David Icke facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
David Icke
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Icke in 2013
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| Born |
David Vaughan Icke
29 April 1952 Leicester, England
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| Occupation |
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| Political party | Green Party (1980s–1991) |
| Movement | New Age conspiracism |
David Vaughan Icke (/vɔːn aɪk/ vawn-_-iyk; born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist and a former footballer and sports broadcaster. He has written over 20 books, self-published since the mid-1990s, and spoken in more than 25 countries.
In 1990, Icke visited a psychic who told him he was on Earth for a purpose and would receive messages from the spirit world. This led him to claim in 1991 to be a "Son of the Godhead" and that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. He repeated this on the BBC show Wogan. His appearance led to public ridicule. Books Icke wrote over the next 11 years developed his world view of a New Age conspiracy.
Icke contends that the universe consists of "vibrational" energy and infinite dimensions sharing the same space. He claims that there is an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings, the Archons or Anunnaki, which have hijacked the Earth. Further, a genetically modified human–Archon hybrid race of reptilian shape-shifters – the Babylonian Brotherhood, Illuminati or "elite" – manipulate events to keep humans in fear, so that the Archons can feed off the resulting "negative energy". He claims that many public figures belong to the Babylonian Brotherhood and propel humanity towards a global fascist state or New World Order, a post-truth era ending freedom of speech. He sees the only way to defeat such "Archontic" influence is for people to wake up to the truth and fill their hearts with love.
Critics have accused Icke of being antisemitic and a Holocaust denier, due to his endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as his identification of the Jewish Rothschild family as reptilians, with his theories of reptilians being alleged to serve as a deliberate "code", something which Icke has denied. The allegations of antisemitism and promotion of misinformation has resulted in him being banned from entering a number of countries.
Early life and education
The middle son of three boys, Icke was born in Leicester General Hospital to Beric Vaughan Icke and Barbara J. Cooke, who were married in Leicester in 1951. Beric Icke served in the Royal Air Force as a medical orderly during World War II, and after the war became a clerk in the Gents clock factory. The family lived in a terraced house on Lead Street in the centre of Leicester, an area that was demolished in the mid-1950s as part of the city's slum clearance.
When David Icke was three, around 1955, they moved to the Goodwood estate, one of the council estates the post-war Labour government built. "To say we were skint", he wrote in 1993, "is like saying it is a little chilly at the North Pole." He recalls having to hide under a window or chair when the councilman came for the rent; after knocking, the rent man would walk around the house peering through windows. His mother never explained that it was about the rent; she just told Icke to hide. He wrote in 2003 that he still gets a fright when someone knocks on the door. He attended Whitehall Infant School, and then Whitehall Junior School.
Icke has said he made no effort at school, but when he was nine he was chosen for the junior school's third-year football team. He writes that this was the first time he had succeeded at anything, and he came to see football as his way out of poverty. He played in goal, which he wrote suited the loner in him and gave him a sense of living on the edge between hero and villain.
After failing his 11-plus exam in 1963, he was sent to the city's Crown Hills Secondary Modern (rather than the local grammar school), where he was given a trial for the Leicester Boys Under-14 team.
Career
Football
Icke left school at 15 after being talent-spotted by Coventry City, who signed him up in 1967 as their youth team's goalkeeper. In 1968 he played in the Coventry City youth team that were runners up to Burnley in the F.A. Youth Cup. He also played for Oxford United's reserve team and Northampton Town, on loan from Coventry.
Rheumatoid arthritis in his left knee, which spread to the right knee, ankles, elbows, wrists and hands, stopped him from making a career out of football. Despite stating that he was often in agony during training, Icke wanted to remain playing, and was signed on a part-time contract by Hereford United player-manager John Charles, including in the first team when they were in the fourth, and later in the third, division of the English Football League.
in 1971, Icke left home following one of a number of frequent arguments he had started having with his father. His father was upset that Icke's arthritis was interfering with his football career. Icke moved into a bedsit and worked in a travel agency, travelling to Hereford twice a week in the evenings to play football.
In 1973, at the age of 21, the pain in his joints became so severe that he was forced to retire from football.
Journalism, sports broadcasting
The loss of Icke's position with Hereford meant that he and his wife had to sell their home, and for several weeks they lived apart, each moving in with their parents. In 1973 Icke found a job as a reporter with the weekly Leicester Advertiser, through a contact who was a sports editor at the Daily Mail. He moved on to the Leicester News Agency, did some work for BBC Radio Leicester as its football reporter, then worked his way up through the Loughborough Monitor, the Leicester Mercury and BRMB Radio in Birmingham.
In 1976, Icke worked for two months in Saudi Arabia, helping with the national football team. His position on the team was planned to be a long-term position, but Icke decided to stay in the UK after his first holiday back. After his return to the UK, BRMB decided to give him his job back, after which he successfully applied to Midlands Today at the BBC's Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, a job that included on-air appearances.
In 1981, Icke became a sports presenter for the BBC's national programme Newsnight, which had begun the previous year. Two years later, on 17 January 1983, he appeared on the first edition of the BBC's Breakfast Time, British television's first national breakfast show, and presented the sports news there until 1985. In 1983 he co-hosted Grandstand, at the time the BBC's flagship national sports programme. He also published his first book that year, It's a Tough Game, Son!, about how to break into football.
Icke and his family moved in 1982 to Ryde on the Isle of Wight. His relationship with Grandstand was short-lived. He wrote that a new editor arrived in 1983 who appeared not to like him, but he continued working for BBC Sport until 1990, often on bowls and snooker programmes, and at the 1988 Summer Olympics. Icke was by then a household name, but has said that a career in television began to lose its appeal to him; he found television workers insecure, shallow and sometimes vicious.
In August 1990, his contract with the BBC was terminated when he initially refused to pay the Community Charge (also known as the "poll tax"), a local tax Margaret Thatcher's government introduced that year. He ultimately paid it, but his announcement that he was willing to go to prison rather than pay prompted the BBC, by charter an impartial public-service broadcaster, to distance itself from him.
Green Party, Betty Shine
Icke began to engage with alternative medicine and New Age philosophies in the 1980s in an effort to relieve his arthritis, and this encouraged his interest in Green politics. He joined the Green Party and became a national spokesperson within six months. His second book, It Doesn't Have To Be Like This, an outline of his views on the environment, was published in 1989.
Icke wrote that 1989 was a time of considerable personal despair, and it was during this period that he said he began to feel a presence around him. He often describes how he felt it while alone in a hotel room in March 1990, and finally asked, "If there is anybody here, will you please contact me because you are driving me up the wall!" Days later, in a newsagent's shop in Ryde, he felt a force pull his feet to the ground and heard a voice guide him toward some books. One of them was Mind to Mind (1989) by Betty Shine, a psychic healer in Brighton. He read the book, then wrote to her requesting a consultation about his arthritis.
Icke visited Shine four times. During the third meeting, on 29 March 1990, Icke claims to have felt something like a spider's web on his face, and Shine told him she had a message from Wang Ye Lee of the spirit world.
Icke had been sent to heal the earth, she said, and would become famous but would face opposition. The spirit world was going to pass ideas to him, which he would speak about to others. He would write five books in three years; in 20 years a new flying machine would allow us to go wherever we wanted and time would have no meaning; and there would be earthquakes in unusual places because the inner earth was being destabilised by having oil taken from under the seabed.
In February 1991, Icke visited a pre-Inca Sillustani burial ground near Puno, Peru, where he felt drawn to a particular circle of waist-high stones. As he stood in the circle he had two thoughts: that people would be talking about this in 100 years, and that it would be over when it rained. His body shook as though plugged into an electrical socket, he wrote, and new ideas poured into him. Then it started raining and the experience ended. He described it as the kundalini (a term from Hindu yoga) activating his chakras, or energy centres, triggering a higher level of consciousness.
Turquoise period
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There followed what Icke called his "turquoise period". He had been channelling for some time, he wrote, and had received a message through automatic writing that he was a "Son of the Godhead", interpreting "Godhead" as the "Infinite Mind". He began to wear only the colour turquoise, often a turquoise shell suit, a colour he saw as a conduit for positive energy. He also started working on his third book, and the first of his New-Age period, The Truth Vibrations.
In August 1990, before his visit to Peru, Icke met Deborah Shaw, an English psychic based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. When he returned from Peru they began a relationship, with the apparent blessing of Icke's wife. In March 1991 Shaw began living with the couple, a short-lived arrangement that the press called the "turquoise triangle". Shaw changed her name to Mari Shawsun, while Icke's wife became Michaela, which she said was an aspect of the Archangel Michael.
The relationship with Shaw led to the birth of a daughter in December 1991, although she and Icke had by then ceased their relationship. Icke wrote in 1993 that at Shaw's request he decided not to visit their daughter and had seen her only once. Icke's wife gave birth to the couple's second son in November 1992.
Green Party resignation and press conference
In March 1991, Icke resigned from the Green Party during a party conference, telling them he was about to be at the centre of "tremendous and increasing controversy", and winning a standing ovation from delegates after the announcement.
A week later, shortly after his father died, Icke and his wife, Linda Atherton, along with their daughter and Deborah Shaw, held a press conference to announce that Icke was a son of the Godhead. He told reporters the world was going to end in 1997. It would be preceded by a hurricane around the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans, eruptions in Cuba, disruption in China, a hurricane in Derry, and an earthquake on the Isle of Arran. The information was being given to them by voices and automatic writing, he said. Los Angeles would become an island, New Zealand would disappear, and the cliffs of Kent would be underwater by Christmas.
Wogan interview
News headlines following Icke's press conference attracted requests for interviews from Nicky Campbell's BBC Radio One programme, for Terry Wogan's prime-time Wogan show, and Fern Britton's ITV chat show.
Wogan introduced the 1991 segment with "The world as we know it is about to end". Amid laughter from the audience, Icke demurred when asked if he was the son of God, replying that Jesus would have been laughed at too, and repeated that Britain would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. Without these, "the Earth will cease to exist". When Icke said laughter was the best way to remove negativity, Wogan replied of the audience: "But they're laughing at you. They're not laughing with you." The BBC was criticised for allowing it to go ahead; Des Christy of The Guardian called it a "media crucifixion".
The interview led to a difficult period for Icke. In May 1991, police were called to the couple's home after a crowd of over 100 youths gathered outside, chanting "We want the Messiah" and "Give us a sign, David". Icke told Jon Ronson in 2001:
One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. And there it was coming true. As a television presenter, I'd been respected. People come up to you in the street and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way. And suddenly, overnight, this was transformed into "Icke's a nutter." I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule.
In 2006, Wogan interviewed Icke again for a special Wogan Now & Then series. Wogan was apologetic for his conduct in the 1991 interview. However, in his autobiography, Mustn't Grumble, Wogan described Icke as being a "ranting demagogue convinced we were all manipulated sheep".
Writing and lecturing
Early books
The Wogan interview separated Icke from his previous life, he wrote in 2003, although he considered it the making of him in the end, giving him the courage to develop his ideas without caring what anyone thought. His book The Truth Vibrations, inspired by his experience in Peru, was published in 1991.
Between 1992 and 1994, he wrote five books, all published by mainstream publishers, four in 1993. Love Changes Everything (1992), influenced by the "channelling" work of Deborah Shaw, is a theosophical work about the origin of the planet, in which Icke writes with admiration about Jesus. Days of Decision (1993) is an 86-page summary of his interviews after the 1991 press conference; it questions the historicity of Jesus but accepts the existence of the Christ spirit. Icke's autobiography, In the Light of Experience, was published the same year, followed by Heal the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformation (1993).
The Robots' Rebellion
Icke's The Robots' Rebellion (1994), a book published by Gateway, attracted allegations that his work was antisemitic. According to historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the book contains "all the familiar beliefs and paranoid clichés" of the US conspiracists and militia. It claims that a plan for world domination by a shadowy cabal, perhaps extraterrestrial, was laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (c. 1897).
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an anti-Semitic literary forgery, probably written under the direction of the Russian secret police in Paris, purporting to reveal a conspiracy by the Jewish people to achieve global domination. It was exposed as a forgery in 1920 by Lucien Wolf and the following year by Philip Graves in The Times. Once exposed, it disappeared from mainstream discourse until interest in it was renewed by the American far right in the 1950s. Interest in it was further spread by conspiracy groups on the Internet.
Icke took both the extraterrestrial angle and the focus on the Protocols from Behold a Pale Horse (1991) by Milton William Cooper, who was associated with the American militia movement; chapter 15 of Cooper's book reproduces the Protocols in full. The Robots' Rebellion refers repeatedly to the Protocols, calling them the Illuminati protocols, and defining Illuminati as the "Brotherhood elite at the top of the pyramid of secret societies world-wide". Icke adds that the Protocols were not the work of the Jewish people, but of Zionists.
The Robots' Rebellion was greeted with dismay by the Green Party's executive.
Self-publishing
Why do we play a part in suppressing alternative information to the official line of the Second World War? How is it right that while this fierce suppression goes on, free copies of the Spielberg film, Schindler's List, are given to schools to indoctrinate children with the unchallenged version of events. And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history.
Icke's next manuscript, And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), contained a chapter questioning aspects of the Holocaust, which caused a rift with his publisher, Gateway. In the book Icke suggested that Jews funded the Holocaust by quoting and seconding Gary Allen's claim that "The Warburgs, part of the Rothschild empire, helped finance Adolf Hitler". In his view, schools "indoctrinate children with the unchallenged version of events" with the mainstream account of the Holocaust thanks to their use of free copies of the film Schindler's List (1993). After borrowing £15,000 from a friend, Icke established Bridge of Love Publications, later called David Icke Books. He self-published And the Truth Shall Set You Free and all his subsequent books.
According to Lewis and Kahn, Icke aimed to consolidate all conspiracy theories into one project with unlimited explanatory power. His books sold 140,000 copies between 1998 and 2011, at a value of over £2 million. Thirty thousand copies of The Biggest Secret (1999) were in print months after publication, according to Icke, and it was reprinted six times between 1999 and 2006. His 2002 book Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster became a long-standing top-five bestseller in South Africa. By 2006, his website was gaining 600,000 hits a week, and by 2011 his books had been translated into 11 languages.
Lecturing
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Icke has held public lectures around the world, and by 2006 had spoken in at least 25 countries. He spoke for seven hours to 2,500 people at the Brixton Academy, London, in 2008, and the same year addressed the University of Oxford's debating society, the Oxford Union. His book tour for Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More (2010) included a sold-out talk to 2,100 in New York City and £83,000 worth of ticket sales in Melbourne. In October 2012, he spoke for eleven hours to 6,000 people at London's Wembley Arena.
Politics and television
Icke stood for parliament in the 2008 by-election for Haltemprice and Howden (a constituency in the East Riding of Yorkshire), on the issue of "Big Brother – The Big Picture". He came 12th out of 26 candidates, with 110 votes (0.46%), resulting in a lost deposit. He explained that he was standing because "if we don't face this now we are going to have some serious explaining to do when we are asked by our children and grandchildren what we were doing when the global fascist state was installed. 'I was watching EastEnders, dear' will not be good enough."
In November 2013, Icke launched an Internet television station, The People's Voice, broadcast from London. He founded the station after crowdsourcing over £300,000 and worked for it as a volunteer until March 2014. Later that year the station stopped broadcasting.
Personal life
Icke met his first wife, Linda Atherton, in May 1971 at a dance at the Chesford Grange Hotel near Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. They married on 30 September 1971, four months after they met. Their daughter Kerry was born in March 1975; Kerry died in December 2023. Their first son, Gareth, was born in December 1981, followed by their second son, Jaymie, in November 1992.
In March 1991 English-Canadian psychic Deborah Shaw began living with the couple in a short-lived arrangement. The relationship with Shaw led to the birth of a daughter in December 1991, although Shaw and Icke had by then ceased their relationship. Icke wrote in 1993 that at Shaw's request he decided not to visit their daughter and had seen her only once.
Icke and Atherton divorced in 2001 but remained friends, and Atherton continued to work as Icke's business manager.
In 1997 he met his second wife, Pamela Leigh Richards, in Jamaica. He and Richards were married in 2001 following his divorce from Atherton. They separated in 2008 and divorced in 2011.
Icke has lived since 1982 on the Isle of Wight.
Infinite dimensions
Icke believes that the universe is made up of "vibrational" energy, and consists of an infinite number of dimensions that share the same space, just like television and radio frequencies, and that some people can tune their consciousness to other wavelengths. He stated in an interview with The Guardian that:
Our five senses can access only a tiny frequency range, like a radio tuned to one station. In the space you are occupying now are all the radio and television stations broadcasting to your area. You can't see them and they can't see each other because they are on different wavelengths. But move your radio dial and suddenly there they are, one after the other. It is the same with the reality we experience here as "life". What we call the "world" and the "universe" is only one frequency range in an infinite number sharing the same space.
Icke believes that time is an illusion; there is no past or future, and only the "infinite now" is real, and that humans are an aspect of consciousness, or infinite awareness, which he describes as "all that there is, has been, and ever can be".
Selected works
Books
- (1983) It's a Tough Game, Son!, London: Piccolo Books. ISBN: 0-330-28047-3
- (1989) It Doesn't Have To Be Like This: Green Politics Explained, London: Green Print. ISBN: 1-85425-033-7
- (1991) The Truth Vibrations, London: Gateway. ISBN: 1-85860-006-5
- (1992) Love Changes Everything, London: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN: 1-85538-247-4
- (1993) In the Light of Experience: The Autobiography of David Icke, London: Warner Books. ISBN: 0-7515-0603-6
- (1993) Days of Decision, London: Jon Carpenter Publishing. ISBN: 1-897766-01-7
- (1993) Heal the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformation, London: Gateway. ISBN: 1-85860-005-7
- (1994) The Robot's Rebellion, London: Gateway. ISBN: 1-85860-022-7
- (1995) … And the Truth Shall Set You Free, Ryde: Bridge of Love Publications. ISBN: 0-9538810-5-9
- (1996) I Am Me, I Am Free: The Robot's Guide to Freedom, New York: Truth Seeker. ISBN: 0-9526147-5-8
- (1998) Lifting the Veil: David Icke interviewed by Jon Rappoport. New York: Truth Seeker. ISBN: 0-939040-05-0
- (1999) The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World, Ryde: Bridge of Love Publications. ISBN: 0-9526147-6-6
- (2001) Children of the Matrix, Ryde: Bridge of Love Publications. ISBN: 0-9538810-1-6
- (2002) Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster, Ryde: Bridge of Love Publications. ISBN: 0-9538810-2-4
- (2003) Tales from the Time Loop, Ryde: Bridge of Love Publications. ISBN: 0-9538810-4-0
- (2005) Infinite Love Is the Only Truth: Everything Else Is Illusion, Ryde: Bridge of Love Publications. ISBN: 0-9538810-6-7
- (2007) The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy (and how to end it), Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-9538810-8-6
- (2010) Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More, Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-9559973-1-0
- (2012) Remember Who You Are: Remember 'Where' You Are and Where You 'Come' From, Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 0-9559973-3-X
- (2013) The Perception Deception: Or … It's All... — Yes, All of It, Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-955997389
- (2016) Phantom Self (And how to find the real one), Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-9576308-8-8
- (2017) Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told, Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-1527207264
- (2019) The Trigger: The Lie That Changed The World, Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-916025806
- (2020) The Answer, Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-1916025820
- (2021) Perceptions of a Renegade Mind, Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-1838415310
- (2022) The Trap : What it is, how is works, and how we escape its illusions, Ryde: David Icke Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-1838415327
- (2023) The Dream: The Extraordinary Revelation Of Who We Are And Where We Are. David Icke Books. ISBN: 978-1838415334
Videos
- (1994) The Robots' Rebellion
- (1996) Turning of the Tide
- (1998) The Freedom Road
- (1999) David Icke: The Reptilian Agenda, with Zulu Sanusi (Shaman) Credo Mutwa
- (1999) David Icke: Revelations of a Mother Goddess, with Arizona Wilder
- (2000) David Icke Live in Vancouver: From Prison to Paradise
- (2003) Secrets of the Matrix
- (2006) Freedom or Fascism: The Time to Choose
- (2008)
- (2008) Beyond the Cutting Edge: Live from Brixton Academy
- (2008) David Icke: Big Brother, the BIG Picture
- (2010) The Lion Sleeps No More
- (2012) Return to Peru
- (2012) Remember Who You Are: Live at Wembley Arena
- (2014) Awaken: Live from Wembley Arena
- (2017) Worldwide Wakeup Tour Live
- (2019) Renegade
See also
- Chitauri (based on Icke's ideas)
- Gnosticism
- The Shadow Kingdom
