Zombie Apocalypse coming to your town? If so, the Pentagon is prepared.
Imagine you wake to frightening screams and unidentifiable growls coming from your neighbor’s yard. Looking out the window you are shocked to see a gang of disfigured bloody corpses surrounding your neighbor as he was apparently trying to water his lawn. The monsters… zombies… continue emerging from the morning gloom as your neighbor screams and they close in to attack.
But suddenly the sound of a helicopter whips through the trees, soldiers appear out of nowhere, storming the yard, machine gun fire begins to pepper the grass as your neighbor runs for cover…
Sound far fetched? Perhaps, but the Pentagon has a plan for such a Zombie Apocalypse type scenario and it’s no joke, reports CNN .
While actually a training plan for other apocalypse-type scenarios, according to the Pentagon’s Zombie Apocalypse plan, which can be seen here , a zombie invasion provides an ideal training scenario:
This plan was not actually designed as a joke,” says the ‘Counter-Zombie Dominance’ plan in its opening disclaimer. “During the summers of 2009 and 2010… members of a USSTRATCOM component found out (by accident) that the hyperbole involved in writing a ‘zombie survival plan’ actually provided a very useful and effective training tool.”
There are also practical aspects of using a Zombie Apocalypse scenario for training, such as avoiding sending the public into a general panic if they mistakenly believed a fictional apocalypse training scenario was real. So instead of using a potentially mistakable title for their exercises, such as “Tunisia” or “Nigeria” they:
Elected to use a completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken as a real plan”
Enter the zombie apocalypse!
Dealing with zombies and the apocalypse-like havoc they would impose also effectively mirrored “basic concepts of plan and order development” of how the Pentagon would need to deal with the societal chaos, and battling and controlling a threat, attack or disaster.
For instance, a flying black plague, earthquake, or some type of terrorist attack could all adversely affect a municipal water system, literally the life-blood of a community. A zombie apocalypse scenario could also pollute or put the water system at risk in the same ways, thus providing a very real calamity to plan for.
Finally, according to the plan, training through a zombie apocalypse scenario takes “a very dry, monotonous topic and turns it into something rather enjoyable.”
A sentiment that is clear in the types of zombies that might attack in a zombie apocalypse situation. These include Pathogenic Zombies, which are created by a virus, bacteria or “some other form of contagion”; Evil Magic Zombies, which are the result of some type of occult experiment, referred to as “evil magic”; and even Vegetarian Zombies, which “pose no direct threat to humans because they only eat plant life.”
But perhaps the most interesting zombie is the Chicken Zombie, which, “is actually the only proven class of zombie that actually exists.”
How? Poultry farmers try to kill old hens that can no longer lay eggs using carbon monoxide. The farmers throw the apparently dead hens in a pile to decompose but in a zombie like fashion, they reanimate, dig themselves out of the pile and stagger around for awhile as literal zombie chickens before toppling over from organ failure.
The phenomenon was outlined in an online article by Jonathan M. Forrester called Zombie Chickens Taking Over California.
So if you wake to find disfigured, bloody chickens attacking your neighbor, hopefully, like the Pentagon, you prepared for a zombie apocalypse.
Image via Guns.com