While browsing through back issues of Science Frontiers Newsletter, a scientific/historical journal detailing reports of anomalous occurrences, I came across this famous report of “purple blobs” found in Frisco Texas in 1979:
In early September 1979, the Associated Press carried a story about three purple blobs found in a yard in Frisco, Texas. One blob evaporated away, while the remaining two were preserved for analysis by NASA. The blobs were warm when found and had appeared during the height of a meteor shower. At first, NASA scientists did not rule out the possibility that the jelly-like goo might be extraterrestrial, but an AP dispatch the next day (not as widely printed) inferred that the blobs were merely industrial waste!
This classic report details a phenomena which has earlier ties to European traditions regarding what the Welch called Pwdre Ser, which meant “rot from the stars.” According to tradition, when a meteorite was seen crossing the skies overhead, if one were to rush out into the fields on a summer evening to seek its point of impact, often small gelatinous blobs were found; the supposed remnants of some “interstellar jelly” which had fallen to earth. As far back as 1641, Sir John Suckling wrote a poem which contained the following:
As he whose quicker eye doth trace
A false star shot to a mark’d place
Do’s run apace,
And, thinking it to catch,
A jelly up do snatch
Interestingly, the discovery of the purple blobs of Frisco, Texas in 1979 coincided with a Perseid meteor shower. Mrs. Sybil Christian, who found the blobs in her yard the following morning, had contacted the press, who brought with them an assistant director of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the ensuing investigation. It was found that a nearby battery processing plant had been using a sodium hydroxide compound to remove impurities from the lead used in their batteries, and the resulting byproduct was purplish in color. Still, Christian’s home was located a good distance from the battery plant, and the wastes discovered there were solid, whereas Christian’s blobs had been clearly “jelly-like”.
Throughout the years a handful of researchers like Ivan Sanderson and Trevor James Constable have even suggested that tangible “atmospheric life forms” living in the skies above us may not only be at the heart of the fallen star-jelly mystery, but may actually be what people were mistaking to be foreign aircraft in UFO encounters. In his book The Cosmic Pulse of Life, Constable includes photographs taken decades ago that resemble the popular “orbs” associated with haunted locations of today, explaining that these images actually depict what he calls critters living in the upper atmosphere. In some instances, he even points out “eyes” and other features on these alleged sky-beasts.
Whatever the source, such fallings (or rather, such appearances, since the sky can’t be confirmed as a point of origin) of strange jelly-like substances continue today, leading researchers to consider more down-to-earth theories such as European polecats regurgitating frog’s egg-masses, which might lend itself to why the Welch traditions regarding Pwdre Ser often seemed to link the phenomena to the springtime. What else might cause these unidentified jellies to appear, or perhaps more importantly, from where else could they come?