Night of the living dead always bothered me how the bodies reanimated. I always thought it could of been an alien taking over the remains of the muscle tissue.
Remember that in Night Of The Living Dead, one of the theories that can be heard over the TV/Radio is the crashed Venus probe. So there is your tie in.
shareNope! You'd have to go further into the cinematic past! Try this one:
Invisible Invaders (1959)
IMDb synopsis:
Aliens, contacting scientist Adam Penner, inform him that they have been on the moon for twenty thousand years, undetected due to their invisibility, and have now decided to annihilate humanity unless all the nations of earth surrender immediately. Sequestered in an impregnable laboratory trying to find the aliens' weakness, Penner, his daughter, a no-nonsense army major and a squeamish scientist are attacked from outside by the aliens, who have occupied the bodies of the recently deceased.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052929/
There you have sci fi zombies, too, well before Bava's film! However, George Romero did part with the zombie thing by having them flesh-eating, which actually makes them ghouls, not zombies. Actually, I refer to them as "zomboids".