From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul. Mission control decans. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. In a recent episode, we decided to take a break from a little bit of what old proverbs we call interesting times and look at surprising stories of weird atmospheric phenomenon, most particularly the multiple instances throughout history human history where it seems to have rained frogs and fish. And I think we're all surprised to find that the answer is not as simple as dare I say, mainstream scientific consensus would have us.
Believe we're gonna get to the one where it's raining men at a later date, But today we are talking about it raining something else while not fish and amphibians. There might well be an amphibian tie in down the line, but what are we talking about today? They have some pretty fun names.
Yeah.
As we mentioned in that earlier episode, there is so much more to strange rain than ill faded fish and amphibians. Tonight we are exploring two bizarre related phenomena things called star jelly and angel hair. Not the pasta, but do check out our upcoming episode on pasta ridiculous history. Sorry, guys, it's all it blurs together sometimes, you know what I mean.
It is indeed a blur. Here are the facts.
Do you guys remember rowing up and hearing maybe any like old farmer's tails or old observations about the weather. I know, being in the South, for the American South, for a lot of our time together, we have probably heard, you know, someone sitting on a porch. What was our joke last time, someone sitting on a porch sipping a mint julip and Colonel Angus says we needed.
This rain, or oh there's an ill omen the foot.
Yeah, I remember hearing that. If you are driving by a pasture and you see all of the cows sitting down like or laying down kind of, but you know, just in their their sitting positions that you know rain is coming.
I like that, you say a rain is coming?
Yeah, yeah, it's weird because folklore and mythoughtlogy, we've established this in previous explorations. They exist primarily to explain how humans came to be where they are, maybe where they think they're going, and why, most importantly and immediately, why
the environment functions the way it seems to function. You know, it's I think it's easy for a lot of people in twenty twenty four, as we record this on the evening of July twenty second, I think it's easy for a lot of people to say, oh, that's balderdash, that's superstition from times gone by. But history is closer than
it looks, you know. I mean, I was looking into etymology and idioms and have you all ever heard the phrase It comes to us from English red sky at night sails to light red sky at morning Sala's take warning.
I don't know why that makes me think of like Stephen King or something. It just seems like something Stephen King villain would say. Remember I think it was made for TV movie The Storm of the Century, where there was that creepy dude with the wolf cane. He would say stuff.
Like my parents would say that every time we went to the beach, like we would talk about that about mm hmm, yeah, and when we were trying to figure out if there was gonna be rain the next day because we didn't have weather dot com dot yeah or whatever that was. But we didn't have any of that stuff. And you know, you could go to the weather channel, but rather than do that, especially if you're out, you just go you look around. You're like, I don't know, do you guys?
Remember the weirdly misogynistic expression of if it's raining and the sun's out and the devil's beating his white and his wife, that one very disturbed.
Excellent. Yeah, there's an excellent little Harper's article that translates various cultural idioms for how people are cultures used to explain rain during sunlight right far beyond credence clear water. But yeah, the devil's being his wife is one. God is beating the angels another one. I can't remember the language.
Yeah, they would do that, I know.
But also this is, you know, I get it. This people's attempt to explain the environment around them. And unless we feel too high and mighty, folks, let's recall that here in the United States, where we record millions of people tune in each and every year to watch a very specific roundhog and to see its behavior just in case, like, just in case.
Not feel anymore Puxi Packsatani something though, right, isn't it.
Yeah, it's kind of like being president. Different people in different groundhogs and different era, same responsibilities.
You know, in the same way that we were talking recently about, like fire, how you know it can be such a powerful tool. It keeps us warm, but it can also burn things to the ground. I mean, weather is the same way. It can water our crops. It keeps us fed. We need it to drink and to survive, but flooding can also destroy everything. It's another incredibly powerful thing.
So it makes sense that culturally we kind of almost are deferential to it in this very We almost are like, well, we worship it on the one hand, but we're also kind of terrified of it on the other.
I got one more for you, guys. Did you ever grow up hearing that if the sky starts to turn green during a bad thunderstorm that a tornado is coming.
Yes, it's certainly a thing we've seen with some weird storms recently here in Georgia, and it doesn't necessarily always mean that. But if you look outside and it has a green hue, you usually know the weather is going to get pretty nasty. And I don't really I guess I've never looked into what causes that, but it's it's almost like supernatural feeling. It's very unsettling. I like that you say supernatural, yeah.
Because it makes me wonder about Again, we're talking about when there's a light out and then still a storm, a big, scary dark storm, but there's still some light going on. It makes you wonder what that green hue actually is. So if you're listening, let us know why.
Meteorologists, fellow conspiracy realist with interest and enthusiasm for weather, we can't wait to hear from you. In that regard. We also to the earlier point about the old idiom, the rhyming couplet around red skies and the ocean. Matt, I love that your parents were teaching you this because it seems that a significant portion, not all, but a significant portion of folklore tales and superstitions and so on, they do seem to have genuine science backing them up.
A reddish sunset means that this is from the farmer's almanac means that the air is dusty and dry, and here in North America or the northern latitudes, the weather typically is going to move west to east, meaning that a red sky at sunset means dry weather, which is good for sailing, is moving east. But a reddish sunrise means dry air from the west has already passed over your craft, and this clears the way for a storm
to move in. So it's not just look. It probably stuck around in oral tradition because it rhymes, but that's not the only reason. It also seemed to work most of the time.
Oh and just really quickly, just a quick layman's description of the green thing. It has to do with updrafts that can cause light to scatter differently, So it's sort of like, I guess, refracting light in a way that can change, you know, the way it's perceived by the eye.
And it doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be a tornado, but oftentimes it does mean there's going to be hail or some severe form of weather, but not always because sometimes you know, it takes perfect conditions for that to break. It could be kind of building up and then conditions change and you know, it sort of gets better.
And perfect condition is very much a human concept. I think weather just has conditions.
With us. We try all that dumb cloud seating stuff that we've talked about, non necessarily being a great idea. It's quite exciting.
They just need to figure out how to do it without wrecking themselves. I mean there's another one. There are a lot of rhyming couplets about weather and folklore, at least in English, and there are many other languages and cultural terms for predictive capability and weather. If you speak another language other than the one you're hearing this podcast and natively, and you have some weather anecdotes or weather idioms, we would love to hear your take on them. Conspiracyd
diheartradio dot com one example. Another one would be Western Europeans often said the following, do someone want to give us a good British accent on this?
When the wind is out of the east, it ti is neither good for man nor for beast the extra four, but I think it helps. It really brings pass.
Cadence a little. Yeah. This is a case where the science does again seem to bear out, because as the British broadcasting Corporation notes. In Western Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, harsh winter weather tends to come from Eastern Europe and Russia. It's a strengthening icy wind that comes from the east, and it could indicate to a farmer that snow and frigid conditions are on the way, and later the rise of meteorological science would prove this to
be the case. I think that's a good place to start. It's astonishing to realize that millennia worth of people just being around and watch the weather from the ground taught us things that were later confirmed by the boffins. That's kind of cool, absolutely, But our question is how does this apply to the weird weird things we're exploring tonight. Star jelly and angel hair. Again, neither of them are pastas.
Yeah, star jelly sounds like something you'd like get in like a Japanese boba drink or something you know.
Oh, I was thinking more like a starship.
Yeah, yeah, but I don't know. I think there literally is like you can get different types of jelly in your boba drink. You've got the regular spherical bobas and then you can get like certain types of They literally call it like jelly.
There is a culinary aspect tied into one of these light spoilers.
I guess you could eat anything.
You can't eat it if it disappears.
Well that's the angel hair, the star jelly'll that'll stay gunking around. But it's also called astral jelly, which sounds for some reason dirty, or star star falling, star shot, star slime, star slutch, which I didn't know was, yeah, that's a weird one, and star spurt. There are many other names as well, but reports of this stuff can be found back as far as the thirteen hundreds. There was a medieval physician named John of Gaddisden who wrote
about this. He called it Stella terre Latin, you know, star star falling on Earth, and he is mainly writing about medicine, so he said, look, you can find this muse and laginous substance lying on the earth. And his main thing was could you just like rub this on abscesses, because that's where medicine was at the time. You saw something and you were like, maybe you could eat this or rub it on something.
Magic goo from heaven. Don't mind if i'd.
Let's just rub it on all of our open wounds and see what happens.
Yea, all, I've been watching the news. It's like Game of Thrones or whatever. House of the Dragon and there's a you know, the masters, they have their remedies, and one of them in the shows it appears to be dressing wounds with some sort of cabbage. Yeah, and it looks real gross, and you gotta wonder if it's doing much good. But you know, again, it was all about drying. But that's why they still call it practicing medicine to this thing. Maybe it's not. I don't I always joke
about that's a good point. That's a good joke.
For centuries, people genuinely believe that this stuff called star jelly was deposited on this planet via meteor showers. They thought it was essentially snot from heaven. And oddly, yeah, yeah, it's not from that was Those are the original lyrics. Nobody fact check us there. There's also for fans of
Western pop culture, we're increasingly certain. We can't say it with one hundred percent surety, but we're increasingly certain that star Jelly at least in part formed the or inspired the plot of the classic nineteen fifty eight horror film the blog.
Oh yeah, the idea that some celestial debris came down and cracked open and within, whether it be a meteor or a piece of some other space rock, held within with some sort of sentient ooze that had it out for mankind of course.
Well, you could also imagine how maybe people would liken it to the leavings of a slug or a snail or another you know, creature that went across the land or the grass and then left this stuff behind somehow.
Yeah, early cryptid kind of concept.
Maybe, or you know, it's really interesting just thinking about it this way, as originating somew from the heavens and this is what you're left behind with. Yeah, that's weird.
Aliens are real, and they need to stop dropping their snot and their goo, you know what I mean, just talk to us one to one in that regard.
That was my favorite cautionary campaign for my youth, Stop dropping snot.
Yeah, but I wonder if the thought was that as the you know, as the meteor showers are occurring and as stuff is burning up, that this is the remains of like the interior of one of those objects or something, or if it as it dissipates, it turns into this stuff. I've really I've been so interested in the thinking there, like the original thinking.
Right, and digging through the primary sources. As we'll see a little bit later, we find some interesting I guess you could call them hypotheses. Let's call them propositions for now, you know, the idea of an unknown life form, a possible cryptid all cool stories that doesn't even hit on the Angel Hair phenomena, which gets a little bit of a fancier name. Angel Hair has its own weird legendary backstory.
Just like people used religion as a framework to describe anomalous weather, they used religion as a framework to describe angel Hair. Its street name Mary's Yarn shout out to the Catholics in the crowd. The idea was that there would be sightings or visitations of the Virgin Mary in Catholic thought, and that in the wake of these visitations there would be sticky, fibrous substances. Imagine cobwebs made out of your favorite jelly.
I do think it's interesting that the imagery comes from this notion that Mary likes to knit, which I don't think is necessary biblically discussed. I don't know, apocryphal, maybe it's.
It's a really weird concept that again there's stuff falling out of the sky, and in this case it's almost ectoplasm life.
Oh yes, yeah, we're going to have an ectoplasm episode on the way as well. We'll give it some space, we'll give it some distance so we can hear your experiences with this stuff, fellow conspiracy realist. But we also note to these earlier points. The knitting idea was one explanation, and then there was the idea that the Virgin Mary was veiled and that the little strands people found were
somehow pieces of this veil falling. And in a lot of visitations here, typically or often, they're going to see the image or the avatar the Virgin Mary in the sky. So the idea that leavings of that visitation could fall to the ground for the humans was a big was a big part of the logic, and for a long time it seemed rational. And then later decades, as we'll see people said, you know, what's really going on with those angel hairs? UFOs bro and they say, I thought you said angels.
I don't know, either one.
Maybe or the same thing. Well, we've even saw. I don't know if you guys remember back in the day on above Top Secret, there were a couple of stories that for some reason stuck in my mind about these angel hair phenomena sightings being associated directly with chemtrails and
with yes dosing of people. And this is like the when let's imagine that you've got the chemtrail device in the back of a plane or something and as it is kind of processing all the chemicals that are turning into basically sometimes like you'll find in any kind of dispenser that has a sudsing material in it, you'll get you'll get the gunk, the build up, right, and then that drops off of the nozzle or something. And that that's what this angel hair was.
And so the direct question is why is the Virgin Mary so into chemtrails?
I mean, that's it wasn't much of elief. Honestly, we were right there with you. It was a short walk, it had to be said, short flight.
Yeah, we got to get in front of the emails from the Pope, I guess. But whatever this angel hair stuff is, which we'll describe in detail and just a bit, we can tell its appearance was so fascinating is so fascinating to human culture that they associated it with some of their most important schools of belief and thought and philosophy, and that brings us. I would say to tonight's question, is it possible to explain either star Jelly or the angel hair phenomenon.
Well, we'll see about that. After a quick message from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy.
Yeah, it turns out we have some pretty solid non folkloric explanations for these related phenomena. And folks, you know, we don't always get to discover definitive answers for some questions in this show, so we're pretty excited about these. I say, we get into it star Jelly. Oh and a quick accountability moment. In previous conversations, I called it sky jelly, which is a different thing it is. Yeah, yeah,
it's a phrase that I accidentally made up. So if we're going to define it, sky jelly would just be jelly you eat on an airplane, Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, they give you. Surely there's some international flight where you get a jello cup, you know.
Just you know, as a point of fact, guys, I knew, I knew, I knew this phrase, and it is from the game Fortnite.
Sky Jelly.
That's a thing.
There's the thing sky jelly.
What does the game?
I don't know. They're on the map. I have no idea what they do. I've seen them before, and they're also sky jellies in Elden Ring. I don't those little ghost jelly things.
Oh, the jelly fish. They're literally like like Portuguese man of war type things that just sort of float around and they don't really attack you. But if you come at them, they can't hurt you.
If I'm not, don't make them mad, that's.
Right, Yeah, yeah, stay on there good side. So we're correcting this.
According to the legend, star jelly or star whatever you want to call it is a magical guey substance and it is part of but the ancient Greeks would have called quintessence, the substance of the heavens makes up the sun, all those big quadrants, the stars, the darkness between those stars, the mediums, the comments, and so when you get as an early human, when you get in a situation where there is a meteor shower, where there's a strong rain,
or maybe a comet swings by your neck of the woods. Cosmically, then what happens is these things break apart in the sky. People knew enough about the atmosphere to know that there was some sort of rate of attrition for entering into Earth's local sphere of influence. When these objects, the reasoning went, break apart, they produce this star jelly, so they're little heavenly inerts that gently fall to Earth.
And then there you go this flat it's most flatity.
I can see why people might associate that. And the only reason I'm imagining it is because of the sparkly nature of stars viewed from Earth. Right, If it's dark enough outside and then this stuff when you see it, I'm imagining it if it's interacting with I was gonna say, you know, fire light or even early electric light, it would probably give you this very sparkly look. If there's enough of it on the ground spread out right, you imagine the light as a light source moving as a
person is moving to investigate the stuff. It would be I would imagine sparkly as all heck iridescence.
Yeah, that makes sense right, because this goes back to the idea of things like sympathetic magic. Right, if something appears to have a commonality, then that one commonality must imply further commonalities. That's kind of cool, man like that. I like that reasoning, and you know, again, we don't want to be dismissive. It's a fine story. It's beautiful, especially if you come up in a time or an evening where you don't know too much about meteors and stars and physics in.
The atmosphere, fluid dynamics, you know, things like that. I mean, I guess I think when I think of a gelatinous substance that would derive from something white hot, you know, like a star or like something with that much energy, I think of like what happens to you know, glass, or like how glass is made, the idea of molten you know, like things that are so hot that they're in a liquid state, but you can't really pick them up and play with them. They'll they'll, they'll, they'll hurt
you pretty bad. And there's a couple of really interesting Instagram accounts where it's people that kind of heat up these these steel balls and see how they interact with different substances. And one example that they do is like hair gel or even various gelatinous kind of desserts and stuff.
I'm sorry, I don't I don't mean to go off topic, but it is an interesting kind of combination of these two ideas to see what happens if you drop a red hot metal ball into a container of hair gel, you get sort of a star jelly kind of thing of its own. I'm all about it.
Oh yeah, well, let's let's just note here as well something you may not be thinking about, but the temperature of star jelly that's been encountered, the at least accounts that I have seen, is that it's cool to the touch, or it is like ambient temperature to wherever it is found. Basically, if not a little bit colder, so it's it had it didn't seem to be really hot, or at least it's not hot right now.
And people touching it did not immediately die, no burn their flangies fingers. The stars are not made of jelly, we know that now. No star cars that people have encountered appear to be chilatinous.
They're made of burning hot gases, if I'm not mistaken.
And also, as far as we know, and I don't know why, I'm hedging this so much.
But as far as the science knows, and really, we've only encountered one star, and we haven't even really encountered it. We've just seen stuff to it and we haven't played with it.
And it's super stuck up in my opinion. But the Sun, to quote Beavis and butt Head, the sun sucks.
And if pieces of an active breakup of a star hit Earth's surface, the results will be way more disastrous. You're only hearing this podcast, by the way, because one time an object from space at beat me here, Paul, absolutely up the life forms and ecosystems that we're here before humans just wrecked the entire thing and a couple of mammals stuck around and eventually invented microphones.
Yeah, and that happened at least once, probably probably that.
The moon.
So it's the hottest new real estate. But we see that this stuff, this gunk has been observed in all sorts of places, the United Kingdom, Texas, India, Pakistan, you name it. It's worldwide, just like pitbull, mister, yeah, mister worldwide, right, And so people have seen this stuff, and often when people are searching for an explanation, if one entity confidently says I know the answer, and people don't object to it, then they accept that because it's cool to explain things.
Turns out here in twenty twenty four. For many years, the human have had pretty good scientific explanations of this that do not rely on the passage of the heavens. But they are gross. This is for all the Cronenberg fans out there. There's a little body horror here to explain Star Jelly.
Right. We did talk about falling amphibians in a previous episode and fish rains and all of that, and got to a pretty I think, level headed explanation of those phenomena. Well, we're coming back to frogs here a little bit, y'all. Frog spawn, you know it. You've seen the stuff, kind of it's gelatinous. It's kind of little beads of gelatinous fluid that the frog reproductive material are suspended with them. Mm hmm.
So usually what we believe now, and this is based on DNA testing or biological test, and I should say of captured samples, usually what appears to happen is that a given amphibian has or a group of amphibians has its body ripped apart by some sort of predator, and when this happens, they somehow expose or release what is called their ovum jelly. So star jelly is actually kind of jelly. The substance is reactive to moisture, so it expands when it absorbs water through condensation, you know, like
through dew or through rain. And if you're just walking by and you're like, oh, blowing me, what a storm, and then you see you see this junk on the ground, You're not seeing the body of the amphibian that created it. You're probably also not seeing the eggs that were suspended in that jelly, because the predator would eat both of those. Instead, you're just seeing the left behind gunk a bunk, And.
I don't know.
There's also a similar to our guy who invented the concept of amps, there's this association between star jelly reports and areas with large amphibian populations.
And if I'm not mistaken, the frog spawn it refers to clumps of frog eggs, So they're like these kind of clutches of frog eggs that are all clumped together. And frogs can lay between like four to six thousand eggs every time they do the thing, and apparently only one in fifty will actually result in a tadpole, so these are very small. But yeah, I think have you guys ever seen this stuff before when you were a kid and playing outdoors back when we touch grass.
Yeah, my son and I encountered some of this not long ago at the old house where we lived, and we were just taking a walk and we saw some standing water after a rain, and inside the little puddles that had formed, some frogugs I guess had been laying eggs like as the water fills up and then goes away. Right, So if there's if there's a rain time over a couple of days, then there's like standing water up We're talking probably four to four to six inches in some areas.
Then when it's not rainy for a couple of days, it goes all the way down to almost dry, just dirt. And what the frogs would do and what this substance and the egg sacs would do is you could see them kind of hanging out and still there even after the rain and the waters had subsided. But when it came back and the moisture came back in, it's this. I mean, it looks like egg whites almost, but in these little egg egg shaped balls kind of and they're
all clumped together. But then it gets kind of flat and it gets weird looking when there's not a lot of moisture.
As it begins to desiccate. The container that we're talking about for these for these life forms is meant to preserve them when the water level changes. So it's a it's a thing you would understand if you had the privilege of sitting around and obsessively studying frogs and amphibians, which, to be frank most people have not had that opportunity for most of human history.
Yeah, and it's still weird to me that. I don't know if they still do this. But you guys ever have to dissect frogs in school? Yes? Oh? In school?
No?
Oh, it's for fun. Yeah, I don't know, it's it's just it's I always found it odd and it's and I can never forget that formaldehyde smell associated with that. We also, I think we did fetle pigs instead of cats. There was a time where people would do cats. I think that's what we've fallen out of fashion. But last thing on frogs, did you guys know that frogs? I guess probably with no malicious intent. They will often eat their young. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a that's a weird one
for me. Frogs are amazing.
Frogs are amazing. What I would say is that I feel like there's other stuff. I've seen pictures of stuff online that purport to be star jelly that are, in my opinion looking at the images, are not this.
That's yes, that's a great point, Matt. I'm glad you brought that up. What we're what we're establishing now is that when you encounter this stuff in the wild. First off, congratulations for going outside. Please do it more often after dark. This is not some kind of love crafty and formless horror out to cause you harm or to hurt you in any way. Sadly, you shouldn't need it because of possible bacterial contamination. Just you know, and don't be stuck
up about eating frogs. If you ever eating fish that.
Tastes like chicken. Yeah, sure. I do think it's interesting though, because you know we're talking. The thing that was sort of the I guess twist or whatever, or the thing that made people think that, you know, there were there were fish and frogs raining from the sky was the fact that this is all associated with rainfall. And in this situation, these things aren't necessarily raining down from the sky,
but they happen when there are rains. So it's easy to kind of, you know, kind of go from A to Z and be like, well, if they happen when it rains, they must have been rained down.
There's also confirmation by us at play over thousands of years.
Yeah. Well, it's the same thing we talked about with the frog and fish rains where sometimes there's local flooding or you know, flooding of areas that then push the wildlife out towards wherever the humans are. We talked about that on the previous episode.
And you just associated with oh rain, Now all of a sudden there's frogs crawling out of the woodwork. They must have come from heaven. And with the next example we're going to get to, it's another case where this potential culprit for what star Jelly is is actually created because of these moist conditions. Moisture.
Yeah so yes, uh, what a fantastic setup to the earlier points. The idea of amphibium predation does not explain all of the star Jelly phenomena. To look to that Uh. To look toward a fuller explanation, we need to look at something called nostoc Commune.
That's just its name just is awesome. And it sounds like something right out of Eldin Ring. By the way, it.
Sounds like a place or it sounds like a weird uh, a weird weapon or armor that requires you to have your incantation levels super hot or what is it not incantation level?
Are we like?
No, there's intelligence and faith, intelligent faith.
It requires high faith, so you can use like the sigils and stuff. Not nostock Commune. Sounds like we're the you would use, But.
That's not what it is. It's some more weird stuff.
It's like the chocolate milk to the star jelly. It's a different color.
I was wondering, are there any examples of man sureley in culinary circles that they try to use all kinds of weird stuff. Have people ever used frog spawn in Halt cuisine? Why not?
I'm sure, I'm sure of it.
It seems to me like no grosser than eating caviar. I guess they. I don't be stuck up. Yeah, exactly, Well, this stuff we're talking about nostock commune. It's a cyanobacteria that is another potential I guess suspect for what might be considered star jelly. It's found around the world because
it's tough as nails. It knows how to survive, I mean much Matt to your point, the egg sacks, the egg clutches that we're talking about with frogs, they're very versatile and they know how to they know how to create life. They survive, they can like put up with some serious dryings and wettings, and you know, and the fact that there's so many of them and it only takes I think one in fifty to hatch. It's all about being resilient. And so are these gnostic commune cyanobacterias.
They are particularly common in polar regions. They are also prevalent in mega harsh climates like arid regions or polar regions.
And there's a reason for that, right because these things, these things can become dormant when there's no water around, no moisture around, for over one hundred years, and they can still be good to go. So, if let's imagine that a place, the desertification happens in an area right where there's a lot of this stuff that already exists. These Nosta communes. They're hanging out, they're very happy with
the current moisture levels. But then it all goes away for fifty years or some you know, hundreds of years. Then all of a sudden, some moisture comes back in and these things that have dried up are they spring back to life as though nothing happened. That's incredible.
Well, they're they're right on the edge of what we will call extremophiles right in that they just like a tartar grade. They could take a hell of a beating. They're a different kind of life form. But it shows us how durable this sort of life form is. I will point out that it is considered terrestrial or fresh water. And you can find it in loose clumps and soil, gravel, paved surfaces. You can find it between cobble stones. It kind of moves like mold, you know what I mean.
It also does, and this is true, it is used in culinary purposes. I've actually eaten some of this stuff in a salad and say, once you get past the appearance, the texture and the taste, and it's worth it.
Apparently it has sort of a citrusy quality to it.
Well, that's nice. I'm glad, you're glad you tried it. It would definitely give me that feeling been like that. I don't know, because it could be well, and we should say here, by the way, just when we're thinking about it as star Jelly in the way that has been described over the years.
Because that's a street name for Gnostic Commune.
Is star Jelly.
It is, But there's different colors to it. There's the yellow kind of flavor. There's a yellow tint that could be in there. There's some kind sometimes this like green blue thing that can happen, but that's just after a rain, after there's moisture that's been in an area, it will be that color. If the moisture is gone for just a little bit, it turns into one of its other street names. What do they call it, which is butter?
Which is butter? I'm so glad you mentioned that, Yeah, which is.
Like a dark brown like black color.
As it begins to desiccate. Yeah, it's also oh god, I don't want to do the whole translation, but basically, the way it's sold to people in Asia, it translates to like after the rain mushroom or post rain mushroom. So it sold the way you would sell a mushroom.
Oh yeah, I feel like man, I feel like I've had some too, like just unknowingly hanging around Beauford Highway or something. But just because I've eaten stuff in a salad and in soups before, that looks eerily familiar to the images I'm seeing right now this stuff. Well, the other thing was when it is dry and crusty, right, it looks there's no rain.
When it's gone from snotty to boogery, yes.
But then but also dry looking, right. I imagine if it was in grass especially or just in a field, you wouldn't even see the stuff because there's other things growing above it it. It looks kind of like the dirt maybe. But then after the rain and it gets the hues to it, and it becomes a little more again, kind of sparkly with the moisture.
And it absorbs and expands with moisture, just like the just like the frog jelly.
Yeah, you're way more likely to notice it hanging out down there, so you can see why after the rain. You know, after a meteor shower, even you're like, oh, what the heck.
Is this, especially if there's a meteor shower that happens to coincide with rain. Right now, it's no longer just some cool stuff in a salad. Now it's a sign from the divine we speaking of. We've got a sign that is going up right now that tells us we need to pause for a word from our sponsors and get into angel hair phenomenon. Quick disclaimer, folks, there's a lot of Iraqnet conversation coming up, So if you're a person with the ractophobias, forward a little. We're back angel
hair all right, Okay, so we talked about this. A little angel hair is wispy strands of some sort of substance that appears to fall from the sky as in human witnesses have on multiple occasions described watching it lose elevation and hit the ground, and for many, many years millennia even people claimed this was a divine thing of some sort. We mentioned strands from the torn veil of
the Catholic figure the Virgin Mary. We've mentioned also knitting, the idea that you know, the apocryphal kind of story of Virgin Mary and knitting, and we know it's been seen in France, Finland, Canada, all over the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere as well. But here's the bag of badgers. For most of human history, the claim was we don't know what this is because it disappears every time we try to analyze or measure it. And who are we
to interfere with these signs from God? And I'm not trying to sound snarky. I'm not being anti religious at all. This is what people would say. They'd say, I saw this thing. I don't have physical proof. It evaporated before I could bring it to you.
Yes, and there are tales of scientists. Again, these are tales of scientists who have attempted to get a sample, put it into a jar, something translucent that they could see, Yes, there are stuff in this jar. They take it on their way to the laboratory or the house or wherever they're going to actually study it. And by the time they arrive, or they by the time they at least are ready to take the top off of that jar and look at the stuff, it's gone, or it's dissipated
into some other substance or nothingness, mostly disappeared. Is what is at least written down.
Yes, yeah, which also kind of leans into the folkloric aspect.
Right.
Even the UFO stories are often folklore. As we said, the names and the terminology change, but the plot remains much very similar.
Right.
So, abducted by fairies, wish I could prove it to you. Abducted by UFOs, Wish I could prove it to you, But the evidence just seems to dissipate. This happens even in the modern day. In twenty fourteen, there was a rain of angel hair phenomena in Portugal and it happened not just one weekend, but two consecutive weekends, and so there was a lot of scuttle. But there was a witness who said, I captured a sample of this. It was analyzed and when it was subjected to infrared light,
nothing happened. When it was subjected to UV ultraviolet light.
It came alive. Uh.
There was no report on what that meant.
And that was also an anonymous person that spoke to somebody and Metro dot co dot UK ended up writing about it in twenty fourteen and it's like a three paragraph each on one or two sentences, and it was just.
Like the thing is, if you go to the original Portuguese sources. They it's there's more writing about the locale and the circumstances. Really yeah, but there's no there's no citation of the source who was making these claims, and there's no explanation of what came alive means, and there's no follow up in any language we can find about what happened to this alleged source, which leads us to possible explanations for angel hair phenomenon. There By the way,
I think there's still a mystery of foot. But is this the spider part.
Yeah, that's by aircut of the spider part for anyone that might be triggered. But really quickly, I just now I'll say it. I just want to talk about maybe some science fiction examples of like angel Harry type, black goo or whatever it might be. I think there's some fun ones. But spiders are as we know, I think we're all Whether or not we find them creepy or terrifying, we can at least give them the respect that they
are due. They do some really incredible things. They engage in mass migration through the air on literal like improvised hand gliders kind of they make out of their own web that they can shoot out of their bodies.
It's so inspect your gadget unbelievable.
I didn't even know about this phenomenon, Benil, until you hit me to it. It's called ballooning.
I think we mentioned it briefly in Rain of Fish and Frogs.
Yeah yeah, I mean.
This was relatively new to me until we've been kind of jumping down these rabbit holes. Oh geez.
The main thing this teaches me, guys, is that human civilization has a lot to learn about spiders. The spider populations over millennia were associated with angel hair phenomenon the same way that frog populations were associated with star jelly.
Why because it looks like spider webs, right the pictures at least that I've seen. There's a couple pieces of video from I don't know if it's from that twenty fourteen event or it's from something else or has nothing to do with actual angel hair, but I've seen some video that's purported to be angel hair that looks like clumps of spider webs to me.
Yeah.
Yeah, Like we were saying earlier, cobwebs made of some sort of gelatinous substance. But definitely. They look like more gooey forms of the spider silk familiar.
With but in high in the sky and almost like in individual strand clubs.
Yeah, in the northern hemisphere we owe a big thank you to a huge population of spiders. They're still not fully understood, the tiny, humble and now ubiquitous LiTi fi day spiders l I n y p h.
I I dae. They we know that they.
Cause a lot of angel hair phenomena events because they move posse style. They migrate en mass. You can recognize a photo of these bad boys. If you see them, they'll look familiar just because they're again ubiquitous. Their street names are things like cheet weavas or money spiders because there's folklore about them, because humans knew about them for so long. There's folklore where if you see them behaving certain ways, just like pusatani phil, then it may bode
well for you in the future. So it's yeah, I.
Think it's because you're either going to or not going to be hit with a mass ballooning of spiders, and.
As you will, that's on your own vibe, you.
Know, Yeah, great day the balloon spiders are on their way.
From a distance, it probably looks kind of beautiful until they get closer and closer, and then you realize that.
Okay, most things look beautiful from a distance.
That's very fair.
I mean, but I love this idea that we're painting to Like Mother, Father, Lord Baden, you come and see Come see the spiders.
They're ballooning, like seeing a whale breach or something like that. Oh, it's glorious. Look at the spiders ballooning and the sunset.
Oh, the mother opens a window wide and then just spiders ju Because yes are.
Often used as like sort of the stuff of nightmares, like the idea of like I think you know what it was. I think it was on the Regular Show where it was like would you rather they play this game? Would you rather have uh, spaghetti for fingers? Or every time you sneeze, spiders would come out of your mouth. And the obvious question is can I eat my spaghetti fingers? And if I can't, will they grow back? Well, you guys know, I have.
The situation, so the in the in the idea.
We're not gonna let you come on spaghetti spaghetti finger situation, spiders situation.
Well, you know it's like you cut yourself and sometimes it's blood and sometimes it's spiders.
Do you have that old infinite blood? Eh?
I will never I rolled weird in character creation.
I will never, as long as I live, forget the scary stories to tell them the dark about the girl that had like a blow and then she and spiders just poured out and the illustration so much more terrifying than the story, and that stuck with me as long as I live.
I was just talking about this as always researching the scary stories to tell in the dark? Is ten ten a great read, the whole series, even if you consider yourself an adult. Uh, it's real folklore. It's super good. Shout out to Schwartz, Alan Schwartz wrote.
It and then her head fell off. Yeah, but.
That book is do you guys remember the rest of the development, the time the father tries to teach lessons.
Yes, And that's why you always leave it though using the amputated leby.
That book and that particular story for me is the and that's why you don't pop your pimples because.
Can you say that again with more of a jersey accident, Because we're.
On the way, and that's why you don't pop your pimples.
Face slap you listen to me, Giuseppe.
The Internet that was really I don't think the Internet got the memo because there's all these like pimple popping websites. Now that's so not my bag. But man, you gotta wonder how many of those involve spiders to sew this up. Yes, it is.
It is possible for spiders to do a lot of meat amazing and perhaps disturbing things, some of which are as we record this evening, not fully understood by human civilization. But that's just because there's a lot to learn about spiders.
We know.
You can go to Snopes. They have an excellent article on angel hair phenomena where they talk about this crazy thing that happens in Australia, Oceania, New Zealand. They have frequent encounters with mass spider or mass erected migration events and the whole time it looks like snow has descended upon the town. It looks like a scene from a horror film like in the or like works of fiction like I don't want to spoil it by Stephen King, but or think about it this way, we could spoil Lord of the.
Reasons to say, the like the spiders damn where Yeah, Like poor Frodo is just wrapped up in the stuff. And it's like in any in Skyrim, You'll be in you know, dungeons and they'll just be the stuff, just like covering the walls. And then you realize that spider's web. I mean, it's wild. The the the capabilities of these little you know, bodily produced strings.
It's rain and bugs. I'm kidding arachnids, but yeah, we know that several native species of spider and rachnid are capable of creating these massive angel hair phenomena events. And our old pal Linifida, which we mentioned earlier, was apparently introduced to this part of the world sometime ago. I wonder it made me think of something that doesn't really apply to this conversation. But guys, at what point is a given species no longer considered invasive? Is it like
moving to Brooklyn? Like, is it like ten years?
It's a good question. I mean, yeah, no, I think that might be longer than that. I mean, is it once it has to be long? It would be once they're no longer an active threat to native species perhaps, or the sort of like the damage has been done and it's sort of assimilated almost right.
I was just reading about those, uh what do they They call them jorro spiders. I don't know if that's the correct term for them, but it's the ones that are all over Georgia right now. They like big web spinning spiders that are kind of yellowy.
The ones where you're like, could I fry this?
You? It looks like you could totally fry it. And they're pretty big, at least compared to other spider species that we get around here, and just how much of a problem they are. But again, people have been talking about those for a while now, and I don't know when people are just going to say, nah, they're.
Good, fine, fine, I know his mother.
Yeah, spiders. At least they not throw webs in the air and flying across Piedmont Park. You know what I'm saying.
Tell you what, I'd have a saw one of them run a stop, like forget about.
Yeah.
Our Jersey listeners are very upset right now. I just want to play.
I don't know these are Atlanta residents.
Yeah, yeah, everybody's welcome in Atlanta. Also, I just watched Donnie Brasco again, so that's that's part of it. We know that, we know that locals in Australia have learned, similar to our friends in Honduras, to predict these events. Uh. There's one guy who talked to the Goldburn Post part of my pronunciation in May of twenty fifteen and said the following. He said, Look, here's what happens during a
particular time of this year in May or August. Young spy in the outback, the rural area of Australia somehow throw these threads of spider webs up in the air. They use them as a parachute and detach themselves from the ground and move in large colonies through the sky. They fly through the sky. We see the folds of spider webs that look almost as though it is snowing. I'm paraphrasing here. But we also have to remember ballooning is a great explanation for a lot of these events
because people also get this. We'll find small spiders crawling around and threads.
But even if you didn't find a spider, some of those spiders lose their parachutes, you know what I mean. They to fall right out of the sky and then just the parachutes flying around, and if there's no weight to that thing, because imagine the weight of a spider web, if you're walked into one, it's almost negative. There's nothing there almost And if that just catches wind, I imagine
how far that could go. Or if there's a storm or something that comes through and pushes the wind, pushes those webs in a different direction than it was headed and spreads them out even more.
Yeah, come on, imagine. Also, are you guys familiar with the with the research into making bulletproof garments out of spider silt?
What?
Yeah, like some sort of really intense weave of it.
Like, yeah, okay, it's just the tensile strength. It's just is interesting, all right, story for another day. And of course there are other possible explanations, because we have had so many instances people experiencing this kind of thing. There does not appear to be a silver bullet nor a
silver spider answer to this, that's a joke. For like four people, we knew that there was well, there was some stuff that got published in Italian journals, reputable Italian journals back in the nineteen nineties where they said there may be an electrostatic precipitation of atmospheric dust that could create the kind of thing we're talking about, similar Matt to your analogy about an aerosol container creating solid matter.
As an offshoot.
This stuff sounded interesting and possible, but then we have to realize a lot of folks took that question or that theory, that hypothesis, and they ran with it, and they said, yes, it is electrostatic precipitation. And here's why it's coming from UFOs. The aliens are real shout out to various UFO centric cults.
So they took it a little further, you know what I mean than they needed to take. Imagine they're doing that. Imagine they're taking things too far.
I'm gonna take it even further. Guys, we've seen the movie Nope. We know now that some UFOs out there are actually extraterrestrial multidimensional beings. Well, what if two of those beings get together and they want to make a little baby multidimensional Nope being thing? Well Star Jelly.
Okay, wait, guys, we're in the brainstorming phase.
There are no bad ideas. Okay, you know what I mean.
I got you back on this one. And we also know that, unlike star Jelly, we have not completely solved every explanation of angel hair. A lot of it is definitely created by arachnid ballooning. And as wild as those photos may look, please do pull them up check it out. As wild as they may look, we guarantee you that a lot of them are genuine. But what are we to make of the multiple reports claiming the angel hair evaporated before it could be documented or tested? Could it
be something else? And so before we close speaking of something else, we have some other takes on star Jelly.
Just one in particular that stood out. I think we covered the majority of the types of occurrences, but there was one that I thought was interesting in terms of like another possibility. I found this. There's a reference to several articles on New Cryptozoology dot. It's like a wiki fandom kind of page. And there was a case in the late seventies in Frisco, Texas where there were reports of like purple globs of goo in a woman's front yard,
Missus Sybil Christian, following a meteor shower. And once again that confirmation bias that A to b like, oh it rained, and now there's this stuff. It must have come from the rain. Okay, there's this goo in my yard after this meteor shower. It turns out that it was actually some kind of caustic soda that was the result of basically poor environmental mitigation at a nearby battery reprocessing plant.
So it was like causing like runoff of this caustic soda used to clean impurities in the leads of batteries. We've all seen it. If a battery gets corroded, you know, it can like form this kind of crust, and if you use caustic soda you can clean that off. So apparently when that's done, the runoff is this purpleish kind of compound that then creates something that can sort of balloon out like the previous examples of star jelly that we were talking about. So I just thought that was
an interesting one worth mentioning. There are a few other examples here if anyone wants to go check it out.
Another one really quickly was just the idea that there were already impurities present in the soil, like in dorsets in the UK in January twenty twelve, granules of sodium poly acrylate that were already present of the soil, which is apparently very common in agricultural use, and when it rained, it caused these dehydrated granules of this stuff to balloon up and then kind of create their very highly absorbent So there's another couple of random examples sea of industrial
contenders exactly. Yeah. And then just last last thing, if anyone's interested. I mentioned the question of whether frog spawn
had a culinary use, So I looked that up. And while I did not find any examples of actual use of frog spawn in the way you would of course cavia or other you know, aquatic eggs, there was a delightful recipe for frog spawn tie tapioca pudding from Bonappetite magazine from June of two thousand and six, and you can find that as well, and it involves some coconut milk, ginger, cilantro kaffir, lime leaves, whole milk, and some pearl tapioca and they have it presented with tiny plastic frogs in
the bowls. So it says in the recipe specifically the plastic frogs are not required, though they are recommended.
What about the agar agar, Yeah.
Yeah, they're definitely some agar agar up in there. Gotta be. I want to make this. I'm a big fan of squishy boba e gummy kind of things. I would totally eat the what was it, the cyana bacteria version of star jelly. It's not bad.
There's no thank you for me, more for me and men, and more for you as well, fellow conspiracy realist. As we mentioned earlier, there is so much weird wild stuff out there, even in these our modern evenings. Head over to Ridiculous History to learn more about, for instance, the Kentucky meat shower. Most importantly, let us know about any strange similar weather phenomena that you have encountered personally.
Please let us know.
Thank you, by the way, to the folks who have already reached out with various similar stories and reactions. We can't wait to hear from you. We try to be easy to find online.
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