At approximately 2:20 PM on Wednesday, nearly every phone, television and radio across the United States will receive a not-so-panicked ping as FEMA tests the federal emergency alert system, an event that has sent conspiracy theorists into a tin-foil-fueled tizzy.


Redditor u//Skynet3301 recently took a moment to express some unidentifiable concerns surrounding the impending ping, sharing their laments to r/conspiracy.


“Does anyone else besides myself have a bad feeling that this is going to be much more than just a ‘test’?” they asked in a post shared on September 23.


Though u//Skynet3301 was admittedly hard-pressed to find concrete examples of what they feared would happen — “I'm trying to think of what could possibly happen during that time, but my brain is so fried from all the bull---- happening in the world since covid ruined everything,” they wrote — u/Visual-Independent-1 had a more concrete vision of the coming days.


“I dug around in the federal register code for the policies around this which led me official guidance from I think FEMA or the FCC and it’s very detailed about cell phone coverage and the number of people covered under each network throughout several years,” they wrote, describing the exercise as “a step towards the future they want”


“It’s to get a geo-location confirmation for each device on each network (future tracking for 24-7 surveillance on your compliance).”


And if you don’t feel like opening the notification? According to /Visual-Independent-1, you’re in for a world of government-sanctioned surveillance.


“If the notification/alert isn’t acknowledged within set [sic] amount of time the network is required to forward all known information about those who fail to open the emergency alert,” they said.”They’ll scrape the web using that info to pinpoint your location.”


But it wasn’t just your regular garden-variety conspiracy theorists questioning the test. As news of the ping spread throughout the internet, a legion of anti-vaxxers decided to get in on the fun, conjuring up a scenario of a 5G-zombie apocalypse stemming from the Covid-19 jab.



“The feds are going to crank up the 5G towers on the 4th (under the guise of an EBS test) and that will activate the 5G, graphene oxide nanobots in the vaccinated, unleashing the Marburg virus and creating a vaccinated zombie apocalypse,” wrote @VaxxersAnti, adding that they’ll plan on  “covering it.”


While other theorists have argued that everyone, regardless of vaccination status, will be impacted by this blast, one creator named Melinda decided to lean into the conspiracy theory stereotypes, arguing that coating all your belongings in a metric f—kton of tin foil may be the only way to evade disaster.


“What you should do is take aluminum foil, and wrap them up and put some in your vehicle 200 meters away from your home,” she said in a now-viral Twitter clip, noting that those worried about undergoing zombification should also create a foil-wrapped safe room in their houses.


“Take a place in your house, a room in your house, and put aluminum foil two, three times layers in that place and stay there from the fourth to the fifth of October,” she advised.



Though it's near-certain that FEMA’s test won’t end in a zombie doomsday, all of these theories have sparked yet another conspiracy — these doomsday preppers are definitely deep in the pockets of big tin foil.