Cryogenics Lab Used Ted Williams' Frozen Head For Batting Practice

According to Larry Johnson, author of the new book "Frozen", workers at an Arizona cryonics facility decapitated the lifeless body of baseball legend Ted Williams and used his frozen head in a bizarre batting practice. In his tell-all book, Johnson describes the horrific conditions of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and how Williams was beheaded, his head frozen and repeatedly abused.

Williams' body, known at the facility as "Alcorian A-1949", was sent to Alcor at the direction of his son, John Henry Williams, who died of leukemia in 2004. Bodies are kept at the facility suspended in liquid nitrogen in case future generations learn how to revive them.

Johnson, the former chief operating officer at Alcor, explained in the book that in July 2002, just after Williams died at the age of 83, technicians without any kind of medical certification happily photographed and used crude equipment to decapitate him. He says that Williams' severed head was then frozen and even used for batting practice by a technician trying to dislodge it from a tuna fish can.

Johnson served as Alcor's COO for eight months before he became a whistleblower, after which he wrote his book and went into hiding, fearing for his life. He said he moved from safehouse to safehouse, receiving death threats.

The horrifying treatment of Ted Williams' corpse is just the tip of the iceberg. Johnson's book reveals other atrocities at the Arizona facility, including a situation in which human blood and toxic chemicals were dumped into a parking lot sewer and the dismembering of live dogs that were injected with chemicals in experiments. He also details the suspicious circumstances involving two bodies frozen at Alcor: gay rights activist John Dentinger and Dora Kent, an elderly woman whos son gave Alcor a hefty sum of money.

In the book, Johnson tells how he wired himself with an audio recorder for his last three months working there, stole internal records, and took gruesome photographs which are reproduced in "Frozen".

Back in 2003, a friend of Ted Williams - Buzz Harmon - snuck into Alcor with the help of a mortician friend. At the time, he said he was "appalled" by the conditions there, where Williams' body and 50 others were stored in steel tanks alongside cardboard boxes and junk. Harmon died in 2004, and is believed to have committed suicide.

Johnson will finally come out of hiding this coming Tuesday, the date his book is released. He will make his first public appearance in years, making a stop at ABC's "Nightline."