Who started the reptilian story?

It starts with a book Zecharia Sitchin published in 1976.He read the Anunnaki of the Sumerian tablets as aliens from a planet called Nibiru.Humans, he wrote, were made as workers to mine gold.Scholars of Sumerian say his translations are wrong.

Anunnaki is a real word on real tablets.It is closer to a collective name for many gods than to one species.The tablets mention no planet Nibiru and no genetic engineering.Those arrived with Sitchin's book.

The reptiles come later.In a 1999 book the British writer David Icke claimed the ruling class were reptilian aliens.He then attached the archons of gnostic texts, Saturn and the moon, one after another.Most of the reptilian material online today rests on that book.

One part of this lineage needs naming.Icke's bloodline story points at real Jewish families.Critics have said it restates old antisemitism in new words.This site marks that branch and does not follow it.

So the story is not yet fifty years old.It did not come down from ancient records; it grew out of two twentieth-century books.