The Zombie Book. Nick Redfern

mix at all. A report from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dated February 2, 1979, and which has been released under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, lends significant credence to the possibility that the helicopters of unknown origin are implicated in the cattle mutilation mystery to some degree. The report also suggests that the mutilators may have a far more down to earth point of origin, and may very possibly be utilizing the UFO mystery as a highly convenient cover for clandestine bacteriological and biological warfare activities. A significant section of the FBI document at issue states:

      “Officer Gabe Valdez, New Mexico State Police, has been handling investigations of these mutilations within New Mexico. Information furnished to this office by Officer Valdez indicates that the animals are being shot with some type of paralyzing drug and the blood is being drawn from the animal after an injection of an anti-coagulant. Officer Valdez is very adamant in his opinion that these mutilations are the work of the U.S. government, and that it is some clandestine operation either by the CIA or the Department of Energy, and in all probability is connected with some type of research into biological warfare.”

       The debilitating, eventually deadly Alzheimer’s disease may be escallating in America because of a rise in mad cow disease in the nation’s meat supply.

      A terrifying theory for the mutilations, one that has nothing whatsoever to do with bio-war or UFOs, has been carefully developed by Colm Kelleher, Ph.D., formerly of the Ontario Cancer Institute. In 1979, statistics from the U.S. Center for Disease Control show that, by that time, 653 people had officially died of Alzheimer’s in the United States. By 1991, the figure had reached 13,768. Eleven years later, it was 58,785. That is an increase of astonishing proportions in a little less than a quarter of a century. As of 2013, more than five million Americans are estimated to have Alzheimer’s. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, an American develops the disease once every sixty-eight seconds of every minute of every day. By 2050, it will be once every thirty-three seconds. It’s perhaps not even wise to muse upon what the figure might be by the turn of the twenty-second century, lest you wish to spend your nights sleeplessly tossing and turning in your bed.

      Colm Kelleher believes that this massive increase is not due to Alzheimer’s, after all. Instead, he believes that the U.S. food-chain—with the emphasis on the cattle herd—is overwhelmingly infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy: BSE, or mad cow disease, which can lead to variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (vCJD) in people. In this particular scenario, countless Americans are being disastrously misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s, when the real cause is vCJD, or a further mutant variant.

      Kelleher believes that the cattle-mutilators are stealthily trying to prevent public panic, and are secretly monitoring the food-chain to determine how serious the spread of disease is and how fast it is growing. Whether the mutilators work for an agency of government, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), or if they are private organizations, secretly contracted by officialdom, is a matter very much unknown.

      Given that both vCJD and BSE provoke erratic and, at times, distinctly violent behavior, will we see—in, perhaps just a few more decades from now—an entire nation held in the vice-like grip of a devastating virus that provokes major changes in human personality? The zombie apocalypse of the future may not involve the infected feeding voraciously on the uninfected. Instead, we may see a landscape filled with millions upon millions of shuffling, scarred souls whose minds are descending into nothingness, and all as a tragic and catastrophic result of a love for burgers and steaks.

       Cemeteries and Tombs

       See also: Burial Traditions, Cremation, Funerals, Mummies

      The marking of graves goes back into remote antiquity. The ancient Hebrews buried their dead and used stone pillars to mark the graves. The Greeks often placed gravestones and various kinds of ornate sculpture on their burial sites.

      The Assyrians (c. 750–612 B.C.E.) dug huge excavations which sometimes reached a depth of sixty feet into which they cast the bodies of their dead, one upon the other. Even when they began to place their dead in coffins, the Assyrians continued to pile one above the other in great excavations.

      The Iberians, the original people who inhabited the peninsula where modern day Portugal and Spain exist, buried their leaders with great pomp and ceremony in chambers made of huge stones, covered over with earth. The bodies were placed in these megalithic chambers in a sitting posture. The Aryans, an Indo-European people, burned their dead and placed the ashes in urns shaped like rounded huts with thatched roofs.

      Decorating graves with flowers and wreaths is an old custom which appears to date back to the earliest human burial observances. Wreaths made of thin gold have been found in Athenian graves during archaeological excavations. The Egyptians adorned their mummies with flowers, and paintings on the walls of tombs that depict the mourners carrying flowers in their hands.

      Not everyone who died in ancient Egypt was buried in a tomb. Although the Egyptians believed firmly in an afterlife, they were also of the opinion that only the powerful and important in the earthly life would have any notable status in the world to come. According to rank and wealth, those who were great in Egypt, and therefore likely to be important in the next life, were laid to rest in magnificent tombs with treasure, servants, food, and weapons to accompany them; the ordinary people were buried in rude stone compartments.

      The rulers of the ancient city of Thebes, once the capital of upper-Egypt (1580–1085 B.C.E.) and their subjects never constructed massive pyramids to house their coffins, but cut their tombs from rock. As soon as a pharaoh would ascend the throne, his loyal subjects began the preparation of their tombs. Excavation went on uninterrupted, year by year, until death ended the king’s reign and simultaneously the work on his tomb which also became a kind of an index revealing the length of his reign. These tombs, cut from the rock in the mountains in Upper Egypt, are still to be seen.

      In sixteenth century Europe, it was customary to make wreaths of flowers from ribbon and paper and give them to the church in memory of the deceased. These artificial wreaths of long ago evolved into the contemporary mourning wreath of living flowers, usually brought by friends or relatives of the deceased and placed upon the grave.

       Centers for Disease Control

      In the event that a real-life zombie uprising really does occur, there is one agency of government—more than any other—that will likely play a major, leading role in trying to quickly find an antidote for the virus that brings back the dead in horrific, murderous form. Its name is the Centers for Disease Control, or the CDC. In a strictly fictional format, this has already happened. In “Wildfire,” the fifth episode of the first season of AMC’s phenomenally popular show, The Walking Dead, group-leader Rick Grimes leads his band of starving, exhausted survivors to the headquarters of the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia. After begging to be let in, they are met by the mysterious and cautious Edwin Jenner. He is the very last survivor of the installation and someone who seems to be, suspiciously, highly informed about the zombie virus, as well as its origins, nature, and history. As the episode comes to a climactic close, Jenner quietly tells Grimes something terrible. In a later episode, the group finally learns the awful secret.

      Rick Grimes explains to his shocked comrades exactly what Jenner confided in him: “We’re all infected.” And we are. At some point before the apocalypse exploded all across the planet, Jenner revealed, every single person was already unknowingly infected by the zombie virus. Yes, a