David Icke

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.

The middle son of three boys born seven years apart, 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.

David Vaughan Icke (born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist and a former footballer and sports broadcaster.

When David Icke was three, around 1955, they moved to the Goodwood estate, one of the council estates the post-war Labour government built.

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.

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 managed to play part-time for Hereford United, 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.

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.

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.

"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.

Reactions to his endorsement of an antisemitic fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in The Robots' Rebellion (1994) and in And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995) led his then publisher to decline further books, and he has self-published since then.

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 with his theories of reptilians serving as a deliberate "code".

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.