Does a viral picture actually document a real-life event during which U.S. servicemembers shot "reptilians"? No, that's not true: Three online tools said that the image was AI-generated. Available government sources do not support the idea of such an encounter ever taking place.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X where it was published on Oct. 10, 2026, by @Skriptkeeper17. It opened:
This is why they gotta pull the plug on the internet.
@grok analyze this picture and listen to the story.
In the video shared in the post, a narrator, in part, said:
This photo y'all all see in my background allegedly supposed to be a actual caption of the Iraq war in early 2000, and this is what they was over there really going against, some damn reptilians.
This is what the image referenced in the clip and independently attached to the post reviewed in this fact check looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @Skriptkeeper17 on X.)
Lead Stories performed a reverse image search via Google Lens and found out that the earliest available version of the image was published (archived here) on X on Oct. 4, 2026, by the @JinxedHorizon account, under the following caption:
A crashed Tic Tac. Dead 'Grays.' Seven-foot reptilians still alive. Then US troops opened fire. That's the story David Grusch says he heard - and it's one hell of a claim. 🛸🦎 He said the alleged crash involved a Tic Tac-shaped craft and dead 'Grays' as well as living https://t.co/F9qv2DYmNX
When Lead Stories tested that older, better-quality version of the image, three online tools said that the picture was generated by AI.
According to Sightengine, the probability of that was 92%:
(Image source: Sightengine.)
Hive Moderation estimated the odds as high as 96%:
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
SynthID, which is a tool that identifies an invisible watermark associated with AI-generated content, confirmed that such a watermark was present in the image in question:
(Image source: SynthID.)
The original post (archived here) by @JinxedHorizon, however, appeared to have been already deleted, as of this writing:
(Image source: post by @JinxedHorizon on X.)
What was still available on that page was another media file that showed a similar scene but in a video format (archived here), which was published several days later, on Oct. 7, 2026. The description of that file ended with an admission that it was created by AI:
If David Grusch is right, this video clip is the scene the phrase 'crash retrieval' has been pointing at for decades...
Smoke hanging over the wreck. Soldiers on the perimeter. Two reptilian figures and smaller shapes on the ground.
In sworn testimony, David Grusch said he was briefed on a long-running UAP recovery program and that 'non-human biologics' had been retrieved. That is the claim.
The testimony is on the record. The only thing that closes the gap is evidence that can survive scrutiny...
This is an AI rendering.
The truth...takes time
When Lead Stories tested a thumbnail from the video with the SynthID tool, it wasn't able to identify the watermark pointing to AI, but that likely meant that the software used to create the video was not part of the verification program. Three other online detectors -- Hive Moderation, AI or Not and Sightengine -- said that the clip was likely AI-generated as well:
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
(Image source: AI or Not.)
(Image source: Sightengine.)
David Grusch (archived here), a former intelligence officer known for making UFO-related claims (archived here) mentioned in the now-deleted original post, appeared in the Sept. 30, 2026, episode (archived here) of Joe Rogan's podcast. Around the 00:59:20 mark, Rogan brings up some "crash," and Grusch refers to it as a "recent" event, additionally clarifying that it didn't happen many decades ago. Then, the guest goes on to discuss video of some creatures whom he describes as "beautiful" and human-looking and compares them to Greek gods. Later, around the 01:10:10 mark, Grusch mentions the term "retrievals," claims that those were seen during a separate event and that they appeared "reptilian-looking." Roughly at the 1:16:00 mark, he mentions a "Tic Tac-looking" spacecraft, and at the 1:17:07 mark, new supposedly existing -- "gorilla-looking" -- reptilian species enter the conversation.
At the 02:07:12 mark, the following exchange took place:
ROGAN: So do you know what supposedly happened to those living reptilians from the crash?
GRUSCH: Uh, uh deceased. They were killed.
ROGAN: They were killed?
GRUSCH: Yeah.
ROGAN: So we killed them?
GRUSCH: Yeah.
ROGAN: Whoa.
GRUSCH: They are mortal.
ROGAN: Did we shoot them?
GRUSCH: Yeah.
ROGAN: We shot the reptilians?
GRUSCH: Yeah.
ROGAN: Jesus. That seems like a bad idea.
Grusch went on to claim that the "reptilians" were killed because they posed a threat to the U.S. servicemembers. Yet, no images -- photos or illustrations -- appeared on the screen during this fragment.
Lead Stories watched the entire episode of Joe Rogan's podcast, but didn't see the image that is the focus of this fact check being shown there at any point.
The New York Post (archived here) and Fox News (archived here) published reports documenting some of Grusch's claims, but those pieces did not include the image evaluated in this article.
As of this writing, the term "Tic Tac" mentioned in the original post appeared twice (archived here) among the UFO-related files released by the Pentagon. In both cases, the term came from descriptions of short video files. Lead Stories reviewed them, but the videos did not show the image of U.S. troops firing at "reptilians" -- or remains of the supposedly extraterrestrial species.
The 2024 Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) (archived here) reads (on page 6):
A consistent theme in popular culture involves a particularly persistent narrative that the USG--or a secretive organization within it--recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, that it operates a program or programs to reverse engineer the recovered technology, and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public.
Page 7 continued:
AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology. All investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification.
