

Image credit: CC 2.0 Richard Webb

The Blob



Columnist: William B Stoecker Posted on Thursday, 6 December, 2012 | 4 comments Columnist:

Article Copyright© William B Stoecker - reproduced with permission.

The Blob, a horror film starring a young Steve McQueen, came out in 1958. The film begins with an old man watching a meteorite fall to Earth. He goes to investigate, and prods the meteorite with a stick, whereupon it breaks open and a small, living blob leaps onto his hand, and begins to consume him, growing steadily larger, until he is completely eaten alive. The blob then eats the doctor and nurse who had tried to treat him, and goes on from there, consuming more and more victims and growing steadily larger, seemingly indestructible, until, finally, the heroes of the story discover that it can be frozen solid with CO2 fire extinguishers. It is then dropped onto the Arctic ice, to await a sequel that never came.What most people never realized is that the story is based on a real incident…actually a long series of incidents, a phenomenon that has yet to be explained. In 1950 in Philadelphia, there were reports that what appeared to be a meteorite had fallen in the city, and four police officers went to the scene to investigate. They discovered a blob six feet across and about a foot thick in the center. When they tried to pick it up it dissolved in their hands, leaving a sticky residue. None of them were eaten alive; in fact, they suffered no ill effects whatever. But what was it?It turns out that there is a long tradition of “star jellies,” of blobs found on the ground, often after meteor falls or large meteor showers. There are reports dating as far back as the thirteen hundreds in Europe, which modern debunkers try to explain away as nostoc algae or slime molds. Perhaps that is all there is to it, but the association with meteorites is hard to explain…and that’s assuming that the glowing objects that seemed to fall from the sky were just meteorites.In more recent times, there have been similar reports, often explained by debunkers as accidental discharges from the toilets of airliners, but there seems to be something else going on, and this “explanation” certainly cannot explain the reports made before airliners existed. On 8/11/1979, following the Perseid meteor shower, a woman named Sybil Christian in Frisco, Texas found a purple blob in her yard, which was “explained” as residue from a battery processing plant in town…but, given the fact that the plant was some distance from her house, how did the residue get to her yard? And is the fact that the event occurred during the meteor fall just a coincidence? In December, 1983 a grayish-white, oily goo was found in North Reading, Massachusetts, on lawns and streets and even on gasoline station pumps, which would seem to rule out algae or slime molds. In Oakville, Washington, again during the Perseid shower, jelly appeared all over town, and some people who touched it reported becoming ill for a short time, suffering from vertigo. Unlike the victims of the fictional blob, none were eaten, and, apparently, there were no lasting ill effects. Some people in town claimed to have seen black helicopters. Note that ordinary Army helicopters are a very dark olive drab in color, and seen from a distance, or silhouetted against the sky even in daylight they appear black. Star jelly was reported in Scotland in 2009, in the English Lake District in March, 2011, and blue blobs fell in Dorset, England in January, 2012. In England researchers at the McCaulay Institute are reported to have analyzed some of the material, discovering very little, save that it was ninety nine percent water and contained no DNA. So the phenomenon has been going on for a very long time, is very widespread, and continues to occur. It would be nice if a more concerted and systematic effort were made to analyze the material, and it is likely that more than one phenomenon is involved. For example, if the blob found by the police in Philadelphia was mostly water, like the one tested in England, it could not have simply evaporated in such a brief time. A number of researchers, especially the American writer Charles Fort, have compiled reports of strange objects and substances falling from the skies, including fish, frogs, “blood,” stones of apparently terrestrial origin, and even what appeared to be chunks of meat. Often the falls of fish and frogs occur during rainstorms, and debunkers claim that tornadoes somehow selectively picked them up from lakes or rivers without picking up other items, such as crayfish or plants or mud, and did so even when no tornadoes were reported. Rains of “blood” are explained as rain colored by dust, and dust can indeed travel great distances and mix with rain; Saharan dust even crosses the Atlantic to be seen in the Caribbean. But there seems to be something else at work, something that defies the usual materialist concept of reality. Perhaps our minds, connected at some higher level, consensually “dream” what we normally take to be reality, and perhaps at times this consensus breaks down.Be that as it may, there may be a different explanation for things like the Philadelphia blob. Many of these things seem to appear after meteor showers, particularly the Perseid shower. Many meteorites are the remains of comets which gradually disintegrate after repeatedly entering the relatively hot inner Solar System, and the Perseid shower is from the Swift-Tuttle comet. What remains of its nucleus is about two kilometers across, surrounded and trailed at a considerable distance by debris. Could carbon and water based life develop in comets? Certainly water is present, and a variety of organic compounds, but comets spend much of their time in the deep freeze of the outer Solar System, originating in the distant Oort Cloud, where temperatures approach absolute zero. They only get warm enough to melt their water ice when they get closest to the Sun. As for the poorly understood phenomenon of the internal heat of celestial bodies, whatever its cause it seems dependent on the mass and probably also the density of the objects, and the largest known comets are of low density and their nuclei are only about forty kilometers in diameter. So it would seem unlikely that life forms could develop within comets and fall to Earth relatively intact, but the possibility cannot be entirely ruled out.But there is yet another possibility to consider. Many UFOs seem to act almost like animals, sometimes with only limited intelligence. The idea that some may, in fact, be bizarre life forms existing in our atmosphere and perhaps beyond has been around for quite some time. Its best-known proponent was Trevor James Constable, who published They Live in the Sky in 1958, The Cosmic Pulse of Life in 1975, and Sky Creatures: Living UFOs in 1978. Constable theorized that the creatures may exist most of the time in a kind of low density state, propelling themselves with what Wilhelm Reich called “orgone energy,” which is identical to what has been called chi, ki, prana, vril, and by many other names in different cultures. Constable believed that the creatures might be visible only in the infrared when in a low density state, but at times increased their density and became visible at the shorter wave lengths we are able to perceive.But what would hold such creatures together and allow them to organize whatever low density matter composes them? For that, we must turn to British biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, who postulated the existence of “morphic fields,” which account for most of the order in the universe. He believed that even the shape of inorganic crystals might be determined by these fields, and that the fields might be identical with the Hindu “Akashic records,” or Jung’s “collective unconscious.” A quartz crystal, for example, might be shaped by such a field and would then also generate a field of its own, which would help other crystals to form, and their exact shape might, in a sense, evolve over time. So the overall universal field would affect individual crystals, and the individual crystals’ fields would then modify the universal field of which they are a part. Applied to living organisms the field is called the “morphogenetic field.” There has always been a problem for biologists trying to explain how undifferentiated embryonic stem cells develop into the multitude of quite different tissues that comprise the different organs in a living creature. It appears that DNA merely tells the cell to produce certain proteins, and this is by no means a complete explanation. Sheldrake suggests that a DNA molecule also acts like a kind of antenna, getting instructions from the morphogenetic field. At a human level, the morphogenetic field might be our astral body, both individual and connected to the greater universal mind. The universal mind (and I have no problem referring to it as God) might then control evolution via the field…intelligent design.In the case of sky creatures, their fields might be powerful enough to shape surrounding materials like air and water vapor into a kind of body. And, in addition to the “blobs,” there may be other evidence for sky creatures. On 3/19/1994 videographer Jose Escamilla taped strange flying rods near Roswell and Midway, New Mexico. They could not be seen by the human eye because their motion was too rapid, but videotape, slowed down, revealed creatures estimated at anywhere from a few inches in length to a yard or more. Many seemed to propel themselves with three or four sets of staggered fin like structures on either side of their bodies. Lest anyone accuse Mr. Escamilla of fraud (with his technical expertise he would certainly be capable of faking it), bear in mind that many, many other people have achieved identical results. Skeptics say that the rods are just blurred images of flying insects, and, indeed, similar images have been obtained by taping insects, but, apparently, they must be back lit. But many of the images were taken when the scene was not back lit, as at the Cave of Swallows in Mexico, and often those present never see any insects, and often the cameras are focused on infinity. If witnesses cannot even see insects, how would a camera focused on infinity detect them? Also, they have been taped near sky divers ten thousand feet up in the air, where flying insects are very rare. Clearly, more research is needed here. If, with multiple researchers present, rods were taped in zero degree weather, for example, that would certainly rule out insects.When I was a volunteer camera man on an access television show and Jose Escamilla was our guest I discussed flying rods with him at some length, and again when I encountered him at UFO and conspiracy conferences. We speculated that rods might exist under water as well as in the air, and they might be the origin of legends of flying dragons, and, possibly, modern accounts of lake monsters, like the one reportedly seen in Loch Ness. And we discussed the morphogenetic field concept as it might apply to flying rods…they would be akin to the “blobs” but perhaps shaped differently.If these creatures are truly proven to exist, it would be an amazing discovery in and of itself. But if their existence, in turn, proves that morphogenetic fields exist, it would revolutionize biology and medicine and present a major challenge to the reigning materialist paradigm.