Walt Disney's frozen head

It makes sense to chop off your head and freeze it

While researching this blog about anti-aging and the Silicon Valley tech-lords investing billions in the quest for eternal life, I came across Walt Disney’s frozen head.

On December 15, 1966, Walt Disney died from lung cancer at the age of 65. President of the cryonic society and TV repairman, Bob Nelson told reporters he had spoken to Walt about freezing his head and storing it for future reanimation, and that Walt was enthusiastic about the technology. So, the day Walt died, Bob cut off his head and froze it in liquid nitrogen.

This may or may not be true. But Walt was rich and interested in future technology. He built an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow which has a giant orb! There are two separate biographies of Disney — Leonard Mosely’s Disney’s World (1986) and Marc Eliot’s Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince (1993) — both claimed that an obsession with death led Walt to an interest in cryonics. Walt wanted to bend the rules of mortality, store his head in frozen limbo and be woken up in a high-tech utopian future, free of wars and disease. It would look like this:

Walt consenting to decapitation and cryonic freezing is totally at odds with his Disney brand, which is all about wishing on stars, finding true love, and living happily ever after. Frozen decapitated heads have more in common with B-grade horror movies, but Walt’s public brand was very different from his personal politics. Walt was a sci-fi nerd obsessed with the technological advances the future would bring and cryonic freezing was a hot topic in 1960’s America. 

On a slight tangent of interest, in 1943, Walt released Der Fuehrer’s Face, an animated short starring one of the company’s brightest stars, Donald Duck, as a disgruntled factory worker in Nazi Germany.

Officially, Walt was cremated but the frozen head scratching won’t go away. This could be a rumour generated by some Disney animators with a dark sense of humour, or the only conspiracy theory that is really worth believing. That Disney created the acclaimed animated feature Frozen because they wanted to throw people off the trail from googling whether Walt was cryonically frozen. Is it true? Well apparently, Walts’ frozen head is hidden somewhere underneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney California. So, we know where to look.

More than five decades after the first cryopreservation, there are now over 500 cryonically frozen heads around the world. The Cryonics Institute holds more than 200. Alcor Life Extension Foundation has 182. KrioRus has 80.

The reasoning is sound but there are a couple of big ifs. If there is someone reliable to look after the bodies and maintain the freezer. If the planet and its people can overcome our imminent existential threats and the frozen heads can stay frozen for a few hundred years, then there is a good chance that future humans will have the technology to bring these frozen heads back to life. If not, and the plug gets pulled for whatever reason, or humanity doesn’t make it, the heads won’t know, and they won’t care. They’ll just never wake up.

James Hiram Bedford was the first person to be cryonically frozen. James was an American psychology professor at the University of California. His whole body was frozen in liquid nitrogen after he died in 1967 at a place called Cryo-Care in Arizona. His son looked after him and he was moved around several times before he ended up at Alcor where he lies to this day, fifty-six years later.

Ted Williams was a famous professional baseball player. He died on 5 July 2002, at the age of 83. Ted wrote his last wishes on a cocktail napkin, which held up in a legal battle after his death. His two youngest children had their father’s corpse decapitated and the head frozen cryonically which sparked a court battle with Ted's eldest daughter. Ted’s head remains frozen at Alcor, waiting patiently.

Dora Kent is one of the most famous frozen heads. In December 1987, she died aged 83. Her son Saul was a board member of Alcor who removed her head and stored it in a liquid nitrogen flask. Dora was the subject of a 1988 legal battle about whether she had been murdered by her son so he could experiment with cryonic suspension. The coroner detected certain metabolites in her body that suggested that she was still alive at the time of decapitation. After a SWAT team raid, most of Alcor's property was seized. Alcor sued the county for false arrest and illegal seizure and won both suits. The case received a lot of publicity resulting in a massive growth in the number of Alcor members.

Fereidoun M. Esfandiary also known as FM 2030. A self-declared transhumanist, consultant, philosopher and Olympic athlete. He was 69 when he died in 2000. His entire body was the first one to be vitrified before being frozen in nitrogen. FM 2030 was injected with syrupy amorphous ice which does not crystallize. Instead, it becomes a solid liquid like glass throughout the body avoiding cell damage from ice crystals.

There are many more living people who have arranged for cryonic procedures upon their death and the technology is only getting better. Some of these include philosopher David Pearce, PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek, Oxford transhumanists Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg. Actor Seth MacFarlane and Britney Spears. Paris Hilton and her two dogs.

It makes sense to chop off your head and freeze it without the rest of your appendages. Assuming that the technology will exist for reanimation, it’s only the brain that will be needed. Your arms, legs and torso are not required and it’s less expensive. Alcor charge $80,000 for head vitrification and $200,000 for the entire body.

This is what you get for $80,000. After a doctor pronounces you brain dead, Alcor’s team take over. They place you in an ice bath to begin the cooling process and to slow cell degradation. They keep blood circulating, oxygenating your brain as anticoagulants are injected to stop blood clotting. Once you are stabilized then it’s back to Alcor’s facility and off with your head. They wash out the blood, pump in some antifreeze, then the vitrification solution. Your frozen head is placed in a liquid nitrogen neurocan, which does not require electricity to maintain a final storage temperature of -196°C.

Every version of afterlife treats the physical body as disposable. Whether it’s a soul, re-incarnation, whole brain emulation or energy entropy. This body we are wearing is not infinite but maybe the brain could be. It’s a new way of looking at life and death and hope for the future. I like the example of a man that lost his wife to cancer, had her head vitrified and stored at Alcor. When he died, he underwent the same procedure. They loved each other and wanted to continue their relationship sometime in the future. They are both in suspension, waiting to be reunited one day which is kind of nice.