Shapeshifting
For the political and bloodline-specific variety, see
Reptilian shapeshifting
.
Shapeshifting is the reported ability of certain non-human intelligent beings — and of alleged human–non-human hybrids — to alter their apparent physical form in front of witnesses, most often shifting between a human-appearing form and a non-human one. Accounts recur across folklore, religious literature, and modern encounter testimony, and are variously described as a literal bodily transformation, as a perceptual event produced in the observer rather than in the being's body, or as a shift across frequencies of reality that human senses do not normally decode.
The most extensively documented and politically charged variety is reptilian shapeshifting, the alleged shifting of reptilian or hybrid individuals between human and reptilian form, which is treated in its own article. The ability is also attributed to a range of other beings and traditions, and witnesses sometimes report transformations whose underlying nature is left unspecified — the form changes, but the being does not identify what it is.
Reported mechanism
Main article:
Reptilian shapeshifting
Where a mechanism is offered, it is usually framed not as one solid body becoming another but as a shift in the information the observer's senses decode. David Icke, who has collected such accounts since the mid-1990s, holds that human perception operates within a narrow band and that a being moving between an apparently human and an apparently non-human state is shifting "energetic information, not solid bodies." The most commonly reported correlate is a partial change — most often in the eyes or facial structure — with full-body transformation described as rarer and more disturbing.
Reported cases
Billy Corgan (2017)
In an October 2017 interview on The Howard Stern Show, musician Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins said that he had once witnessed, at close range and "totally sober," a person who "transformed into something other than human." Corgan described having been in an ordinary conversation when, as he put it, "suddenly you turn around and there's somebody else standing there." Pressed by Howard Stern — who asked whether the person had said they were "from another planet" and had refused to explain — Corgan declined to give any details, calling it "a really messed up story" involving "a famous person" and "one of the most intense things I've ever been through." He did not characterise what he had seen as reptilian or otherwise identify it. The clip was later re-broadcast by the podcast The Fact Hunter as an example of shapeshifting testimony.