Good morning, Nashville, and a Merry Christmas to everybody.
We are looking at a cold one out there today,
with lows reaching around 33 degrees,
so make sure to bundle up if you're out and about.
9-1-1, what is the address of your emergency?
It's 2nd Avenue North in Downtown Nashville.
We have a recording out here saying there's a limited time
to evacuate this area.
Metro National 9-1-1, what is the address?
9-1-1, what is the address of your emergency?
And it was closer towards the AT&T building.
Towards the AT&T building?
Yes. "There's a large bomb inside this vehicle."
In the news, you know, you hear your horror stories.
But I never thought that I would ever be involved
in something this horrible.
Tony was a friend.
I don't judge people.
I knew he was kind of off.
He showed me some of the strangest things
I've ever seen in my life.
And that's the first time I heard of Lacerta,
a shape-shifting reptilian...
who looked like a normal person.
He believed that reptilian lizard people
were here to kill humans, to eat 'em and take over.
A lotta people believe this stuff, lots of them.
Tony was obsessed,
and I was not to speak to anyone.
And if I did, I was gon' pay for it.
He started telling me that something big was gonna happen
and everybody's gonna remember it.
And on Christmas day,
when I saw the news, I knew immediately it was too late.
I'm not a big internet person.
I was a very social person.
My daughter was living with me.
I got my grandbabies. I had my hands full.
But, for Tony, his whole life was computers and the internet.
Always thought good of him. Always.
I first met Tony Warner
when he dated my sister in high school
40-some-odd years ago, for about three months.
He was 17, she was 13. So, big difference.
He became a family friend, as well, with my parents.
He ran a business where he was IT
for several different types of companies.
So, always computers, and he was a genius at it.
In August of 2017, my sister drowned,
and I was really vulnerable, and I was sad, and I was lonely.
And, Tony, he offered to just come pick me up
for dog walks.
It was very therapeutic for me.
We went out to eat a couple times.
He offered to help me do some repair work
and put a burglar alarm in my house.
And he was, to me, being a good friend.
And then, he invited me on a camping trip
that he said he takes every year on Christmas.
That's when I started questioning who this person was.
We were out hiking alone.
He had this place by the creek.
And that's when he started telling me stories
about this person or this thing in the park.
And it was...
a reptilian woman named Lacerta.
It was a woman he saw in the woods from a distance.
Beautiful long, black hair, shape-shifter.
He was always looking out there in those woods
after the first time he saw her.
And he never got a good close look at her
because she disappeared.
But he knows she's out there, and he's gonna find her again.
And I'm like, "Okay."
I watch... I've watched all the Ancient Alien, UFOs and all that.
I mean, you know, a lot of people take interest in that.
But he was totally obsessed with lizard people.
He told me during that trip reptilians were here,
and they eat people, which made me think,
"This isn't normal. This isn't normal."
This is kinda crazy.
Can we stop? I need to get my thoughts together.
Monsters are really these bundles of anxiety,
of terror and the unknown.
In world history, it's fairly early
that the idea of the-the reptilian monster, begins to appear.
It has its roots as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh,
a sneaky snake that steals the secret of eternal life.
From there, both the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian scriptures,
you've got yet another serpent.
And then, there's the figure of Satan.
And so, by the 20th century,
with the birth of mass media platforms,
there is a template that has come from religion,
and folklore, and popular culture
that informs what people come to believe.
And although lizard people have a really long history
in the mythic imagination of America,
and indeed, in humanity,
there really had not been sort of reptilian cryptids
that people have to talk about,
until there was an incident in the late 1980s, Bishopville,
when the Lizard Man story broke.
And if you don't believe what I'm saying, that's fine
because I saw it... My own two eyes, I was there.
One night, the sheriff got a call from Chris Davis.
Had said that something jumped on his car.
A lizard-looking thing.
Chris was my brother.
He had gotten off work late that night, had a flat tire.
He ended up probably the worst spot you could think of on that road.
He said he heard something running towards him.
Pulled up right in the front yard
and started blowing the horn.
He was afraid to get out the car.
We went outside and had to pretty much pull him
out the car into the house.
Never seen him that way.
It's, it's... eerie.
This is the Scape Ore Swamp on both sides of us.
Chris was stopped around that curve there a little ways,
changing the flat tire.
Sheriff said if it was possible to scare somebody to death,
he was about scared to death.
I scratched my head.
I said, "I can't believe this, what I'm hearing."
I said, "Okay, draw it."
He drew it. Immediately, he drew it.
So, right after daylight, sheriff called everybody out.
He goes out and investigates.
Then, as he finds the tracks...
I'd run up on something that I'd never seen before
because the tracks are approximately, I'd say,
seven and a half inches wide, 14 inches long.
...came across a 55-gallon steel drum.
We found claw marks on each side of it where he grabbed it.
It was breaking off tree limbs, snapped it like you would a toothpick.
Sheriff told 'em to bring the bloodhounds.
Bloodhounds track people, so we figured if they were manmade,
the bloodhounds would track it.
Bloodhounds didn't pay it any attention,
just like it wasn't even there.
And we went as far as we could in the swamp
that we couldn't see no more tracks.
I've been all over the place,
and nothing I've ever seen or heard comes even close to it.
Well, you gotta be open-minded.
Just because you haven't seen it, don't mean it's not there.
I've met a lot of people who believe in a lot
of kind of out-there conspiracy theories in my life.
Either lizard people, the Illuminati, or anything like that.
It's an alternate way of seeing the world,
whether they're real or not real.
But in the case of something like Bishopville,
you have people who are essentially, like, folklore enthusiasts
and it became kind of a tourist attraction for the town.
You may never have heard of Bishopville,
and you may not believe there's such a thing
as the tall, green, scaly apparition allegedly cited near there.
We came looking for the Lizard Man.
Dozens of people go down to the swamp every day
in hopes of catching a glimpse of the mythical creature.
It was a community that kinda came together
and basically, just like a case of a small town
tryna drum up a little bit of money.
Somebody could make a lot of money off this, T-shirts.
A radio station is offering one million US dollars for its capture.
What happens if somebody brings it in alive?
Well, we'd go ahead and pay him a million dollars for it,
turn around and sell it to Michael Jackson.
What happened in Bishopville in 1988
was getting an extraordinary amount of attention.
This was a story going viral
before we had social platforms for things to go viral on.
As the new year begins, an estimated
two and a half million computers will be on the network.
Back in the 1990s was when the lizard people stuff really took off.
Now, you can kind of, like, create your own sort of lizard people communities
with other believers in this stuff.
It'd be, like, 300 people on, like, a little Usenet message board
just kind of talking to each other.
And I think through there, it just spread.
For Tony, that's where I think it started.
They were fellow Reptilian believers
and they shared information.
This whole thing about Lacerta.
And Tony's always been a loner.
You never see him with anybody.
Lizard people theorists online are kind of building, like, lore
for the lizard person community.
But online, where you're sort of isolated and unable to, like,
tell what's real from what's not real,
then that's when you start getting a little nuts.
My friends, our next guest was a goalkeeper
for Hereford United Football Club.
He claims to be the Son of God.
How you're going to react to this, I do not know.
But would you welcome, please, David Icke.
David Icke was a professional football player in the UK,
and then he started hearing sort of these prophetic voices and visions,
and they revealed the lizard people thing to him.
To try to bring the truth to a planet
that has lost that truth for 12,000 years,
and as a result of which, we have taken this wondrous planet
to the brink of not existing.
He was able to get invited on to talk shows
because he had those relationships already.
But now, he also had a new product to sell,
which is the fact that lizard people
secretly, control all the world's governments.
It's these human-reptile hybrid bloodlines
that actually have occupied the major positions of power
through the history of the last few thousand years,
running the banking system, the business system,
the politics, the military, et cetera.
David Icke.
I think it's no accident that David Icke's career
really takes off with the emergence of the internet.
He claimed that all these various influential figures
have been sort of pushing the world to a one-world government.
He believed the Merovingians were lizard people,
the Bush family.
Oddly, Bob Hope, for some reason.
Do you still think the royal family
were shape-shifting lizards? - Yes, I do.
At some point, it came out that David Icke
had just ripped his whole theory off from this TV show, V.
The visitors are not our friends!
They've come to rape our planet and kill us!
They are not who they appear to be!
His followers did not care whatsoever
that he had just ripped the plot off of a TV show
and then passed it off as his own theory
about how the universe works.
Because, at this point, they believe that lizard people are everywhere.
And so, if you believe that, you're gonna believe
that any kind of, like, you know, anybody trying to assail your theory
or prove you wrong, is actually an agent of the lizard people.
Human race, awaken!
With the online stuff about lizard people,
like the David Icke stuff and these kinda conspiracy entrepreneurs,
people started seeing that there's actually
a big online market for this stuff.
Hello, everybody, I'm Sherry Shriner.
You know, soul scalping is, the last phase
of their human domination plan of the end game for the reptiles.
I tip my hat to the New World Order
and suggest all of you drink more fluoride.
And so you have all these different people
tryna kinda get in on this pretty lucrative craze.
People making the big lizard people videos,
they probably don't believe in that stuff.
They might, they might not.
But at the end of the day, they're actually making money off of it.
And then, there's, like, a lot of other people
who take it really seriously
and believe that, like, we're kind of under,
you know, this sort of despotic rule by lizard people.
And that is actually the reason that all of these bad things happen in the world.
Something that Tony had put together.
"The reptilians are an advanced species
who have evolved on and from this planet."
There are 1,833 of them that have been living underground
between 100 and 200 miles beneath the surface.
"The absolutely evil and corrupt lifeforms
"that tweaked DNA over and over to make humans,
created us to be a race of slaves."
Humans have been eaten and taken off planet, et cetera, et cetera,
and used for slaves in other colonies.
"They also put a switch into the human brain,
so they could walk among us and appear as a human."
Shape-shifted in front of him, turned into a reptile.
He was giving me information to study.
And I had to stop reading it because I don't believe this.
There are... O-Other people say,
"Well you better not talk about the Reptilians."
Well, you know, bull. You know, why not?
This might itself seem like just a quaint, weird belief.
Problematically, though, racists have always made use
of reptilian language.
Hitler made use of reptilian language
to talk about the Jewish people.
If you want to portray a group as secretive,
if you want to portray a group as inhuman,
it's just simply become part of their weaponry.
And so, David Icke has managed to find an audience
among neo-Nazis, anti-Semites,
and people who are anti-government.
Tony let it be clear that he hated the government
and anybody with power over him.
He believed the reptilians
were bugging all the telephone lines and the cell phones,
and listening in to every conversation of everybody all the time.
He told me not to talk on the phone,
not to text anything except in code.
The telecommunications industry is owned by this cult
because it's absolutely crucial to total human control.
These ideas that have percolated
out of some of the strangest places,
and then met one another online,
I think do pose a-a-a very real danger.
Looking back, I'm picking all these little pieces up,
putting it together.
Tony showed me how he could make a fire
in the woods with a cotton ball and this liquid.
And it blew up big.
But he explained to me that he was working on a project...
and it was very dangerous, and he had to cook this stuff.
I remember when I drove him over to his place to get a tool,
and that RV was in his driveway.
And I went over to open the door.
He grabbed my arm like he was gon' squeeze my arm off.
"Don't, don't open that door."
And I'm like, "Why? Is that where you're storing
"this stuff that you're making?
What are you doing this for? Are you gonna hurt people?"
And he said, "Well, you know, if people get hurt, that's not my fault."
I took it as a threat.
He was determined to get his message out there
about lizard people.
And that scared me.
That, that totally started making me, I guess, come to my senses.
And that's when I'm like...
"Who is gonna believe this story?"
So, this reptilian conspiracy theory
is just one of several odd and esoteric conspiracy theories
that manifests here in the United States.
And over the past couple decades,
because of the rise of the internet and social media,
we've just seen more and more of that.
There have been this proliferation
of conspiracy entrepreneurs who traffic in these ideas
and beliefs that you and I would find just reprehensible.
And these reptiles, they actually like the whole covert thing
because it's even more insidious, it's more effective.
But all it takes is someone with a voice
who's got a platform and can promote it,
and then it's a question of, well, who then is willing to latch onto it?
I think in the early 2010s when social media sites
really, really started taking off,
the internet became, like, a frequent companion through people's days,
sometimes the only companion.
And that really breaks down the wall between, like,
reality and fiction for a lot of people.
The thing about social media is that people
sort of share without context,
and then some are really just, like, kinda lost people
who are looking for some kind of answers.
I noticed that things were getting really weird
at, like, kinda the end of Obama's presidency.
I mean, have you been on the internet?
People are out there saying that we're ruled by giant lizards.
One of them was that he was a lizard person.
And so, it sort of merged into this heavily politicized
right wing conspiracy theory stuff.
These kinda conspiracy entrepreneurs
will, like, churn out video after video after video
that is swept up in the algorithm.
And so, people will get sucked into this world.
The algorithm heavily favored a lot
of this kind of, like, lizard person kinda crazy shit content.
And because so many people were clicking on them of their own accord,
they started being fed to other people.
And so, you're constantly bombarded by, like, this stuff
in a way that, like, I don't think the human brain
is, like, really capable of-of-of taking.
And so, you have people essentially, like, self-brainwashing.
I-I know that, I know that something is up.
Something is.
It's, it's everybody's trying to with me, man.
And it's, like, and it's to the point of where I freak out
and I start punching shit.
Unfortunately, there are, a number of instances
where people who seem damaged, or they're looking for meaning,
or a-a source of strength or comfort, they latch onto these beliefs,
and in some cases, they're willing to act out violently.
Alright. Reptilians run the world, okay?
There's... They're-They're way up at the top, they run everything.
It's-It's on some Illuminati shit.
Buckey Wolfe, was a guy in Seattle
who had spent a lot of time online watching, like,
bodybuilding, kind of fitness videos,
and then that led him into a, lizard person rabbit hole.
These people can take human form and you wouldn't tell the difference.
You could stare them right in the eye and they'll look like a normal human.
And it... even when you're in here, man, you hear noises like
across the the-the wall and shit like that.
I come back in and shit's moved around.
A guy like Buckey Wolfe is basically being preyed upon
by, like, a conspiracy hustler and that, like, a guy like this
will just watch these over and over and over because it's addictive content.
But it also can-can feed into really violent delusions.
If you're being targeted by any of your family members or friends,
know this, they are dead.
And the reptiles...
took their body.
He started applying the videos that he saw on the internet to his real life,
and then that ended up in the murder of his brother...
because he believed he was becoming a lizard person.
I didn't know who Tony was anymore.
All I know was he was obsessed
and that I was not to speak to anyone,
and that if I did, I was, I was gon' pay for it.
But I had to do something.
'Cause I-I knew that he was serious about making a bomb.
I couldn't take that to my deathbed,
knowing that if I knew thousands of people were gonna die...
and I'm not that person.
I had to call somebody with some type of good reputation
to be by my side.
And I called my attorney to call the police,
and I left three messages on his phone.
In the last one, I was screaming.
He's making bombs.
I need somebody here, please, just to back me up, just,
just to help me. I-I needed help.
I'm sitting on the porch.
One police car pulls in, and then 10 more.
The whole street was lined
with Nashville's best blue and white.
I told them I had never been so happy to see...
somebody come to help.
But then, something was wrong.
They got the misunderstanding,
the police did, that I was suicidal.
So, they wouldn't listen to anything I said to them.
Nothing.
I said, I'll go to the hospital
when you tell me you're going to his house.
There's bombs in that RV, in his house.
They say they knocked on his door.
You know, he had probably 15, 20 video cameras
around his house, he's always had it surveilled.
Well, he didn't come to the door.
All his vehicles were there, he didn't answer the door.
So, they said they went back at least 10 to 20 more times
to knock on his door. And, and that was it.
They never completed, followed up anything, the police.
So, I went to the hospital.
The Nashville police took that first initial step
and did what's called a knock and talk,
where, literally, a police officer knocks on your door.
But without a warrant, um, to go inside a house
or to detain you on the spot,
there's not much that law enforcement can do.
I mean, these are the rules that law enforcement has to play by.
And had the situation been different, or the facts emerged,
or had Warner showed up to the door,
who knows what would've happened after that.
So, I was on my own 'cause I couldn't call the police.
The day after I got out of the hospital, Tony had texted me.
I'm like, "How does he know I'm out?"
He's got a way into my house,
'cause he had a key fob to my burglar system,
which I didn't realize he kept one.
He was coming in my house and he was leaving little things.
He put Hershey kisses in my oven.
I mean, this is weird stuff.
I was scared to death.
So, I had to either decide to sit there
and wait for him to kill me...
or to sell my house and disappear, and save my life.
So, I decided to save my life.
And I bought a mobile home so he could not locate me
through public records of purchasing a property.
And since that day, I've been living in fear
knowing that Tony said,
"Something big's gonna happen and everybody's gonna remember it.
And I know exactly the day I'm going to die."
On Christmas day of 2020...
I guess it was going on 2 o'clock, I guess, when I turned on the TV.
From what I understand,
an RV pulled up on 2nd Avenue.
And then, there's a warning with this voice saying...
And that song started playing from the RV.
It was Downtown.
♪ Downtown, just listen to the music ♪
He used to play that in his car... to me...
and my heart sank.
Where's your car? - Right there.
Okay, go to your car!
My God, there... my entire building
just fell down and it's collapsing.
I live at 2nd Avenue North.
Please, come. Please...
The entire building just collapsed?
All I saw was a building shattering back and forth.
The explosion authorities call "intentional"
damaged nearly 40 downtown buildings,
the blast coming from an RV parked near the AT&T transmission building.
They finally showed that RV, and I just freaked out.
And I'm like, "He did it. He did it."
The explosion was significant, as you can see
from the street, there on 2nd Avenue.
We're putting everything we have into finding who was responsible.
And if you know anything about what has happened here today,
we'd appreciate your help.
I saw an FBI hotline come up and the police hotline.
And I'm like, "I can't call the police."
I di... I di... I didn't trust 'em.
I think it was around 6:00 or 7:00 that evening,
I decided I'm gonna call and tell 'em what I know.
It's the right thing to do.
And I was on hold for over half an hour.
That's when they found the police report that I had made in 2019.
They showed up at my door at 8 o'clock the next morning,
four giant FBI men with shotguns.
And that afternoon, they said it was Tony Warner.
Combing the scene of the blast for clues,
authorities say this man, Anthony Quinn Warner,
blew himself up in his RV right outside of the AT&T building.
Investigators identified Warner
by matching a hat and gloves found in one of his vehicles
with DNA gathered at the scene.
He said, "I'm going to be so famous. Nashville will never forget me."
Tonight, federal authorities are searching the home
of 63-year-old, Anthony Warner.
The person they believe is responsible for the bombing,
Anthony Quinn Warner,
believed in a number of conspiracy theories.
Not long ago, Warner wrote to his friend
about lizard people, whom he believes
can tweak human DNA and control the planet.
In the immediate aftermath, law enforcement and the FBI
found out that this reptilian humanoid conspiracy
was the belief system that Warner had latched onto
and was the basis for conducting the attack.
That's probably the first time anyone,
either in the FBI or other law enforcement partners
who were assisting the FBI had ever heard of that.
And from a domestic extremism perspective,
that's not one that people like me would have ever heard of either.
Mobile service was interrupted from Georgia to Kentucky.
9-1-1 systems were down, credit card readers failed,
and planes were grounded after Nashville's airport lost internet access.
And from an FBI perspective,
this is very difficult territory to navigate through
because you're dealing with, for the most part,
First Amendment protected speech.
Even if it's a conspiracy theory
and even if it's promoting general violence or rebellion,
there's really nothing the FBI can do to stop it from just being out there.
And this is just the legal framework
the FBI has to operate under because of the First Amendment.
These are the toughest things to try to identify in advance
before they go out and conduct an attack.
If the FBI had known Warner was building a bomb,
yes, they could've done something about them.
But nobody did.
When I wasn't believed
and I was treated...
like I'm absolutely not a person, a human being, um...
I don't know that I've ever been so let down in my life,
knowing that nothing,
not one, not one thing had been done.
The girlfriend of the suspected Nashville Bomber
told police that he was making explosives in his RV
back in August of 2019.
In the news, my God,
everybody just started making things up on the news.
Nashville police arrive at Pamela Perry's house.
According to the report, Perry says she is Anthony Warner's girlfriend.
There was a report that I heard about me
saying I was a crazy ex-girlfriend of Anthony Warner.
They, they fed me to the wolves.
Warner's girlfriend, may have had, suicidal thoughts.
They had my name, they had the police report,
the recording, everything on the TV.
I was never a girlfriend. I'm not crazy, I'm not an ex.
They're all lies, they were all lies.
And it was, like, people running up and down my neighborhood
and chasing after my daughters.
I didn't come out of my house for four or five months.
And I was afraid, I was scared.
How does a nobody like me get into a mess like this?
I did nothing but try to help people stay alive.
I'm usually not this... a foolish person.
I'm not.
And he got, like I said, he, he got me at my lowest,
and, um...
it crushed me.
But not to the point where I couldn't come back.
And so...
I'm glad I did what I did.
I sometimes regret it...
but not for long.
Some people are gonna be completely convinced
that lizard people control the world.
Their sense of what's real and what's not real
has almost completely broken down.
But when a town comes together and controls their own lizard person,
it can actually be a positive experience.
I think the Bishopville Lizard Man
is an example of Lizard Man helping humanity.
I mean, I would say that's, like, in the classic spirit
of small town boosterism.
You know the Lizard Man.
Whether he's real or whether he's not, it's fun.
We can have fun with him
and also help bring some money to Bishopville.
Having this Stomp every year will also bring people together.
That way, we can talk about something besides...
on the phone.
And that's what we need.
We're not having enough of that in this world.
We were promised that the internet
was going to be the information superhighway.
And instead, it's become these series of alleys of-of-of disinformation.
I think the lizard person phenomenon
is really just, like, one part of a bigger hole.
The communities that once were, like, a big part of people's lives
have really sort of faded away.
I think that plays on a lot of people's feelings
of, like, helplessness and insecurity, and feeling alone in the world.
Over the last decade, a kind of apocalyptic attitude
that will help you understand who the enemy
with a capital "E" is,
can prove a terrible temptation.
The lizard people story is an example of this.
Pizzagate is an example of this.
QAnon is example of this.
The man who killed his children in-in Santa Barbara
seems to have first come in contact
with the lizard people notion
from his QAnon contacts.
A Santa Barbara dad has admitted
to taking his two kids to Mexico
where he killed them and left their bodies
because he thought they had what he calls "serpent DNA".
Looking back at the history of these tragic, violent acts
that have happened going back to the late 2010s
with people who believe in the reptilian humanoid conspiracy,
in-in the future, I am concerned that this will be an ongoing phenomena.
A man in Washington state was arrested
after he was shown, waving an AK-47 and a pistol
and indicating that he, had had a conversation
with Donald Trump, and needed to go after so-called lizard people.
This is-is almost certainly just gonna get way worse
as people get more and more disconnected,
as people spend, like, way, way more on... time online,
and as the world makes less and less sense.
Court paperwork shows Isaiah Gentry
is accused of hitting his dad in the head with a statue
before stabbing him 20 times with a steak knife
because a quote "shape-shifting reptile had taken over."
The need that many of those who at least feel marginalized
to create monsters, is terrifying.
Because if you see anyone as a monster,
well, the only thing to do with the monster...
is you gotta destroy it.