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The Blob

Content below is from #179 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

This week I am prepping for one of our annual parties: Lief Erikson Day!

So the episode is a bit peckish, I will admit. Listen to the audio podcast for more.

As for a recommendation… uh… drink lots of water and stay in school kids.. LOL

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

The Blob 1958 - HeadStuff.org
The Blob via antifilmschoolsite

An alien lifeform consumes everything in its path as it grows and grows.

  • The movie The Blog is about an alien blob that falls from outer space and engulfs people into a horrible, gooey death.
    • It first came out in 1958 then again in 1972… and then again in 1988
    • The Blob was based on a 1950 police case in Philadelphia. A bunch of cops found a big disk of quivering yet solid jelly-like substance. When they tried to move it, it dissolved into a sticky scum.
    • Scientists later chimed in with their labeling machines and gave this stuff a name… The goo is called star jelly and is usually reported seen near the site of a meteorite landing.
  • Today the 1958 Blob movie is viewed as a novelty type thing. It is over the top and not taken seriously. People who watch it tend to see it as a campy oddball flick from a long-gone era.
    • Unlike some of the best sci-fi horror movies we enjoy today about AI taking over the planet or interstellar space travel (both real-world possibilities), No one thinks the blob is actually going to rain down from the sky and gobble up entire towns.
    • But that’s where people are wrong LOL
    • This actually happened! … sort of
  • In 1950, eight years before The Blob was released, a couple of cops in Philly named Joe Keenan and John Collins saw a big-bright flying saucer six feet in diameter fall out of the night sky.
    • After a brief existential crisis…
    • They chased it, and where it landed they found a foot-tall mass of glittering “purple jelly.” The officers believed it was alive. In their report, they said that the jelly was pulsing and glowing, but that it weighed so little it didn’t even bend the grass it was resting on.
    • The weight distribution thing is the eeriest part for me. I imagine a foot-tall blob to be rather heavy, but if it didn’t bend the grass… it would probably look like it was defying the laws of physics.
  • What did Joe and John do? They did what all cops do when they find something interesting… they called for more cops.
    • Two other cops arrived for backup. Sergeant Joe Cook actually picked up a handful of the blob stuff.
      • Side note, in the movie, The guy who does that in The Blob suffers a horrible fate, obviously.
      • I mean… in every horror movie, it is the curious one that gets got!
  • But this was a real-life account and Sergeant Cook didn’t get eaten by an other-worldly mass.
    • No, it just sort of fell apart in his hands. It disintegrated into smaller blobs and stuck to his hand. Then those smaller blogs evaporated into thin air.
    • What was left was an “odorless scum”… that’s a direct quote from the police report.
    • By the time the FBI arrived, according to an AP story at the time, “there was nothing to show FBI agents except a spot on the ground.”
  • Was there really a blobby flying saucer that touched down in Pennsylvania in 1950?
    • Scientists are pretty skeptical; any liquid or semi-liquid substance on an asteroid would almost certainly burn off when the object entered the earth’s atmosphere.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/analysis-whistleblower-testimonies-did-not-change-our-basic-understanding-of-ufos
  • So what was that stuff?
    • Well the Pentagon recently issued a report discussing what appear to be unidentified flying objects in American airspace. Those recent hearing on July 26th 2023 with Ryan Graves, executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, David Grusch, former National Reconnaissance Office representative on the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, and retired Navy Commander David Fravor were pretty eye-opening as well.
      • If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the hearing discussed UFOs and retrieved living beings inside those UFOs… from 3 reputable sources.
    • More, many eye-witnesses to meteorite landings have claimed to have found what the Welsh people call pwdre ser, or “star rot” near the site of impact.
      • Pwdre ser is a bad-smelling, jelly-like substance that evaporates quickly. It’s also been called “star jelly” and in French “crachet de lune”, or moonspit. Pwdre ser has been analyzed a couple of times. The most recent was following a meteorite landing in Scotland in 2009. Scientists found that the space jelly lacked DNA and didn’t seem to be either plant or animal. That’s what it wasn’t. They never figured out what it was.
  • What’s creepy is that it is scientifically proven that meteorites leave behind an unknown jelly substance when they crash into Earth… and no one really knows what this stuff is.

It’s also not completely clear whether the Philadelphia incident inspired the 1958 movie The Blob directly. Producer Jack Harris never acknowledged the real-life pwdr eser as the origin of his own space slime. But Harris was from Pennsylvania, and so was his old friend Irvine Millgate, who is credited with the original idea for the Blob. Millgate could easily have remembered the local newspaper articles about the police dealing with the weird space substance. That’s probably how the Blob crawled out of the headlines and into horror legend.

CREDIT: