Is Walt Disney’s Body Really Frozen?
“Is Walt Disney’s body/head/still conscious brain cryogenically frozen under the eerily clean streets of Disneyworld?” It’s a question that’s been making the rounds since the filmmaker and entrepreneur passed away in 1966. It’s outlandish, but so is building a cave full of robot pirates. More than anything, it’s for a subterranean lab full of expatriate German scientists to know and you to find out.
The short version is this: No, Walt Disney isn’t floating in a mouse-shaped Lazarus pit under Epcot, biding his time until the company he founded really hits its stride. Probably.
The story goes like this. In the 1950s and ’60s, a new super science called “cryonics” seemed to be on the horizon. Its first practical application was in the preservation of sperm cells, frozen and then thawed to be used in artificial insemination. What exists today as a fairly common practice was heralded dramatically in the Cedar Rapids Gazette with the 1954 headline “Fatherhood After Death Has Now Been Proved Possible,” per the Atlantic.
Oversimplification of the practice in the public eye sort of snowballed the concept, and it soon became a point of fascination. Could a body be preserved in the same way? Could a man – an obscenely wealthy futurist with an eye for the outlandish, for example, freeze himself before death, only to be resurrected at a later date?
No, but Pluto's is
No, he couldn’t. The first recorded case of cryonic preservation came in 1967, a year after Disney’s passing. The body belonged to University of California psychology professor James Bedford, whose remains are still in ice to this day. Despite a cottage cryogenic industry in the 1970s, the process lost ground for a couple of reasons. Firstly, in the decades since, no body has ever been successfully reanimated. And then there’s the nightmare fuel. According to the ALCOR Life Extension Foundation, the freezing process has led to a number of body horror scenarios involving improperly sealed containment pods, power outages, and, in 1981, a lawsuit involving a facility run by a TV repairman running out of money and letting the bodies in the back room thaw.
As for Disney, Snopes reports that he had little to no interest in preserving his body through science fiction means. Public records state that his body was cremated, per his wishes. Or was it?
Yes, it was.
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