US draws up plans to fight zombie invasion

Photo / File / Andrew Warner

The US military has drawn up plans to fight off an invasion of "evil magic zombies" and other forms of the undead.

Prefaced with the disclaimer "this plan was not actually designed as a joke", CONPLAN 8888 lays out a strategy "to undertake military operations to preserve 'non-zombie' humans from threats posed by a zombie horde".

The 31-page document, obtained by the journal Foreign Policy, lays out the eight types of zombie adversaries the US military may face in the event of an outbreak.

They range from space zombies to weaponised zombies and even vegetarian zombies, who eat plants rather than humans.

It dwells on the threat from evil magic zombies, those created by "some form of occult experimentation in what might otherwise be referred to as 'evil magic'".The 2011 plan also mentions chicken zombies, a genuine phenomenon where chickens are gassed with carbon monoxide and buried "but inexplicably come back to life and dig themselves out".

Although not strictly a joke, the document is intended as an exercise in drawing up planning documents for training purposes, rather than a real-life strategy.

Its authors noted that the general public sometimes "mistakenly believes that a fictional training scenario is actually a real plan" so they opted for "a completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken".