The Visitors of V: Reptilians in Human Skin and Where the Idea Came From

V aired on NBC on May 1 and 2, 1983, four hours across two nights, and drew about 40 percent of the audience. It opens with fifty motherships, each three miles across, settling over cities from Los Angeles to Moscow; their crews, who look exactly like us in red uniforms and dark glasses, ask for help manufacturing a chemical their dying world needs and offer their science in return. Within weeks scientists are being denounced as a conspiracy, then rounded up, then disappeared, and a Visitor youth movement is drilling in the streets. The television journalist Mike Donovan, sneaking aboard a mothership, films the crew eating live rodents and the Visitors' commander peeling off a human face to reveal a reptile beneath.

Kenneth Johnson, who wrote and directed it, had pitched the story without aliens. His first draft was an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935), about an American fascist takeover, and NBC asked for something more like Star Wars; Johnson kept his plot and made the fascists extraterrestrial. The miniseries was followed by V: The Final Battle in 1984, made without Johnson and ending with the Visitors defeated by a bacterium, and by a weekly series in 1984 and 1985 that ran nineteen episodes before cancellation. Johnson published his own intended sequel as a novel, V: The Second Generation, in 2008.

The Visitors are lizards wearing people. Beneath a synthetic skin that took, the series says, hours to apply, they are green, scaled, cold-blooded humanoids with yellow slit-pupilled eyes, forked tongues, clawed hands and a jaw that can unhinge to swallow prey whole, and their voices, unprocessed, carry a reverberating rasp. They eat live animals and, the series reveals, freeze humans in storage racks aboard the motherships as provisions for the journey home. Their science is real: the motherships, the laser weapons and the medical technology they demonstrate all work, and the human-Visitor child Elizabeth, born in The Final Battle, is a genuine hybrid whose accelerated growth gives the later series its plots.

The Visitors' account of themselves places their home on the fourth planet of Sirius, 8.6 light-years away, and describes it as dying. What the series never reconciles is that Sirius is a young, hot star system with no known planets and a white dwarf companion that would have sterilized any world during its giant phase, an objection that astronomy had already raised before 1983 and that the show, which was not about astronomy, ignored. The 2009 remake dropped the origin story altogether; its Visitors are simply "from a long way away," and its reveal of the reptile beneath is a single shot of a lizard eye.

Everything about the occupation is 1930s Europe with the serial numbers filed off. The Visitors' emblem is a red glyph on a black field; their youth wing wears armbands; the scientists they persecute are the series' stand-in for the Jews of Germany, and the Holocaust survivor Abraham Bernstein, who spray-paints the first V for victory over a Visitor poster, says so outright. The resistance forms in a Los Angeles that has learned to inform on its neighbours, and the miniseries' best-remembered scenes are not the reptiles but the ordinary collaborators. Johnson has said the reveal of the scales was NBC's idea of a hook and that his interest was in how quickly a democracy folds.

ABC's remake, which ran two seasons from 2009 to 2011, kept the shape and changed the fear. Its Visitors, led by Morena Baccarin's Anna, arrive over 29 cities offering universal healthcare and a cure-all, win the public through television and a charismatic message of peace, and are undermined by an FBI agent and a Visitor fifth column that has gone native; the sleeper cells, the surveillance and the media manipulation were 2009's anxieties rather than 1983's. Critics noted that the show could be read as a parable about either an incoming administration or its opponents, which is what happens when an allegory is transplanted from a time with a clear villain to one without.

The show gave the lore its face. The claim that reptilian beings walk among humans in disguise existed before 1983 in fragments, in the pulps' lizard-men, in Robert E. Howard's serpent people of 1929, in scattered contactee accounts of scaly visitors, but the specific image of an authority figure whose human skin tears to show scales, and of a ruling class that eats people, entered the culture through V. David Icke assembled the pieces into a system in The Biggest Secret (1999): a bloodline of shape-shifting reptilians from the Draco constellation who occupy the world's thrones and presidencies. The Reptilian aliens article traces that lineage, and the conspiracy theories ranked article explains why Icke's version, which repeatedly names Jewish banking families among the reptiles, is read as an antisemitic trope in a green suit.

V itself was the opposite of that reading. Johnson's reptiles were a device for showing how fascism recruits, with the persecuted scientists standing in for the persecuted of the 1930s; the later conspiracy inverted the allegory into a claim that the persecuted are the reptiles. Nothing in the series supports the theory, and the theory's believers rarely cite it, but the picture they carry in their heads, a face peeled back, a tongue flickering out, was drawn by NBC's makeup department in 1983. The aliens on TV article covers where the show sits in the medium's history.