Star jelly (also called astromyxin, astral jelly) is a gelatinous substance sometimes found on grass and less commonly on the branches of trees. According to folklore, it is deposited on the Earth during meteor showers. It is described as a translucent or grayish-white gelatin that tends to evaporate shortly after having "fallen". Explanations have ranged from it being the remains of frogs, toads, or worms, to the byproducts of cyanobacteria, to being the fruiting bodies of jelly fungi or masses of amoeba called slime molds. Nonbiological origins proposed for instances of "star jelly" have included byproducts from industrial production or waste management. Reports of the substance date back to the 14th century and have continued to the present.

History

There have been reports of 'star-jelly' for centuries. John of Gaddesden (1280–1361) mentions stella terrae (Latin for 'star of the earth' or 'earth-star') in his medical writings, describing it as "a certain mucilaginous substance lying upon the earth" and suggesting that it might be used to treat abscesses. A fourteenth-century Latin medical glossary has an entry for uligo, described as "a certain fatty substance emitted from the earth, that is commonly called 'a star which has fallen'". Similarly, an English-Latin dictionary from around 1440 has an entry for "sterre slyme" with the Latin equivalent given as assub (a rendering of Arabic ash-shuhub, also used in medieval Latin as a term for a "falling" or "shooting" star). In Welsh it has been referred to as "pwdre ser" meaning "rot from the stars". The Oxford English Dictionary lists a large number of other names for the substance, with references dating back to the circa-1440 English-Latin dictionary entry mentioned above: star-fallen, star-falling, star-jelly, star-shot, star-slime, star-slough, star-slubber, star-spurt, and star-slutch. The slime mold Enteridium lycoperdon is called caca de luna ("moon's feces") by the locals in the state of Veracruz in Mexico. Another theory states that star jelly is most likely formed from the glands in the oviducts of frogs and toads. Birds and mammals eat the animals but not the oviducts which, when they come into contact with moisture, swell and distort, leaving a vast pile of jellylike substance sometimes also referred to as otter jelly. In 1910, T. M. Hughes ruminated in Nature as to why poets and ancient writers associated meteors with star jelly, and observed that the jelly seemed to "grow out from among the roots of grass".

Scientific analysis and theories

Examples

In fiction

Sir John Suckling, in 1641, wrote a poem which contained the following lines: 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 Henry More, in 1656 wrote: "That the Starres eat...that those falling Starres, as some call them, which are found on the earth in the form of a trembling gelly, are their excrement." John Dryden, in 1679, wrote: "When I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star I found I had been cozened with a jelly." William Somervile, in 1740, wrote in The Talisman: Swift as the shooting star, that gilds the night With rapid transient Blaze, she runs, she flies; Sudden she stops nor longer can endure The painful course, but drooping sinks away, And like that falling Meteor, there she lyes A jelly cold on earth. Sir Walter Scott, in his novel The Talisman, wrote: "'Seek a fallen star,' said the hermit, 'and thou shalt only light on some foul jelly, which, in shooting through the horizon, has assumed for a moment an appearance of splendour.'" An unidentifiable substance that falls to earth during a meteor-type event forms the background to "The Colour Out of Space", a 1927 short story by the American horror and science fiction author H. P. Lovecraft. Some observers have made a connection between star jelly and the Paramount movie The Blob, in which a gelatinous monster slime falls from space. The Blob, which was released in 1958, was supposedly based on the Philadelphia reports from 1950 and specifically a report in The Philadelphia Inquirer called "Flying 'Saucer' Just Dissolves" where four police officers encountered a UFO debris that was described as evaporating with a purple glow leaving nothing. Paramount Pictures was also sued for this movie by the author Joseph Payne Brennan, who had written a short story published in Weird Tales Magazine in 1953 called "Slime" about a similar creature. In a 2019 episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "Not All Men", a virulent star jelly causes the male residents of a town to become psychotic.