Royal Family and Royal Conspiracy Theories

There’s a peculiar magic surrounding royalty. No matter how many centuries pass, the public remains fascinated—sometimes disturbingly so—by those born into privilege, pomp, and the peculiar obligation of waving gracefully at crowds. Members of the royal family have long had to balance the performance of public duty with the near-impossible task of maintaining private lives.

Most people accept that a monarch deserves at least some measure of privacy. Others, however, interpret any secrecy as proof of scandal—or extraterrestrial infiltration. And so, with that same level of academic rigor that fuels the internet’s finest theories (“I read it online, so it must be true”), we revisit a few of the strangest royal conspiracy theories—now updated for a post-Elizabethan world.

UPDATED: November 6, 2025

Queen Elizabeth II Was Immortal—Until She Wasn’t

When the crown was placed upon her head in 1953, the crowd’s cry of “Long live the Queen!” seemed less like a wish and more like a prophecy. For decades, many online commentators speculated that Her Majesty was not simply long-lived, but immortal. The internet is full of memes claiming she was present at the dawn of time and would still be reigning when the Sun finally imploded.

To be fair, the evidence was compelling. She outlasted world leaders, pop icons, and roughly half the internet’s favorite memes. But the theory finally hit a snag on September 8, 2022, when the nation and the world mourned her passing at the age of 96. While that may have put an end to her alleged immortality, it’s safe to assume she’ll live on forever in the British psyche—and probably still show up in the next round of royal conspiracy memes.

Queen Elizabeth II Was an Extraterrestrial Reptile

The late Queen’s supposed longevity was often attributed to another “fact” from the tinfoil-hat crowd: she was, allegedly, a reptile from outer space. The idea that shape-shifting lizard beings secretly control human governments was popularized by former BBC sports reporter David Icke, whose 1999 book The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World named Elizabeth II as one of the so-called “Annunaki.”

Icke claims this cosmic cabal orchestrated everything from the Holocaust to 9/11 to the COVID-19 pandemic—proof, perhaps, that imagination can thrive without the slightest interference from evidence. In a BBC interview titled “Lizards in Buckingham Palace,” Icke assured viewers his ideas were backed by “hard factual information.” That’s certainly one way to describe delusion with footnotes.

Queen Elizabeth II Was a Cannibal

For those unwilling to accept the lizard theory, philosopher Hubert Humdinger (whose name alone screams “fictional”) offered an alternative: the Queen’s vitality, he said, came from eating human flesh. This allegedly appeared in a 1973 article in We Royalty magazine—a publication that, oddly enough, no one has ever seen and may never have existed. Humdinger allegedly described Her Majesty as “violently vibrant” and concluded, “She must eat human flesh to be so vivacious.”

We scoured every available archive and found no trace of the article—or of Humdinger himself, for that matter. The only evidence of his claim appears on this website. It’s entirely possible that the Queen devoured both the magazine and the author to protect her secret—or, more likely, that the internet collectively hallucinated the whole thing.

Prince Philip Was a Divine Being

Before his death in 2021, Prince Philip was venerated as a god—literally—by the Kastom people of Tanna, an island in Vanuatu. According to their legend, the son of a mountain spirit traveled across the sea, married a powerful woman, and would one day return. When Philip visited in 1974, the villagers decided the prophecy had been fulfilled.

The Yaohnanen people corresponded with Buckingham Palace for years, exchanging gifts and photos. When Philip died, the tribe entered a period of mourning but continued to revere him as a divine figure whose spirit, they believe, still watches over them. It’s one of the few royal conspiracy theories grounded not in paranoia—but in genuine affection and mythic reverence. (See “The Cargo Cults: Faith, Spam, and the Strangest Religion of the 20th Century” for more information about this phenomenon.)

King Charles III Is a Vampire

When Doctor Who suggested Queen Victoria’s descendants might become werewolves, royal watchers scoffed. After all, the truth—according to the internet—is much darker: King Charles III (formerly Prince Charles) is a vampire.

In 2011, Charles himself fueled the rumor by discussing his ancestral link to Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century Romanian prince who inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He even owns a home in Transylvania, which is about as subtle as buying a timeshare in the Batcave.

The fact that he’s now King—and still looks remarkably human in daylight—may suggest that the rumors are exaggerated. Still, it does make one wonder what’s really in those royal goblets at state dinners.

Of course, it’s always possible the internet is simply full of nonsense. But if we wake up one morning to headlines about “King Charles and the Eternal Reign of the Undead,” well… don’t say we didn’t warn you.

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