SAN LUIS OBISPO -- Author David Icke says that what he preaches to audiences throughout the United States and Great Britain isn't a conspiracy theory, it is fact.

"There are a tiny few people who run the world and this has been well documented," he said. "It is all provable."

Icke brought his call for spiritual awakening and a demand for an end to "mind manipulation" to San Luis Obispo this weekend. He appeared at the Earth Day Fair and the County Library on Saturday and a book-signing and $25 workshop on Sunday.

According to Icke, who once was a professional soccer player and later a sportscaster for the BBC, an elite bloodline of people control the world through mind control, the media and religion.

This bloodline, he claims, includes such notables as the Rockefellers, the DuPonts and the English royal family. This global power is headquartered in England and works out of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in London.

These bloodlines all started in the lost city of Atlantis, Icke said, and later fanned out throughout the world to build the pyramids in Egypt and to form the tribes of Israel. These people now jealously guard their genealogy and the purity of their families through intermarriage.

"There is something special about their blood, though I haven't figured out what it is yet," Icke told a small audience at his Sunday workshop in San Luis Obispo.

The power of these elite comes from their control of what is deemed normal, Icke said. Most people stay within this "hassle-free zone" Icke said, without question. Those who don't are "immediately condemned," he said.

The control of this global elite is beginning to branch out from mere mental manipulation, Icke said, and they are now implanting tiny microchips into children through vaccinations.

"Have you ever noticed how shots always do more harm than good?" he asked. "So why are they still compulsory?"

Icke said he has actually seen one of these microchips in Sweden and has proof "from people who would know" that it is happening in the United States.

But he said he could not reveal his sources because he said they fear retribution.

Icke also claimed that AIDS has been made up to further control people.

"It is one of the greatest scams," he said.

HIV has nothing to do with AIDS, he said, and people are really dying of afflictions such as cancer, tuberculosis or fear, while the doctors are blaming it on AIDS.

The only way to change this "New World Order" as Icke calls it, is not by a violent uprising, but by creative and individual thinking.

"We need to stop being frightened of what others think of us," he said.

People who think for themselves, he said, will begin to ask questions and make changes.

By finding others to blame for our mistakes, Icke says we "externalize our power."

"We need to take it back. Get back in touch with the multi-dimensional self."

Sandra Marshall, who runs the Illumination Foundation, invited Icke to speak in San Luis Obispo because "He is one of the only people in the world willing to speak up about a lot of things that are already well known."

Ivy Underdaho, who attended the Sunday afternoon workshop, wasn't quite ready to say if everything Icke had to say was true, but she was keeping an open mind.

"I like to at least hear all sides things," she said. "Then I can make up my own mind."