The mystery of Star Jelly

There were two separate posts on Facebook this week where people were discussing finds of mysterious gelatinous blobs - Star Jelly. 

Star jelly (also known as astromyxin, star-fallen, star-jelly, star-shot, star-slime, star-slough, star-slubber, star-spurt, star-slutch or astral jelly) is a bit of a mystery. It usually turns up in the spring and appears as lumps of a gelatinous substance found on grass or, occasionally, in the branches of trees. 

According to folklore, it is deposited on the Earth during meteor showers. Other 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 moulds. 

Reports of the substance date back to the 14th century and have continued to the present. They even feature in works by writers and poets such as John Dryden (1697): 

When I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star I found I had been cozened with a jelly. 

And Sir Walter Scott (1825): 

"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." 

Physician 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". 

But what is it? 

You will be surprised to hear that it has baffled people for centuries and, even now, the origin of Star Jelly isn’t known for certain. The most common theory is that it is regurgitated frog spawn from frog-eating predators. This is supported by the findings of the BBC who in 2015 sent a specimen to the National History Museum for DNA testing. The results showed it as primarily frog, but with a small amount of magpie. Suggesting that a magpie attacked a frog, and then couldn’t digest all of it and and regurgitated what was left. 

Whatever the truth, some observers have made a connection between star jelly and the Paramount movie The Blob (1958), in which a gelatinous monster falls from space. The film was supposedly based on UFO reports from Philadelphia in 1950 and specifically a report in The Philadelphia Inquirer called 'Flying Saucer Just Dissolves' where four police officers encountered UFO debris that was described as evaporating with a purple glow leaving nothing behind but jelly. 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. 

I've only ever found some once in my life when I was around 16-17 years old and on grassy moorland in Cornwall.

Seems a odd place to start an alien invasion.