Trade Centre after the attacks convinced him he was listening to a tall tale.
"I remember hearing a BBC newsreader tell me, without laughing, that the FBI had found a passport of one of the hijackers right next to one of the twin towers. It's ridiculous.
"I remember thinking: 'Hold on a minute, it's paper. You see that fireball? Laws of physics, anybody?'"
In the years after September 11, Icke wrote Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster. During a talk in 2007, Icke said there was not "one strand" of September 11 that makes sense but journalists swallowed the story without questioning it.
"The official version of events gets given to the journalist and it gets passed on virtually undiluted to the public. And so you sell your manufactured movie to the people and crucially you want people to be afraid. Then you can play your sting."
Icke said the planes flying into the towers sparked a war that "will likely not end in our lifetimes" in which America can target any country they like "as a terrorist state" and "go in and conquer it".
Conspiracy theories about September 11 are nothing new. Plenty have been aired and debunked before. Icke says those theories are spouted by amateurs who damage his reputation by association.
"There are people in the alternative media that do shoot from the hip, they say this, that and the other without any evidence. I wish they wouldn't."
Technology inserted inside us
When Icke began his Worldwide Wake Up Tour on Saturday in Perth, those in attendance heard him speak at length about smart technology.
His most recent book, Phantom Self, looks at a world leading rapidly down the path of human microchipping. It's a path that worries him deeply.
"We are being systematically led - 'here kitty, kitty, kitty' - down a road to having technology inserted inside us," Icke told news.com.au. "This is where it's going and it's so blatant when you can see it.
"Stage one: you get people addicted to technology they can hold. That addiction is global, it's extraordinary. You see people with a smart phone put it down and then look at it straight after they put it down.
"Stage two is what they call wearables. The Google glasses, the smart watches. Stage three is implantables. They will be as common as wearables and holdables within three or four years."
So what's the conspiracy? Icke says holdables and wearables got us addicted to technology only for implantables to be used to control the human brain and "hijack" the way we perceive the world.
"The human brain is a biological computer. It blatantly is. It's a biological version of a computer system. If you look at the brain, it processes information in the form of electrical activity. If you can get technology into the body and hack in to the biological information processing system, you can remotely dictate someone's sense of reality."
"Transhumanists say that by putting technology inside us we are going to be super human but we're actually going to be sub-human. We will become computer terminals."
I told Icke I could understand how he joined the dots on a number of his theories but asked him if one theory in particular was holding him back, making all of his other theories less believable.
The reptilian agenda
Forty-five minutes into our interview, I had waited long enough to talk about the one topic that everybody who interviews Icke wants to talk about.
I'm talking, of course, about the "Reptilian Agenda", a theory Icke extends as far as to label the British royal family "shape-shifters".
His theory goes like this: an extraterrestrial race interbred with humans. Their spawn, reptilian shape-shifters, have for generations taken positions of power around the world. US presidents. the British royal family, Adolf Hitler. There's more.
He believes the moon is hollow and occupied by the super race that "demands sacrifice". "I can join all those dots and I can see how you've joined the dots on your other theories," I said to him.
"But it all comes back to some things you've said before that discredits your work, the stuff about the reptilian race. Do you ever wish that you didn't say that?" I asked him.
He immediately becomes defensive.
"No, no I don't [regret saying it]," he told me. "I am so far beyond worrying about what anybody thinks of me. I put it out there and people make up their own minds. But what you get in the mainstream is people saying: 'That David Icke, he says the world is run by lizards'. That's as far as you get, that superficiality.
A reptilian master race is claiming positions of power around the world.
"I am interested in what is happening and communicating what I find. If you keep putting out uncensored what you find then a process happens that if there is validity to it, it will eventually be shown by events to be true.
"This is why I've gone from not being able to fill a phone box and being laughed at to talking to thousands at a time, selling books and having massive interest on the internet."
"The fact that people laugh at the idea of life that doesn't look human on the basis of what they can actually see is insanity. But it's beyond that. It's systematic, cradle-to-the-grave, programmed ignorance."
He says that ignorance is ingrained in people from birth.
"You come out of the womb and your perceptions are influenced by your parents, who've been in the system their whole lives.
"Very soon, you're put in a system where an authority figure appointed by the state and representing the state's official story tells you when you have to be there, when you can eat, when you can leave, when you can talk, what is real, what is not real, what is right, what is wrong.
"You go into this system through your formative years, downloading the state's version of reality. You take that base programming with you everywhere. Everyone confirms to each other that the 'postage-stamp normal' version of events is correct. If you step out of line on that, people tell you you're strange, or you're weird."
