Does an interview circulating on social media prove that U.S. presidents, namely George H.W. Bush, who died in 2018, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were or are reptilians? No, that's not true: Bush was human, as Clinton and Obama are. The reptilian claim is part of a long-running conspiracy theory.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on May 27, 2023, by user @sephiroth9990. The graphic overlay on the video, in Romanian, read: "William Tompkins fost inginer McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Northrop Grumman," or, in English (translated from Romanian into English by Lead Stories staff), "William Tompkins former engineer McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Northrop Grumman."
The text, which appeared also as a caption below the video, added:
Planeta condusa de presedinti reptilieni #istorie #stiri
which in English is:
The planet ruled by reptilian presidents #history #news
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jul 19 11:00:54 2023 UTC)
The clip is an excerpt from an interview with William Mills Tompkins, an American aerospace engineer who claimed to have been involved with secret government space programs and to have had contacts with extraterrestrial beings. He died in 2017. In the interview, taken in December 2016, according to the final stills in the Part II video, he describes an extraterrestrial civilization called Draco-Reptilians. He described them as "ugly-looking lizard-alligator-type people" that have "the same skin as the lizards got and terrible-looking faces" and "the ability to shift and look like a human."
The interviewer, Kerry Cassidy, goes on to ask Tompkins whether Wernher von Braun (a German-born American engineer who played a prominent role in rocketry and space exploration before and after World War II) was a reptilian. Tompkins replies that he wasn't, and adds that some U.S. presidents were, citing George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama as examples.
Claims that public and political figures such as former and actual U.S. presidents or members of the U.K. royal family were or are reptilians are unfounded and part of a long-running conspiracy theory, which was popularized in the late '90s. In 1998, Time magazine reported, former BBC reporter David Icke published a book called "The Biggest Secret," which claimed that members of the royal family "are nothing more than reptiles with crowns," that these "Annunaki" (the reptiles) have controlled humankind since ancient times and that they include Queen Elizabeth, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Lead Stories has previously debunked similar claims about the supposed existence of "shape-shifting reptilian beings" and about Pope Francis, Queen Elizabeth II and Joe Biden being related due to their presumed reptilian nature.
Tompkins, author of an autobiographical book trilogy called "Selected by Extraterrestrials: My Life in the Top Secret World of UFOs, Think-Tanks and Nordic Secretaries," offers no evidence for the claims he makes in this clip. The interviewer, Kerry Cassidy, is the co-founder of Project Camelot, which, according to the website description, reveals "secrets in areas previously only known to a select few from secret societies and those with high level security clearances in the secret governments." She conducts interviews on "the subjects of ETs, the Illuminati agenda, mind control, the matrix, prophecies, 2012 and many other subjects."
