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Carp, Canada, Conspiracies
In early November 1989, a very strange, and highly controversial document was circulated among various prominent individuals in the field of UFO research. One of those individuals was Leonard Stringfield, a former intelligence officer with the United States Air Force. The document told the sensational story of an incident involving nothing less than a UFO that supposedly crashed to Earth in the large swamps of Carp, a community in the Canadian city of Ottawa. According to the anonymous writer of the document: “On November 4, 1989, at 20:00 hrs., Canadian Defense Department radars picked up a globe shaped object travelling at a phenomenal speed over Carp, Ontario. The UFO abruptly stopped, and dropped like a stone.”
The source of the story claimed that both Canadian and American military personnel were involved in a secret operation to retrieve the fallen UFO, which was allegedly taken to a secret facility in Kanata, Ontario. Stringfield was told that a number of alien bodies had been recovered from within the UFO, and were described as being reptilian, fetus-headed beings. One presumes they weren’t locals.
Matters became even more controversial when the alleged whistleblower claimed that after the craft from another world was carefully examined, evidence was found that shocked the investigation team to its absolute core. That evidence was in the form of small metallic devices that, analysis suggested, were being implanted into the bodies of people, with one goal in mind: to give the aliens complete mental and physical control over the implanted unfortunates.
Stringfield was told that: “All individuals implanted by the aliens are classified as zombies. The zombies have been programmed to help overthrow mankind in the near future. When China finishes with Israel, it will invade Europe. At the same time, Chinese space-based bacteriological weapons will be launched at the Arctic. The winds will carry the diseases into Russia and North America. In days, hundreds of millions will be dead; the survivors will have to deal with the Chinese, the aliens, and the zombies. The aliens want an all-out war so that human resistance would be minimal.”
It turns out, however, that the aliens were not quite so alien after all. String-field’s informant explained: “Data aboard the sphere explained why the aliens are so comfortable in our world. They preceded man on the evolutionary scale by millions of years—created with the dinosaurs. Some sixty-five million years ago, an inter-dimensional war destroyed most of their civilization, and forced them to leave the Earth. Now, they have chosen to reclaim what was once theirs.”
Well, that’s quite a story. It seems very likely, however, that it was nothing stranger than a bizarre hoax, since the alleged insider maintained that “the alien forces with their Chinese and Arab allies will attack within the next five years.” That would have placed any such attack no later than 1994. Clearly, no such attempt to wipe out the human race occurred between 1989 and 1994, suggesting that the whole thing was someone’s idea of a tasteless joke. Unless, that is, the aliens decided to put their plans on-hold for a couple of decades. And let’s face it: fraught Middle Eastern issues, the growing power and influence of China, the fear of bacteriological weapons, and, of course, zombies, are all staple parts of twenty-first-century civilization. Maybe Leonard Stringfield’s source was not so wide off the mark after all. The time frame might have been off-target, but perhaps the future we face is not.
Carradine, John
The well-known Hollywood actor Ving Rhames has starred in no less than three zombie-themed movies: the 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, 2008’s Day of the Dead (which was also a Romero remake), and the downright terrible Zombie Apocalypse (2011). In terms of starring roles in zombie movies, however, Rhames has nothing on horror legend John Carradine, who appeared in numerous undead-based productions, including Revenge of the Zombies, Voodoo Man, Face of Marble, Invisible Invaders, Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors, The Astro-Zombies, Blood of Ghastly Horror, The House of Seven Corpses, and Shock Waves.
It is most unfortunate that, at best, all of Carradine’s forays into the world of the zombie ranged from what can only be described as awful to mediocre, since he was actually a highly skilled actor. Born in 1906 in Manhattan, New York City, Carradine broke into the movie industry in 1930, in Bright Lights. It is ironic that Carradine should be so associated with horror-movies, since his very first credited role in the field of acting was a comedy-musical of no particular, longstanding merit. Nevertheless, Carradine, like all actors, had to start somewhere.
Dramas and westerns soon followed (although Carradine did have un-credited roles in both The Invisible Man of 1933 and the 1935 movie, The Bride of Frankenstein), as did the 1939 version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was a film in which Carradine took on the significant role of Barryman, the sinister butler of Baskerville Hall. Interestingly, in the original novel, Barryman is named Barrymore, but Twentieth Century Fox chose to make the change to prevent viewers from thinking there might be a connection to the actors John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore, both of whom were big draws for cinema-goers in the 1930s.
While zombie fanatics may wish to check out each and every one of Carradine’s movies of a reanimated and undead fashion, very few are worthy of comment. Revenge of the Zombies (1943) is somewhat notable, as it was the sequel to King of the Zombies, which was made two years earlier. Voodoo Man (1944) starred Bela Lugosi in the lead, which made it a crowd-puller with the viewers, but it can hardly be regarded as a classic.
Certainly, the most interesting of all of Carradine’s zombie movies is a 1959 production, Invisible Invaders. It focuses on a hostile alien force that plans on enslaving the people of Earth by inhabiting the corpses of the recently deceased, and using the newly animated bodies as vessels to attack and kill the living while simultaneously causing chaos all across the planet. Not quite Night of the Living Dead, but most definitely ahead of its time in terms of its concept—although sadly not in terms of its less than impressive special-effects and less than great acting.
Although Carradine worked alongside such famous actors as Spencer Tracy, Basil Rathbone, and Charlton Heston, made more than 200 movies on a wide and varied body of subjects, and spent extensive time working in the world of theater, it is for the incredibly huge number of horror movies that he made for which Carradine is most remembered and loved. He was still active right up until the time of his death, in Milan, Italy, in 1988. Carradine did not, by the way, subsequently “come back.”
Cats of the CIA
Pre-George A. Romero era, pretty much each and every scenario involving zombies revolved around not the literal dead, but mind-controlled individuals behaving in a distinctly undead, emotionless state. Such movies as I Walked with a Zombie and White Zombie make that abundantly clear, as does Wade Davis’ book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. It may very well be the case that none other than the CIA took deep note of some of those old black and white zombie movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Such a theory is born out by the fact that in
