The Zombie Book. Nick Redfern
left head for new pastures, a place where, reportedly, the icy environment has been reversed and blue skies and green terrain are once again the norm. The end of the human race just might not be in the cards, after all.
Columbia, Space Shuttle
When the space shuttle Columbia was catastrophically torn to pieces during its reentry on February 1, 2003, in addition to the astronauts who died in the explosion, nearly ninety on-board science experiments were lost as what was left of Columbia plummeted to the ground. Three weeks later, however, it was revealed that Texas State University-San Marcos biologist Robert McLean had managed to save something completely unanticipated from the widely spread debris: namely, a strain of slow-growing bacteria that had survived the crash. It was a discovery that may have significant implications for the concept of panspermia, which is the scenario of life—perhaps even viruses—“hitchhiking” on rocks ejected from meteorite impacts on one world, and that could travel through space and seed other worlds with life under favorable conditions.
Examination of the debris from the space shuttle Columbia disaster showed that bacteria could survive being in space and even the high-temperature process of reentry into the atmosphere.
Notably, found within the wreckage of Columbia was a bacteria called Microbispora: a slow-growing organism, normally found in soil, that McLean determined had probably contaminated the experiment prior to launch. “This organism appears to have survived an atmospheric passage, with the heat and the force of impact,” McLean said. “That’s only about a fifth of the speed that something on a real meteorite would have to survive, but it is at least five or six times faster than what’s been tested before. This is important for panspermia, because if something survives space travel, it eventually has to get down to the Earth and survive passage through the atmosphere and impact. This doesn’t prove anything; it just contributes evidence to the plausibility of panspermia.”
It also demonstrates that when we head into outer space, we may bring back something terrifying, something viral, something that may lead to a real-life dawning of the dead. Or, a case of: one small step for man, one giant leap for zombiekind.
Congo Conspiracies
In August 1964, a very strange yet fascinating document was secretly prepared for senior personnel in the U.S. Army and the Pentagon. A copy even reached none other than the White House. Its title was Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic, and Other Psychological Phenomena and Their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo. It was a document written by James Price and Paul Juredini, both of whom worked for the Special Operations Research Office, SORO, which was an agency that undertook top secret contract work for the military.
The document, now in the public domain under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, is a fascinating one, in the sense that it focuses on how beliefs in paranormal phenomena can be successfully used and manipulated to defeat a potential enemy. The bigger the belief in the world of the supernatural, note Price and Jure-dini, the greater the chance that a particularly superstitious foe could be terrorized and manipulated by spreading faked stories of paranormal creatures on the loose, of demons in their midst, and of ghostly, terrible things with violent slaughter on their monstrous minds.
Interestingly, one portion of the document deals with a classic aspect of the zombie of the modern era: its terrifying ability to keep on coming, even when its body is riddled with bullet upon bullet. In the example, the authors reported that: “Rebel tribesmen are said to have been persuaded that they can be made magically impervious to Congolese army firepower. Their fear of the government has thus been diminished and, conversely, fear of the rebels has grown within army ranks.”
That was not all: rumors quickly spread within the army to the effect that the reason why the rebels were allegedly so immune to bullets was because they had been definitively zombified. Not in Romero-style, but by good old, tried and tested Voodoo techniques. The rebels, entire swathes of army personnel came to fully believe—and very quickly, too—had literally been rendered indestructible as a result of dark and malignant spells and incantations. On top of that, the minds of the rebels, controlled by a Voodoo master, had been magically distilled, to the point where they were driven by a need to kill and nothing else. Or so it was widely accepted by the Congolese military.
It transpired, as one might guess, that the stories were actually wholly fictional ones. They were ingeniously created and spread by none other than the rebels themselves, and with just one purpose in mind: to have the army utterly convinced that the rebels were unbeatable and indestructible. Such was the ingrained fear that infected the army, the brilliant piece of disinformation was accepted as full-blown fact—as was the belief that fearless, and fear-inducing, zombies were roaming the landscape and who were impervious to bullets. The result: the rebels delivered the army a powerful blow of a terrifyingly psychological kind. While the bullet-proof zombies of the Congo never really existed, for all of the stark fear and mayhem they provoked, they just might as well have been the real thing.
The Crazies
When you think of George A. Romero, several things immediately, and inevitably, spring to mind: death, chaos, a deadly virus, societal collapse, people running for their lives, and—last, but most assuredly not least—zombies. Well, in Romero’s 1973 film, The Crazies, you have all of those ingredients, except for one: the shambling dead. A Romero film, but one specifically without walking corpses: can it be true? Yes, it is true. But, instead of the dead, the cast of The Crazies are forced to do battle with something just as fearsome; hordes of living people who have been driven to homicidal levels of madness after being exposed to a military-created biological weapon.
Like most of Romero’s zombie movies, The Crazies—also released under the far less fearsome title of Code Name: Trixie—makes the viewer ponder deeply on how fragile society really is, and the speed with which it can fragment and collapse when death, disaster, and terror become overwhelming. It’s also a film from which the production teams of the likes of 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later likely took a great deal of inspiration.
The scary humans in 1973’s The Crazies are not zombified undead, but rather people ill with a disease that turns them into homicidal maniacs.
Evans City, Pennsylvania is where all of the carnage and homicidal behavior occurs. As it does so, we follow the plight of a trio of people trying to comprehend, and survive, the anarchy exploding all around them. They are David and Judy—a fireman and a nurse who also happen to be boyfriend and girlfriend—and Clank, also a fireman. When violent behavior quickly turns Evans City into a living hell, a large military contingent quickly arrives to take control of the alarming situation. Each and every one of them is decked out in protective gear of the type generally seen in chemical- and biological-warfare outbreaks, and are led by a Major Ryder.
Taking control basically means killing anyone and everyone who is living—whether they are infected or not. So, as is often the case when Romero is behind the lens, the stars of The Crazies are not just in danger of losing their lives to those with the