Chapter 2

The Vril: Taxonomy of a Hidden Species

"I'm not sure of their origins, but they're the highly evolved lizard species. They're reptilian. They actually said that they're not actually lizard. They're saurian, as in dinosaurian."

The Name They Call Themselves

Before we examine what Donald Marshall describes, we should consider the word itself.

Vril.

Marshall is uncertain about the spelling—"I'm not sure if it's one L or 2 at the end. It's Vril. V-R-I-L-L or V-R-I-L"—but he is certain about one thing that most researchers would find surprising: the creatures can say the word themselves. "That's the common name they all call themselves. They can say the word themselves, Vril."

This is a remarkable claim for a specific reason. The word "Vril" has a documented history that most people in the conspiracy research space associate with Nazi Germany, occult societies, and a nineteenth-century novel. If Marshall were fabricating his account, the use of this particular word would be a curious choice—too easily traced, too loaded with existing associations, too likely to invite skepticism from anyone familiar with the literature.

And yet the historical record surrounding the word is itself extraordinary enough to warrant close examination.

The Literary Origin: Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race

In 1871, the English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton published The Coming Race (later retitled Vril, the Power of the Coming Race), a work of speculative fiction describing a narrator who discovers a subterranean civilization of beings called the Vril-ya. These beings wield a force called "Vril"—an all-pervasive energy that can be used for healing, destruction, mind control, and the animation of machinery. The Vril-ya are described as having evolved underground over millennia, developing physical and psychic capabilities far beyond those of surface-dwelling humans.

The novel was influential in ways that exceeded its literary merit. Bulwer-Lytton was not merely a popular writer; he was a member of the British aristocracy (1st Baron Lytton), a Member of Parliament, and, according to multiple historical sources, deeply involved in Rosicrucian and occult circles. His earlier works—Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1862)—dealt explicitly with occult themes, esoteric initiation, and the existence of hidden intelligences operating behind the veil of material reality.

The question that has fascinated researchers for over a century is whether The Coming Race was fiction, allegory, or disclosure dressed as fiction—a technique that Marshall's testimony suggests is standard operating procedure for the system he describes.

Bulwer-Lytton was in a position to know things. His social circle included some of the most connected people in Victorian England. If the bloodline families Marshall describes had been interacting with subterranean entities for generations, a well-placed aristocrat with occult interests would be exactly the kind of person who might learn of it—and exactly the kind of person who might choose to publish it as a novel, knowing that fiction provides plausible deniability.

This is speculation. But it is specification grounded in the documented facts of Bulwer-Lytton's biography and social position.

The German Obsession: The Vril-Gesellschaft

The word made its most consequential leap from fiction to operational reality in early twentieth-century Germany.

The Vril-Gesellschaft—the Vril Society—is documented as a real organization that operated in Munich in the years following World War I, closely associated with the Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft), which is itself documented as a direct precursor to the Nazi Party. The Thule Society provided the organizational infrastructure and many of the founding members of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), which became the NSDAP—the Nazi Party.

The historical record on the Vril Society is thinner than that of the Thule Society, leading some mainstream historians to question whether it existed as a formal organization or merely as an informal circle of discussion. What is not in dispute is that the concept of Vril—a hidden energy source wielded by subterranean beings—was taken with deadly seriousness by people at the highest levels of the German occult-political establishment.

Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist who emigrated to the United States in 1937, wrote in a 1947 article for the magazine Astounding Science Fiction that a group in Berlin had been "ichly organized... to look for Vril." He named it the "Wahrheitsgesellschaft"—the Society for Truth—and described its members as believing that Bulwer-Lytton's novel was a factual account.

Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels, in their 1960 work The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des Magiciens), expanded significantly on the Vril Society narrative, placing it within a broader framework of Nazi occultism that included the search for inner-earth civilizations, contact with non-human intelligences, and the development of advanced technology derived from esoteric knowledge.

Peter Levenda, in Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult (2002), further documented the intersection of Nazi ideology with occult beliefs about subterranean races, hidden energy sources, and the spiritual significance of "blood and soil"—the latter phrase acquiring a more literal meaning in the context of Marshall's testimony about bloodline families who manage the surface-subterranean interface.

Marshall's comment is almost casual: "Germans were into them. They had a club with Vril things." Without elaborating on the German connection or citing Bulwer-Lytton or the Thule Society, he simply states that the Germans knew about the creatures, gave them a name (or used the name the creatures already called themselves), and organized around that knowledge.

The historical record confirms that the Germans did exactly this. The question is what they were organizing around—a literary fantasy, or something they had actually encountered.

Marshall's Taxonomy: Three Types

Marshall describes the Vril not as a single species but as a genus comprising at least three distinct morphological types, which he numbers in ascending order of size and intelligence.

Type 1: The Parasites

"There's a one-to-one-and-a-half-foot tall one. That's the real type one. The type ones are covered in red-simon-shaped scales. Real type ones are real dumb. Little dragons, those are the real type one."

Type 1 Vril are the smallest, the least intelligent, and—crucially—the only type capable of the parasitic process that Marshall calls "droning." They are the operational foot soldiers of the species, the biological vectors through which the Vril infiltrate human society.

Marshall provides additional morphological details across multiple descriptions:

• Covered in scales that vary in color by geographic region: red scales under the British Isles, black scales under the Middle East
• Carnivorous
• Possess a proboscis located at the top of the head, described as looking "like a chocolate chip" when retracted
• Capable of basic speech—"they sound like they've had helium"
• Possess built-in sonar
• Highly sensitive to sound and light ("they're basically subterranean troglodytes, like trolls basically—they are trolls")
• Communicte in "clicks and gurgles"
• Have a "blood spike"—Marshall identifies this as the feature that gave rise to chupacabra sightings

The description of Type 1 Vril as what "people would call a chupacabra" is worth pausing on. The chupacabra—literally "goat-sucker"—first entered public awareness in 1995, when livestock in Puerto Rico were found drained of blood with puncture wounds. Eyewitness descriptions from the original Puerto Rican sightings described a creature roughly 3 feet tall, with large eyes, grayish skin, and spines or quills running down its back. Subsequent sightings across Latin America and the southern United States have produced varying descriptions, but the core features—small bipedal creature, carnivorous, associated with exsanguination—recur.

Marshall's claim that chupacabra sightings are encounters with Type 1 Vril that have surfaced from underground provides a framework for understanding why the sightings cluster in certain geographic areas (potentially near subterranean access points) and why the creatures have never been captured or cataloged by mainstream biology (they retreat underground).

This is, of course, exactly the kind of unfalsifiable claim that skeptics rightly flag. The absence of a captured specimen can always be explained by the claim that they hide too effectively. But it is worth noting that Marshall's description was offered in the context of a comprehensive taxonomy, not as a one-off explanation for chupacabra sightings. The chupacabra identification is incidental to his main narrative, which suggests it was not manufactured to explain the phenomenon but rather that the phenomenon happened to match what he was already describing.

Type 2: The Non-Parasitic Carnivores

"There's a type 2 that is not parasitic, but it's still vicious, nasty carnivorous. They're all carnivorous. Type 2 are a little smarter."

Marshall provides less detail about Type 2 Vril, which he describes as a middle category: larger and smarter than Type 1, but without the parasitic capability that makes Type 1 the primary threat to human beings. He notes that Type 2 have a visible proboscis sheath—"a proboscis sheath that comes out, sticks out"—but this apparatus is apparently not used for the consciousness-transfer process that defines Type 1 parasitism.

The relative lack of detail about Type 2 is itself consistent with a genuine account rather than a fabricated one. A fabricator would be expected to elaborate equally on all categories to make the taxonomy seem complete. A witness describing actual encounters would naturally know more about the types he interacted with most frequently (Type 1, which is used for droning, and Type 3, which governs the others) and less about the intermediate type.

Type 3: The Commanders

"And there's a type 3 that's 8 feet tall, has a real long neck, and looks like a gray alien. And real type 3 runs the previous 2 kinds."

Type 3 Vril are, in Marshall's account, the governing class of the species. They are the largest, the most intelligent, and they "pretty much lord over the other 2." They reside at the deepest levels of the subterranean habitat—"like below deep base deep"—and rarely interact directly with humans.

Marshall provides a cultural reference point that is striking in its specificity: "Those long-necked aliens in the Star Wars movie, there would be a representation of a certain type of Vril, like all the Vril type threes."

He is referring to the Kaminoans—the tall, slender, long-necked aliens who operate the cloning facility on the planet Kamino in Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2002). The Kaminoans are depicted as sophisticated, detached, and clinical—operating vast clone production facilities with industrial efficiency.

The parallel is almost too precise. In the Star Wars fiction, the Kaminoans are:

• Tall and long-necked
• Operators of a cloning facility
• Producers of clone armies grown in tanks
• Detached and unemotional in their relationship to the clones they create

In Marshall's testimony, Type 3 Vril are:

• Tall (8 feet) and long-necked
• The rulers of a species associated with cloning operations
• Deep subterranean dwellers
• The most intelligent and commanding of the three types

Marshall adds a detail that links back to his broader claims about cultural encoding: "Everybody else calls them that, too." He says the Kaminoan comparison is common among people who have encountered Type 3 Vril.

He also notes that Type 3 Vril "get real ugly" as they age: "They end up looking like Pumpkinhead after a while." He then makes a claim that, like his songwriting assertions, is audacious in its specificity: "Which is why I made Pumpkinhead look like Pumpkinhead." He is claiming authorship of the creature design for the 1988 horror film Pumpkinhead, directed by Stan Winston—a film featuring a tall, long-limbed, vengeful creature summoned from beneath the earth.

The Subterranean Environment

Marshall describes the Vril's natural habitat in terms that, as we will see in Chapter 6, align with documented geological conditions in specific regions of the earth's crust.

"They need a methane-oxygen mix to breathe, and deep underground they got sulfur pools, I guess, that make this stuff."

"They come up from underground different spots all over the world, like worms out of a rotten apple."

"There's even different kinds of these Vril that don't even know about each other and they don't even speak the same language to themselves."

This last detail is significant. Marshall is not describing a unified civilization with central command. He is describing a species with regionally isolated populations—different factions, different scale colorations, different communication systems—that have developed independently in their respective subterranean habitats, much as isolated populations of any biological species would be expected to diverge over time.

This is consistent with biogeography. If a species survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago by retreating to deep subterranean habitats, and if those habitats were geographically separated by geological formations, the species would be expected to diversify into regionally distinct populations over that timescale. The red scales of the British Isles population, the black scales of the Middle Eastern population, and the different communication systems Marshall describes are exactly what evolutionary biology would predict for a species in long-term geographic isolation.

Marshall explicitly connects the Vril to the age of dinosaurs: "They said that they live past the cataclysm that killed dinosaurs because they were so far underground."

He also draws a distinction that is taxonomically precise: "They actually said that they're not actually lizard. They're saurian, as in dinosaurian." This is not a distinction that a fabricator would typically make. The popular imagination conflates "lizard" and "dinosaur," but they are taxonomically distinct. Lizards (order Squamata) and dinosaurs (clade Dinosauria) diverged in the Triassic period, roughly 230 million years ago. A species that survived the K-Pg extinction event by being underground would indeed be more accurately described as "saurian" than "lizard," and the correction Marshall attributes to the creatures themselves suggests either genuine taxonomic knowledge on his part or genuine communication with entities that know their own evolutionary history.

The Intelligence Gradient

One of the more nuanced aspects of Marshall's taxonomy is the intelligence gradient he describes across the three types.

Type 1 Vril are "real dumb"—comparable, in Marshall's estimation, to animals with some capacity for basic speech and instinctual behavior. Their intelligence is sufficient for the parasitic process (which appears to be largely biological rather than cognitive) but not for complex planning or social organization.

However, once a Type 1 Vril has parasitized a human host—once it has "droned" someone—its intelligence increases dramatically. "The lizard is smarter as a human then, and totally controls everything." This is because the drone inherits the neural architecture of the human host, gaining access to the host's memory, language capabilities, and cognitive functions while retaining the Vril's own parasitic psychology.

This creates a paradox that Marshall acknowledges: "They're actually deficient. They're dumber than the original person. And they mimic human behavior." The drone is smarter than a Type 1 Vril in its natural form, but dumber than the human it replaced. It compensates through mimicry—"it knows that its life is dependent on it mimicking human behaviour, so it does really well"—but the cognitive deficit is real and, over time, potentially detectable.

Type 3 Vril, by contrast, are described as genuinely intelligent in their natural form. They are the strategists, the commanders, and apparently the only type capable of understanding and directing the broader relationship between the Vril species and human civilization.

The Relationship with Humans

Marshall describes a relationship between the Vril and human "bloodline families" that is transactional, longstanding, and deeply parasitic—in both the biological and sociological senses of the word.

"These bloodline families, they're just lizard helpers, and lizards favored them in the past. They used to bring them up gold and gems from underground that they mined, and they would trade people gems and gold, and they would give them animals, children, all kinds of things, and just cart them down tunnels and cages."

The exchange is explicit: precious minerals from underground in exchange for biological resources from the surface. The human collaborators provide what the Vril cannot easily obtain from their subterranean environment—living organisms for food and for the droning process. The Vril provide what humans value—gold, gems, and (implicitly) political advantage through the elimination of rivals via droning.

Marshall connects this arrangement to specific historical secret societies: "Some of these things, Brotherhood of the Snake, Dragon Society and stuff, it's all about lizards."

The Brotherhood of the Snake (or Brotherhood of the Serpent) is one of the oldest secret society concepts in conspiracy literature, traced by some researchers to ancient Sumeria and Egypt. The Dragon Court (or Royal Dragon Court) is a documented organization that claims descent from medieval European nobility and uses explicitly draconic/serpentine symbolism.

In mainstream historical analysis, these organizations are understood as human institutions that adopted reptilian symbolism for its associations with wisdom, power, and esoteric knowledge. In Marshall's framework, the symbolism is literal: these organizations were founded by humans who were in direct contact with a reptilian species and adopted its iconography as a mark of their alliance.

The Pets

One of the most unsettling details in Marshall's testimony involves the keeping of individual Type 1 Vril as personal pets by high-ranking human collaborators.

"Sometimes these people, they get a pet lizard, one of their very own. Like Elizabeth's one is called Matilda, and Kissinger's one is called Herbert."

He names two of the most powerful people of the twentieth century—Queen Elizabeth II and Henry Kissinger—and assigns them named pet Vril in the same casual tone one might use to describe a neighbor's dog. The specificity of the names—Matilda, Herbert—is the kind of detail that either reflects genuine knowledge or a fabricator's effort to add verisimilitude. In either case, it is testable in principle: if either individual were ever subjected to the kind of investigation Marshall proposes, the presence or absence of anomalous biological material in their residences or personal effects would be relevant evidence.

"And they occasionally get a hold of a real kid and bring it to the cloning station and feed a kid to one of these lizards."

Marshall compares this to the television show Alf (1986–1990): "It's like Alf, the show. Alf runs around trying to eat cats and stuff. Everybody thinks it's cute. Well, these things, their favorite food is a kid, human kid, because it has less vaccinations in it."

The vaccination detail is, like many of Marshall's claims, oddly specific. He says that vaccinations administered after a certain age make human blood toxic or unpalatable to the Vril: "Some vaccinations after a certain age will, if they drain the blood out of a thing, the real lizard will die from the vaccinations or it'll get real sick or taste bad or something to them."

This is not a claim that can be verified without access to a Vril specimen for testing. But it is a claim that, within the internal logic of the testimony, provides a biological rationale for the specific targeting of young, unvaccinated children—a pattern that, if the broader testimony is accurate, maps onto documented patterns of child trafficking and exploitation by the same elite networks Marshall describes.

"The Biggest Stir in Human History"

Marshall says the Vril themselves understand the stakes of disclosure: "These lizards are smarter than a chimpanzee, and they're saying that this is probably the thing that's going to cause the greatest stir in human history, finding out about the parasite lizards."

He describes their psychology as fundamentally cowardly—"parasitic psychology is really cowardly. They slink around in the dark"—and driven by an imperative toward secrecy that he frames as almost religious: "Secrecy is part of a lizard's religion. Parasite psychology hides in the shadows."

"Once it's proven, once you see a crab—I call them crab nasties—once you see a real body on television and then people know what the proboscis does, and then someone says the percentage of the population that has been droned, it could lead to panic, riots, loss of social order, martial law, all that, and that could be the end of the world spiral down."

This is the dilemma at the heart of Marshall's disclosure effort: the information, if true, is so destabilizing that its release could itself cause the catastrophe it aims to prevent. The system's architects understood this and built it into their threat model.

"They tried to convince me and others that it was a worldwide takeover thing, that they had already taken over so much that all was lost, better just go along with it, but that's not true. They're a very, very small part of the population, like under 5 percent or something."

Five percent. If Marshall's estimate is correct, that would mean approximately 400 million parasitically hosted humans walking the earth. If it is an overestimate by an order of magnitude—half a percent—that is still 40 million. Either number represents a staggering infiltration. Either number, if proven, would indeed cause the greatest stir in human history.

But Marshall insists the number is manageable. The drones are not the majority. The system can be broken. The species can be identified, detected, and neutralized—if enough people know what to look for.

"Something has to be done," he says. "These people are like over-corrupt. I don't know if there's a word for it in the English language."

In the next chapter, we will examine the mechanism by which this corruption operates at the biological level—the process Marshall calls "droning," and the physical evidence that may betray its occurrence.