San Diego, California — On October 31st, the United States military is scheduled to engage in a preparedness training exercise in the form of a mock “Zombie Apocalypse.”
The event, labeled a “counter-terrorism summit,” will reportedly be attended by hundreds of members of the Marines, Navy special ops, soldiers, police, firefighters and other groups.
“This is a very real exercise, this is not some type of big costume party,” Brad Barker, the president of Halo Corp, which is hosting the event, told reporters. “Everything that will be simulated at this event has already happened, it just hasn’t happened all at once on the same night. But the training is very real…”
During the training exercise, the group will create a simulated emergency, in which zombies have surrounded a VIP and trapped him in a village. Then, when a bomb explodes, the VIP becomes injured, and law enforcement and first responders must move in and take control of the situation. They must open fire on the zombies, who have now begun shooting at police, and deal with the injuries of some of their teammates who have been bit by zombies.
A zombie is defined as a dead person that has been brought back to life by witchcraft. It is a term that is said to have originated in Haiti and West Africa, where Voodoo followers give homage to the “snake god.” They believe that sorcerers or witches can take control of a person’s body and use it for whatever purpose they wish — especially for evil. The sorcerer then tries to capture part of the person’s soul, which they state is used to give them greater powers. Zombies are also often characterized as those that eat the flesh of the dead.
In horror films produced in America from the 1930’s through the 1970’s, such a Night of the Living Dead, I Walked With a Zombie and Dawn of the Dead, zombies were enacted on the big screen, including young children that were depicted eating the flesh of those they murdered. Zombies were also used in witchcraft games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Zombies Ate My Neighbors and All Flesh Must Be Eaten.
Wednesday’s similar Hollywood-style “Zombie Apocalypse,” which will be enacted on a 44-acre island in the Mission Bay section of San Diego, is said to serve as a test as to how law enforcement will react in incidences of great chaos.
“No one knows what the zombies will do in our scenario, but quite frankly no one knows what a terrorist will do,” Barker outlined. “If a law enforcement officer sees a zombie and says, ‘Freeze, get your hands in the air!’ What’s the zombie going to do? He’s going to moan at you. If someone on PCP or some other psychotic drug is told that, the truth is he’s not going to react to you.”
The training exercise reportedly follows a 2011 campaign from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which released a cartoon that urged Americans to be prepared in the event of a “Zombie Apocalypse.” The Center states that it was using the concept as a way to encourage emergency preparedness.
The Department of Homeland Security chimed in last month, stating that if Americans are prepared to handle a zombie attack, they can successfully survive a terrorist attack, pandemic or natural disaster.
While some are disturbed that government funds and taxpayer dollars are being used for what they believe is foolish and an embrace of the occult, organizations such as the Project on Government Oversight say that they see the exercise as being “harmless fun.”
“Obviously we’re not expecting a zombie apocalypse in the near future, but the effects of what might happen in a zombie apocalypse are probably similar to the type of things that happen in natural disasters and man made disasters,” stated spokesman Joe Newman. “They’re just having fun with it. We don’t have any problems with it as a teaching point.”
However, others did not find real life scenarios of flesh eating to be humorous, including an incident this past Memorial Day weekend, where 31-year-old Rudy Eugene of Miami literally ate the face of a 65-year-old homeless man that he passed on the street. Another incident occurred weeks later in Canada, where a 29-year-old self-described porn star killed his homosexual lover with an ice pick, dismembered his body and ate pieces of his flesh with a knife and fork.
“This is not a ‘zombie apocalypse,’ but this is a demonic spirit,” one commentator declared following reports of the incidents. “There [are] demonic spirits at loose in the land.”
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