On November 15th, Harvard Professor Don Wiley left a gathering of friends and colleagues some time after 10:30 PM. The next morning, Memphis police found his rental car stopped on a bridge, with a full tank of gas and keys still in the ignition.
I’m not a big fan of conspiracy theories, outside of the movies and television, and even then only under the proper circumstances. This one, though, might be of interest to you, dear readers, because of a tangential link to zombie fiction. Pathogens of some sort or other are the most frequent catalytic culprit on which to pin the blame for zombie apocalypses. From the excellent 28 DAYS LATER and its sequel to WORLD WAR Z—and one might argue that the returning space probe blamed for the undead uprising in Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD brought with it an extraterrestrial microbe, thus warranting inclusion on the list—it typically is something microscopic and nefarious, rather than supernatural and nefarious, behind the dead, or brain-dead, clawing their way out of the graveyards and morgues. That’s why I give pathogens fair coverage here.
I haven’t fact-checked this entire article—I don’t have time—but it does seem to be on the level. There does seem to be a potential pattern linking the deaths of several prominent microbiologists over the past several years. It’s a troubling thought. What might they have been working on—or threatening to talk about—that got them killed? I don’t know that we’d really wanna know.