Unsolved Undead: The Mystery of the Devils Tower Zombies, Part II

By Bulletin Staff

In Part I of this two-part series, we recounted Roger Collins’ encounter with a swirling circle of zombies in a meadow beneath Devils Tower, the skepticism that met reports of the undead herd, and the Pentagon’s plan to obliterate the living dead at the Tower.

A Distracted President

Declassified Pentagon documents obtained by The Bulletin through a Freedom of Information request show that the commander of Ellsworth Air Force Base, Lt. Col. Mike Fitz, reported on the undead at Devils Tower up the chain of command back to Washington, where the report landed on the desk of General Nick Filby, who was leading the US Undead Counterstrike Force at the time.

Filby was a hardliner when it came to dealing with the undead, earning him the moniker “The Zombinator.” Filby received the initial report of the Devils Tower herd at 2 pm Eastern Time, and by 3 pm he had called a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense to review plans to bomb the swirling zombies into oblivion.

The bombs, and the planes to drop the bombs, were the easiest part of the plan. Evacuating the area around the target zone and controlling the public narrative around the incident to prevent panic also were relatively straightforward. The biggest challenge was getting the White House to sign off on the plan because, at the time, the Nixon Administration had, shall we say, other things on its collective mind.

June 17, 1972, was, of course, the day of the botched Watergate break-in that would eventually lead to Nixon’s resignation. The president and his advisors were more focused that day on containing any fallout from the failed operation and saving their own political lives than on containing a zombie outbreak in a sparsely populated corner of Wyoming and saving humanity.

The secretary of defense, Melvin R. Laird, was able to secure a White House meeting only later that Saturday evening. But when Filby and the secretary arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as darkness fell on Washington, D.C., they were ushered into a waiting room where they were kept waiting for more than three hours. Finally, they were ushered into the Oval Office to meet with the president.

Accounts of how the meeting went vary, but it’s largely agreed that that Nixon was distracted, barely listening as Laird and Filby briefed the president on the situation and the Pentagon’s plan for laying waste to a part of the nation’s first national monument.

In the end, though, Nixon signed off on the plan, and Filby got the green light to proceed with the operation. He headed back to his office at the Pentagon to put the wheels in motion.

“The Longest Nights of My Life”

Meanwhile, with darkness now falling on Devils Tower, Finn pulled his park rangers back from their posts observing the circling undead. He was worried about the herd leaving the meadow, but he was more concerned about zombies breaking off from the group and stumbling onto the rangers, overwhelming and devouring them before they could escape. Only lightly armed and without any night-vision gear, the rangers were sitting ducks.

As night enveloped the Tower, only Finn, Collins and a skeleton staff of armed rangers remained on hand in the park. On a conference call, Filby briefed Finn and Fitz on the plan to strike the undead at dawn, and in the meantime directed Fitz to send a convoy of troops to Devils Tower from Ellsworth to enforce a “zombie-proof perimeter” so that none of the undead could escape.

“It was the longest night of my life,” Collins relates now. “We hunkered down in the admin office to wait for the reinforcements from Ellsworth. We kept all the lights off to avoid attracting any stray living dead. I’d left my stash of weed back at my bunk, so I was stone cold sober instead of stoned, which probably made the night seem longer and more terrifying.”

The military convoy arrived at the park by 4 am and prepared to deploy at a safe distance in a circle around the target zone. As dawn broke over the Tower shortly after 5 am, a military reconnaissance plane was already flying over the zone to provide a final update before the bombers were let loose on the herd.

Except the herd was gone.

“Into Thin Air”

The recon crew crisscrossed the area in and around the park but spotted not a single undead, let alone a herd. Filby was flummoxed, if not a little disappointed. He directed the heavily armed troops now at the park into the meadow with shoot-on-site orders, but again, no zombies were found.

The herd had disappeared in the night.

As the military stood down, now it was time for the zombie scientists to take the lead. Leading government specialists arrived on the scene within hours, and Collins led the science team and a military escort back to the meadow to investigate.

The grassy field was well trampled where the spinning wheel of undead had woven their path around the meadow. But, oddly, Collins’ group could find no “exit path” – no clear sign that the herd had walked out of the field. No broken twigs, no trampled grass, no torn clothes or bits of decaying zombie flesh caught on bushes or trees.

“It was as if the herd had simply vanished into thin air,” Collins says. “Poof, gone like the light of life that left their eyes when they turned into zombies to begin with. It was weird. And spooky.”

Strange Lights and Other Odd Hints

The government investigation into the incident lasted six weeks, yet no sound scientific explanation emerged. But there were hints. Odd hints.

Strange lights reported in the skies over the Tower on that Saturday night. Military pilots radioing in about blips appearing and disappearing from their radar as they flew over the quarantined area around the Tower. Faint sounds like a brass band of the dead wafting across the deserted park.

In the end, the incident was marked “unexplained” and filed away. Most of those involved seemed happy to close the case. By the time the investigation concluded, the nation and the government were on the verge of being consumed with the burgeoning Watergate scandal. The Pentagon had bigger concerns as the Vietnam War raged, and the Park Service was eager to reopen Devils Tower once it had been certified as zombie-free.

The Park Service didn’t exactly order its staff not to speak about the incident, but Collins says that most of the personnel at Devils Tower held to a kind of omerta and avoided talking about their brush with the zombie herd.

“No one really wanted to talk about it. I suppose we were all traumatized by the experience, to one degree or another. But it was also a feeling that, if we started talking about it, somehow that would bring the dead back to the park again,” Collins says.

An Encounter of the Undead Kind

Not that word didn’t get out. In fact, a young Hollywood screenwriter and director named Steven Spielberg caught wind of the whole affair and decided to build his second blockbuster around it.

Industry lore has it that Spielberg originally intended that movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to document the park staff’s encounter with the undead, with the climax being the zombie herd getting beamed onto an alien ship in a nod to the rumors of strange lights, radar blips and spooky sounds.

But studio heads worried that the public wouldn’t buy a storyline that mixed aliens and zombies, and they convinced Spielberg to cut the undead out of the script and focus on humanity’s encounter with the aliens instead. Nevertheless, they assented to Spielberg’s wish to film the climax at Devils Tower, a nod to the incident that inspired the movie.

An Unwritten Final Chapter

As for Collins, he says that he didn’t talk about the incident for years, not even revealing his role in the whole affair to family until after his retirement. And while he wound up making an entire career in the park, Collins says that he could never pass by that particular meadow again without a cold shiver running down his spine.

“I would see hikers and climbers go out that trail all the time, and they would have no idea of the scene they would have encountered 50 years ago, all those zombies just walking in a circle. Come to think of it, I have trouble believing it myself these days. But it happened, the mystery was never solved, and that final chapter was never written.”

Asked what he thinks happened to the zombie herd, where they all disappeared to, Collins only chuckles and points at the sky. “Up there … maybe,” he says, then adds, “I just hope they don’t bring them back.”

And with that, Collins relights the embers of his smoke, leans back in his porch rocker and stares – perhaps a bit worriedly – at the waning sun on the horizon.

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