Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Noel.
Speaker 3: They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Paul. Mission control decans. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 4: You are here.
Speaker 3: That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 3: In a recent episode, we decided to take a break
Speaker 3: from a little bit of what old proverbs we call
Speaker 3: interesting times and look at surprising stories of weird atmospheric phenomenon,
Speaker 3: most particularly the multiple instances throughout history human history where
Speaker 3: it seems to have rained frogs and fish. And I
Speaker 3: think we're all surprised to find that the answer is
Speaker 3: not as simple as dare I say, mainstream scientific consensus
Speaker 3: would have us.
Speaker 4: Believe we're gonna get to the one where it's raining
Speaker 4: men at a later date, But today we are talking
Speaker 4: about it raining something else while not fish and amphibians.
Speaker 4: There might well be an amphibian tie in down the line,
Speaker 4: but what are we talking about today? They have some
Speaker 4: pretty fun names.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: As we mentioned in that earlier episode, there is so
Speaker 3: much more to strange rain than ill faded fish and amphibians.
Speaker 3: Tonight we are exploring two bizarre related phenomena things called
Speaker 3: star jelly and angel hair. Not the pasta, but do
Speaker 3: check out our upcoming episode on pasta ridiculous history. Sorry, guys,
Speaker 3: it's all it blurs together sometimes, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: It is indeed a blur. Here are the facts.
Speaker 3: Do you guys remember rowing up and hearing maybe any
Speaker 3: like old farmer's tails or old observations about the weather.
Speaker 3: I know, being in the South, for the American South,
Speaker 3: for a lot of our time together, we have probably heard,
Speaker 3: you know, someone sitting on a porch. What was our
Speaker 3: joke last time, someone sitting on a porch sipping a
Speaker 3: mint julip and Colonel Angus says we needed.
Speaker 4: This rain, or oh there's an ill omen the foot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember hearing that. If you are driving by
Speaker 2: a pasture and you see all of the cows sitting
Speaker 2: down like or laying down kind of, but you know,
Speaker 2: just in their their sitting positions that you know rain
Speaker 2: is coming.
Speaker 4: I like that, you say a rain is coming?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's weird because folklore and mythoughtlogy, we've established
Speaker 3: this in previous explorations. They exist primarily to explain how
Speaker 3: humans came to be where they are, maybe where they
Speaker 3: think they're going, and why, most importantly and immediately, why
Speaker 3: the environment functions the way it seems to function. You know,
Speaker 3: it's I think it's easy for a lot of people
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty four, as we record this on the
Speaker 3: evening of July twenty second, I think it's easy for
Speaker 3: a lot of people to say, oh, that's balderdash, that's
Speaker 3: superstition from times gone by. But history is closer than
Speaker 3: it looks, you know. I mean, I was looking into
Speaker 3: etymology and idioms and have you all ever heard the
Speaker 3: phrase It comes to us from English red sky at
Speaker 3: night sails to light red sky at morning Sala's take warning.
Speaker 4: I don't know why that makes me think of like
Speaker 4: Stephen King or something. It just seems like something Stephen
Speaker 4: King villain would say. Remember I think it was made
Speaker 4: for TV movie The Storm of the Century, where there
Speaker 4: was that creepy dude with the wolf cane. He would
Speaker 4: say stuff.
Speaker 2: Like my parents would say that every time we went
Speaker 2: to the beach, like we would talk about that about
Speaker 2: mm hmm, yeah, and when we were trying to figure
Speaker 2: out if there was gonna be rain the next day
Speaker 2: because we didn't have weather dot com dot yeah or
Speaker 2: whatever that was. But we didn't have any of that stuff.
Speaker 2: And you know, you could go to the weather channel,
Speaker 2: but rather than do that, especially if you're out, you
Speaker 2: just go you look around. You're like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: do you guys?
Speaker 4: Remember the weirdly misogynistic expression of if it's raining and
Speaker 4: the sun's out and the devil's beating his white and
Speaker 4: his wife, that one very disturbed.
Speaker 3: Excellent. Yeah, there's an excellent little Harper's article that translates
Speaker 3: various cultural idioms for how people are cultures used to
Speaker 3: explain rain during sunlight right far beyond credence clear water.
Speaker 3: But yeah, the devil's being his wife is one. God
Speaker 3: is beating the angels another one. I can't remember the language.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they would do that, I know.
Speaker 3: But also this is, you know, I get it. This
Speaker 3: people's attempt to explain the environment around them. And unless
Speaker 3: we feel too high and mighty, folks, let's recall that
Speaker 3: here in the United States, where we record millions of
Speaker 3: people tune in each and every year to watch a
Speaker 3: very specific roundhog and to see its behavior just in case, like,
Speaker 3: just in case.
Speaker 4: Not feel anymore Puxi Packsatani something though, right, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of like being president. Different people in
Speaker 3: different groundhogs and different era, same responsibilities.
Speaker 4: You know, in the same way that we were talking
Speaker 4: recently about, like fire, how you know it can be
Speaker 4: such a powerful tool. It keeps us warm, but it
Speaker 4: can also burn things to the ground. I mean, weather
Speaker 4: is the same way. It can water our crops. It
Speaker 4: keeps us fed. We need it to drink and to survive,
Speaker 4: but flooding can also destroy everything. It's another incredibly powerful thing.
Speaker 4: So it makes sense that culturally we kind of almost
Speaker 4: are deferential to it in this very We almost are like, well,
Speaker 4: we worship it on the one hand, but we're also
Speaker 4: kind of terrified of it on the other.
Speaker 2: I got one more for you, guys. Did you ever
Speaker 2: grow up hearing that if the sky starts to turn
Speaker 2: green during a bad thunderstorm that a tornado is coming.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's certainly a thing we've seen with some weird
Speaker 4: storms recently here in Georgia, and it doesn't necessarily always
Speaker 4: mean that. But if you look outside and it has
Speaker 4: a green hue, you usually know the weather is going
Speaker 4: to get pretty nasty. And I don't really I guess
Speaker 4: I've never looked into what causes that, but it's it's
Speaker 4: almost like supernatural feeling. It's very unsettling. I like that
Speaker 4: you say supernatural, yeah.
Speaker 2: Because it makes me wonder about Again, we're talking about
Speaker 2: when there's a light out and then still a storm,
Speaker 2: a big, scary dark storm, but there's still some light
Speaker 2: going on. It makes you wonder what that green hue
Speaker 2: actually is. So if you're listening, let us know why.
Speaker 3: Meteorologists, fellow conspiracy realist with interest and enthusiasm for weather,
Speaker 3: we can't wait to hear from you. In that regard.
Speaker 3: We also to the earlier point about the old idiom,
Speaker 3: the rhyming couplet around red skies and the ocean. Matt,
Speaker 3: I love that your parents were teaching you this because
Speaker 3: it seems that a significant portion, not all, but a
Speaker 3: significant portion of folklore tales and superstitions and so on,
Speaker 3: they do seem to have genuine science backing them up.
Speaker 3: A reddish sunset means that this is from the farmer's
Speaker 3: almanac means that the air is dusty and dry, and
Speaker 3: here in North America or the northern latitudes, the weather
Speaker 3: typically is going to move west to east, meaning that
Speaker 3: a red sky at sunset means dry weather, which is
Speaker 3: good for sailing, is moving east. But a reddish sunrise
Speaker 3: means dry air from the west has already passed over
Speaker 3: your craft, and this clears the way for a storm
Speaker 3: to move in. So it's not just look. It probably
Speaker 3: stuck around in oral tradition because it rhymes, but that's
Speaker 3: not the only reason. It also seemed to work most
Speaker 3: of the time.
Speaker 4: Oh and just really quickly, just a quick layman's description
Speaker 4: of the green thing. It has to do with updrafts
Speaker 4: that can cause light to scatter differently, So it's sort
Speaker 4: of like, I guess, refracting light in a way that
Speaker 4: can change, you know, the way it's perceived by the eye.
Speaker 4: And it doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be a tornado,
Speaker 4: but oftentimes it does mean there's going to be hail
Speaker 4: or some severe form of weather, but not always because
Speaker 4: sometimes you know, it takes perfect conditions for that to break.
Speaker 4: It could be kind of building up and then conditions
Speaker 4: change and you know, it sort of gets better.
Speaker 3: And perfect condition is very much a human concept. I
Speaker 3: think weather just has conditions.
Speaker 4: With us. We try all that dumb cloud seating stuff
Speaker 4: that we've talked about, non necessarily being a great idea.
Speaker 4: It's quite exciting.
Speaker 3: They just need to figure out how to do it
Speaker 3: without wrecking themselves. I mean there's another one. There are
Speaker 3: a lot of rhyming couplets about weather and folklore, at
Speaker 3: least in English, and there are many other languages and
Speaker 3: cultural terms for predictive capability and weather. If you speak
Speaker 3: another language other than the one you're hearing this podcast
Speaker 3: and natively, and you have some weather anecdotes or weather idioms,
Speaker 3: we would love to hear your take on them. Conspiracyd
Speaker 3: diheartradio dot com one example. Another one would be Western
Speaker 3: Europeans often said the following, do someone want to give
Speaker 3: us a good British accent on this?
Speaker 4: When the wind is out of the east, it ti
Speaker 4: is neither good for man nor for beast the extra four,
Speaker 4: but I think it helps. It really brings pass.
Speaker 3: Cadence a little. Yeah. This is a case where the
Speaker 3: science does again seem to bear out, because as the
Speaker 3: British broadcasting Corporation notes. In Western Europe, especially in the
Speaker 3: United Kingdom, harsh winter weather tends to come from Eastern
Speaker 3: Europe and Russia. It's a strengthening icy wind that comes
Speaker 3: from the east, and it could indicate to a farmer
Speaker 3: that snow and frigid conditions are on the way, and
Speaker 3: later the rise of meteorological science would prove this to
Speaker 3: be the case. I think that's a good place to start.
Speaker 3: It's astonishing to realize that millennia worth of people just
Speaker 3: being around and watch the weather from the ground taught
Speaker 3: us things that were later confirmed by the boffins. That's
Speaker 3: kind of cool, absolutely, But our question is how does
Speaker 3: this apply to the weird weird things we're exploring tonight.
Speaker 3: Star jelly and angel hair. Again, neither of them are pastas.
Speaker 4: Yeah, star jelly sounds like something you'd like get in
Speaker 4: like a Japanese boba drink or something you know.
Speaker 2: Oh, I was thinking more like a starship.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, but I don't know. I think there literally
Speaker 4: is like you can get different types of jelly in
Speaker 4: your boba drink. You've got the regular spherical bobas and
Speaker 4: then you can get like certain types of They literally
Speaker 4: call it like jelly.
Speaker 3: There is a culinary aspect tied into one of these
Speaker 3: light spoilers.
Speaker 4: I guess you could eat anything.
Speaker 2: You can't eat it if it disappears.
Speaker 3: Well that's the angel hair, the star jelly'll that'll stay
Speaker 3: gunking around. But it's also called astral jelly, which sounds
Speaker 3: for some reason dirty, or star star falling, star shot,
Speaker 3: star slime, star slutch, which I didn't know was, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's a weird one, and star spurt. There are many
Speaker 3: other names as well, but reports of this stuff can
Speaker 3: be found back as far as the thirteen hundreds. There
Speaker 3: was a medieval physician named John of Gaddisden who wrote
Speaker 3: about this. He called it Stella terre Latin, you know,
Speaker 3: star star falling on Earth, and he is mainly writing
Speaker 3: about medicine, so he said, look, you can find this
Speaker 3: muse and laginous substance lying on the earth. And his
Speaker 3: main thing was could you just like rub this on abscesses,
Speaker 3: because that's where medicine was at the time. You saw
Speaker 3: something and you were like, maybe you could eat this
Speaker 3: or rub it on something.
Speaker 4: Magic goo from heaven. Don't mind if i'd.
Speaker 2: Let's just rub it on all of our open wounds
Speaker 2: and see what happens.
Speaker 4: Yea, all, I've been watching the news. It's like Game
Speaker 4: of Thrones or whatever. House of the Dragon and there's
Speaker 4: a you know, the masters, they have their remedies, and
Speaker 4: one of them in the shows it appears to be
Speaker 4: dressing wounds with some sort of cabbage. Yeah, and it
Speaker 4: looks real gross, and you gotta wonder if it's doing
Speaker 4: much good. But you know, again, it was all about drying.
Speaker 4: But that's why they still call it practicing medicine to
Speaker 4: this thing. Maybe it's not. I don't I always joke
Speaker 4: about that's a good point. That's a good joke.
Speaker 3: For centuries, people genuinely believe that this stuff called star
Speaker 3: jelly was deposited on this planet via meteor showers. They
Speaker 3: thought it was essentially snot from heaven. And oddly, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's not from that was Those are the original lyrics.
Speaker 3: Nobody fact check us there. There's also for fans of
Speaker 3: Western pop culture, we're increasingly certain. We can't say it
Speaker 3: with one hundred percent surety, but we're increasingly certain that
Speaker 3: star Jelly at least in part formed the or inspired
Speaker 3: the plot of the classic nineteen fifty eight horror film
Speaker 3: the blog.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, the idea that some celestial debris came down
Speaker 4: and cracked open and within, whether it be a meteor
Speaker 4: or a piece of some other space rock, held within
Speaker 4: with some sort of sentient ooze that had it out
Speaker 4: for mankind of course.
Speaker 2: Well, you could also imagine how maybe people would liken
Speaker 2: it to the leavings of a slug or a snail
Speaker 2: or another you know, creature that went across the land
Speaker 2: or the grass and then left this stuff behind somehow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, early cryptid kind of concept.
Speaker 2: Maybe, or you know, it's really interesting just thinking about
Speaker 2: it this way, as originating somew from the heavens and
Speaker 2: this is what you're left behind with. Yeah, that's weird.
Speaker 3: Aliens are real, and they need to stop dropping their
Speaker 3: snot and their goo, you know what I mean, just
Speaker 3: talk to us one to one in that regard.
Speaker 4: That was my favorite cautionary campaign for my youth, Stop
Speaker 4: dropping snot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I wonder if the thought was that as
Speaker 2: the you know, as the meteor showers are occurring and
Speaker 2: as stuff is burning up, that this is the remains
Speaker 2: of like the interior of one of those objects or something,
Speaker 2: or if it as it dissipates, it turns into this stuff.
Speaker 2: I've really I've been so interested in the thinking there,
Speaker 2: like the original thinking.
Speaker 3: Right, and digging through the primary sources. As we'll see
Speaker 3: a little bit later, we find some interesting I guess
Speaker 3: you could call them hypotheses. Let's call them propositions for now,
Speaker 3: you know, the idea of an unknown life form, a
Speaker 3: possible cryptid all cool stories that doesn't even hit on
Speaker 3: the Angel Hair phenomena, which gets a little bit of
Speaker 3: a fancier name. Angel Hair has its own weird legendary backstory.
Speaker 3: Just like people used religion as a framework to describe
Speaker 3: anomalous weather, they used religion as a framework to describe
Speaker 3: angel Hair. Its street name Mary's Yarn shout out to
Speaker 3: the Catholics in the crowd. The idea was that there
Speaker 3: would be sightings or visitations of the Virgin Mary in
Speaker 3: Catholic thought, and that in the wake of these visitations
Speaker 3: there would be sticky, fibrous substances. Imagine cobwebs made out
Speaker 3: of your favorite jelly.
Speaker 4: I do think it's interesting that the imagery comes from
Speaker 4: this notion that Mary likes to knit, which I don't
Speaker 4: think is necessary biblically discussed. I don't know, apocryphal, maybe it's.
Speaker 2: It's a really weird concept that again there's stuff falling
Speaker 2: out of the sky, and in this case it's almost
Speaker 2: ectoplasm life.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, yeah, we're going to have an ectoplasm episode
Speaker 3: on the way as well. We'll give it some space,
Speaker 3: we'll give it some distance so we can hear your
Speaker 3: experiences with this stuff, fellow conspiracy realist. But we also
Speaker 3: note to these earlier points. The knitting idea was one explanation,
Speaker 3: and then there was the idea that the Virgin Mary
Speaker 3: was veiled and that the little strands people found were
Speaker 3: somehow pieces of this veil falling. And in a lot
Speaker 3: of visitations here, typically or often, they're going to see
Speaker 3: the image or the avatar the Virgin Mary in the sky.
Speaker 3: So the idea that leavings of that visitation could fall
Speaker 3: to the ground for the humans was a big was
Speaker 3: a big part of the logic, and for a long
Speaker 3: time it seemed rational. And then later decades, as we'll
Speaker 3: see people said, you know, what's really going on with
Speaker 3: those angel hairs? UFOs bro and they say, I thought
Speaker 3: you said angels.
Speaker 4: I don't know, either one.
Speaker 2: Maybe or the same thing. Well, we've even saw. I
Speaker 2: don't know if you guys remember back in the day
Speaker 2: on above Top Secret, there were a couple of stories
Speaker 2: that for some reason stuck in my mind about these
Speaker 2: angel hair phenomena sightings being associated directly with chemtrails and
Speaker 2: with yes dosing of people. And this is like the
Speaker 2: when let's imagine that you've got the chemtrail device in
Speaker 2: the back of a plane or something and as it
Speaker 2: is kind of processing all the chemicals that are turning
Speaker 2: into basically sometimes like you'll find in any kind of
Speaker 2: dispenser that has a sudsing material in it, you'll get
Speaker 2: you'll get the gunk, the build up, right, and then
Speaker 2: that drops off of the nozzle or something. And that
Speaker 2: that's what this angel hair was.
Speaker 3: And so the direct question is why is the Virgin
Speaker 3: Mary so into chemtrails?
Speaker 4: I mean, that's it wasn't much of elief. Honestly, we
Speaker 4: were right there with you. It was a short walk,
Speaker 4: it had to be said, short flight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we got to get in front of the emails
Speaker 3: from the Pope, I guess. But whatever this angel hair
Speaker 3: stuff is, which we'll describe in detail and just a bit,
Speaker 3: we can tell its appearance was so fascinating is so
Speaker 3: fascinating to human culture that they associated it with some
Speaker 3: of their most important schools of belief and thought and philosophy,
Speaker 3: and that brings us. I would say to tonight's question,
Speaker 3: is it possible to explain either star Jelly or the
Speaker 3: angel hair phenomenon.
Speaker 4: Well, we'll see about that. After a quick message from
Speaker 4: our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it turns out we have some pretty solid non
Speaker 3: folkloric explanations for these related phenomena. And folks, you know,
Speaker 3: we don't always get to discover definitive answers for some
Speaker 3: questions in this show, so we're pretty excited about these.
Speaker 3: I say, we get into it star Jelly. Oh and
Speaker 3: a quick accountability moment. In previous conversations, I called it
Speaker 3: sky jelly, which is a different thing it is. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a phrase that I accidentally made up. So if
Speaker 3: we're going to define it, sky jelly would just be
Speaker 3: jelly you eat on an airplane, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, they give you. Surely there's some
Speaker 4: international flight where you get a jello cup, you know.
Speaker 2: Just you know, as a point of fact, guys, I knew,
Speaker 2: I knew, I knew this phrase, and it is from
Speaker 2: the game Fortnite.
Speaker 4: Sky Jelly.
Speaker 3: That's a thing.
Speaker 2: There's the thing sky jelly.
Speaker 4: What does the game?
Speaker 2: I don't know. They're on the map. I have no
Speaker 2: idea what they do. I've seen them before, and they're
Speaker 2: also sky jellies in Elden Ring. I don't those little
Speaker 2: ghost jelly things.
Speaker 4: Oh, the jelly fish. They're literally like like Portuguese man
Speaker 4: of war type things that just sort of float around
Speaker 4: and they don't really attack you. But if you come
Speaker 4: at them, they can't hurt you.
Speaker 2: If I'm not, don't make them mad, that's.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, yeah, stay on there good side. So we're
Speaker 4: correcting this.
Speaker 3: According to the legend, star jelly or star whatever you
Speaker 3: want to call it is a magical guey substance and
Speaker 3: it is part of but the ancient Greeks would have
Speaker 3: called quintessence, the substance of the heavens makes up the sun,
Speaker 3: all those big quadrants, the stars, the darkness between those stars,
Speaker 3: the mediums, the comments, and so when you get as
Speaker 3: an early human, when you get in a situation where
Speaker 3: there is a meteor shower, where there's a strong rain,
Speaker 3: or maybe a comet swings by your neck of the woods. Cosmically,
Speaker 3: then what happens is these things break apart in the sky.
Speaker 3: People knew enough about the atmosphere to know that there
Speaker 3: was some sort of rate of attrition for entering into
Speaker 3: Earth's local sphere of influence. When these objects, the reasoning went,
Speaker 3: break apart, they produce this star jelly, so they're little
Speaker 3: heavenly inerts that gently fall to Earth.
Speaker 4: And then there you go this flat it's most flatity.
Speaker 2: I can see why people might associate that. And the
Speaker 2: only reason I'm imagining it is because of the sparkly
Speaker 2: nature of stars viewed from Earth. Right, If it's dark
Speaker 2: enough outside and then this stuff when you see it,
Speaker 2: I'm imagining it if it's interacting with I was gonna say,
Speaker 2: you know, fire light or even early electric light, it
Speaker 2: would probably give you this very sparkly look. If there's
Speaker 2: enough of it on the ground spread out right, you
Speaker 2: imagine the light as a light source moving as a
Speaker 2: person is moving to investigate the stuff. It would be
Speaker 2: I would imagine sparkly as all heck iridescence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense right, because this goes back to
Speaker 3: the idea of things like sympathetic magic. Right, if something
Speaker 3: appears to have a commonality, then that one commonality must
Speaker 3: imply further commonalities. That's kind of cool, man like that.
Speaker 3: I like that reasoning, and you know, again, we don't
Speaker 3: want to be dismissive. It's a fine story. It's beautiful,
Speaker 3: especially if you come up in a time or an
Speaker 3: evening where you don't know too much about meteors and
Speaker 3: stars and physics in.
Speaker 4: The atmosphere, fluid dynamics, you know, things like that. I mean,
Speaker 4: I guess I think when I think of a gelatinous
Speaker 4: substance that would derive from something white hot, you know,
Speaker 4: like a star or like something with that much energy,
Speaker 4: I think of like what happens to you know, glass,
Speaker 4: or like how glass is made, the idea of molten
Speaker 4: you know, like things that are so hot that they're
Speaker 4: in a liquid state, but you can't really pick them
Speaker 4: up and play with them. They'll they'll, they'll, they'll hurt
Speaker 4: you pretty bad. And there's a couple of really interesting
Speaker 4: Instagram accounts where it's people that kind of heat up
Speaker 4: these these steel balls and see how they interact with
Speaker 4: different substances. And one example that they do is like
Speaker 4: hair gel or even various gelatinous kind of desserts and stuff.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I don't I don't mean to go off topic,
Speaker 4: but it is an interesting kind of combination of these
Speaker 4: two ideas to see what happens if you drop a
Speaker 4: red hot metal ball into a container of hair gel,
Speaker 4: you get sort of a star jelly kind of thing
Speaker 4: of its own. I'm all about it.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well, let's let's just note here as well
Speaker 2: something you may not be thinking about, but the temperature
Speaker 2: of star jelly that's been encountered, the at least accounts
Speaker 2: that I have seen, is that it's cool to the touch,
Speaker 2: or it is like ambient temperature to wherever it is found. Basically,
Speaker 2: if not a little bit colder, so it's it had
Speaker 2: it didn't seem to be really hot, or at least
Speaker 2: it's not hot right now.
Speaker 3: And people touching it did not immediately die, no burn
Speaker 3: their flangies fingers. The stars are not made of jelly,
Speaker 3: we know that now. No star cars that people have
Speaker 3: encountered appear to be chilatinous.
Speaker 4: They're made of burning hot gases, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 3: And also, as far as we know, and I don't
Speaker 3: know why, I'm hedging this so much.
Speaker 2: But as far as the science knows, and really, we've
Speaker 2: only encountered one star, and we haven't even really encountered it.
Speaker 2: We've just seen stuff to it and we haven't played
Speaker 2: with it.
Speaker 4: And it's super stuck up in my opinion. But the Sun,
Speaker 4: to quote Beavis and butt Head, the sun sucks.
Speaker 3: And if pieces of an active breakup of a star
Speaker 3: hit Earth's surface, the results will be way more disastrous.
Speaker 3: You're only hearing this podcast, by the way, because one
Speaker 3: time an object from space at beat me here, Paul,
Speaker 3: absolutely up the life forms and ecosystems that we're here
Speaker 3: before humans just wrecked the entire thing and a couple
Speaker 3: of mammals stuck around and eventually invented microphones.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that happened at least once, probably probably that.
Speaker 4: The moon.
Speaker 3: So it's the hottest new real estate. But we see
Speaker 3: that this stuff, this gunk has been observed in all
Speaker 3: sorts of places, the United Kingdom, Texas, India, Pakistan, you
Speaker 3: name it. It's worldwide, just like pitbull, mister, yeah, mister worldwide, right,
Speaker 3: And so people have seen this stuff, and often when
Speaker 3: people are searching for an explanation, if one entity confidently
Speaker 3: says I know the answer, and people don't object to it,
Speaker 3: then they accept that because it's cool to explain things.
Speaker 3: Turns out here in twenty twenty four. For many years,
Speaker 3: the human have had pretty good scientific explanations of this
Speaker 3: that do not rely on the passage of the heavens.
Speaker 3: But they are gross. This is for all the Cronenberg
Speaker 3: fans out there. There's a little body horror here to
Speaker 3: explain Star Jelly.
Speaker 4: Right. We did talk about falling amphibians in a previous
Speaker 4: episode and fish rains and all of that, and got
Speaker 4: to a pretty I think, level headed explanation of those phenomena. Well,
Speaker 4: we're coming back to frogs here a little bit, y'all.
Speaker 4: Frog spawn, you know it. You've seen the stuff, kind
Speaker 4: of it's gelatinous. It's kind of little beads of gelatinous
Speaker 4: fluid that the frog reproductive material are suspended with them.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: So usually what we believe now, and this is based
Speaker 3: on DNA testing or biological test, and I should say
Speaker 3: of captured samples, usually what appears to happen is that
Speaker 3: a given amphibian has or a group of amphibians has
Speaker 3: its body ripped apart by some sort of predator, and
Speaker 3: when this happens, they somehow expose or release what is
Speaker 3: called their ovum jelly. So star jelly is actually kind
Speaker 3: of jelly. The substance is reactive to moisture, so it
Speaker 3: expands when it absorbs water through condensation, you know, like
Speaker 3: through dew or through rain. And if you're just walking
Speaker 3: by and you're like, oh, blowing me, what a storm,
Speaker 3: and then you see you see this junk on the ground,
Speaker 3: You're not seeing the body of the amphibian that created it.
Speaker 3: You're probably also not seeing the eggs that were suspended
Speaker 3: in that jelly, because the predator would eat both of those. Instead,
Speaker 3: you're just seeing the left behind gunk a bunk, And.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: There's also a similar to our guy who invented the
Speaker 3: concept of amps, there's this association between star jelly reports
Speaker 3: and areas with large amphibian populations.
Speaker 4: And if I'm not mistaken, the frog spawn it refers
Speaker 4: to clumps of frog eggs, So they're like these kind
Speaker 4: of clutches of frog eggs that are all clumped together.
Speaker 4: And frogs can lay between like four to six thousand
Speaker 4: eggs every time they do the thing, and apparently only
Speaker 4: one in fifty will actually result in a tadpole, so
Speaker 4: these are very small. But yeah, I think have you
Speaker 4: guys ever seen this stuff before when you were a
Speaker 4: kid and playing outdoors back when we touch grass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my son and I encountered some of this not
Speaker 2: long ago at the old house where we lived, and
Speaker 2: we were just taking a walk and we saw some
Speaker 2: standing water after a rain, and inside the little puddles
Speaker 2: that had formed, some frogugs I guess had been laying
Speaker 2: eggs like as the water fills up and then goes away. Right,
Speaker 2: So if there's if there's a rain time over a
Speaker 2: couple of days, then there's like standing water up We're
Speaker 2: talking probably four to four to six inches in some areas.
Speaker 2: Then when it's not rainy for a couple of days,
Speaker 2: it goes all the way down to almost dry, just dirt.
Speaker 2: And what the frogs would do and what this substance
Speaker 2: and the egg sacs would do is you could see
Speaker 2: them kind of hanging out and still there even after
Speaker 2: the rain and the waters had subsided. But when it
Speaker 2: came back and the moisture came back in, it's this.
Speaker 2: I mean, it looks like egg whites almost, but in
Speaker 2: these little egg egg shaped balls kind of and they're
Speaker 2: all clumped together. But then it gets kind of flat
Speaker 2: and it gets weird looking when there's not a lot
Speaker 2: of moisture.
Speaker 3: As it begins to desiccate. The container that we're talking
Speaker 3: about for these for these life forms is meant to
Speaker 3: preserve them when the water level changes. So it's a
Speaker 3: it's a thing you would understand if you had the
Speaker 3: privilege of sitting around and obsessively studying frogs and amphibians, which,
Speaker 3: to be frank most people have not had that opportunity
Speaker 3: for most of human history.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's still weird to me that. I don't
Speaker 4: know if they still do this. But you guys ever
Speaker 4: have to dissect frogs in school? Yes? Oh? In school?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 4: Oh, it's for fun. Yeah, I don't know, it's it's
Speaker 4: just it's I always found it odd and it's and
Speaker 4: I can never forget that formaldehyde smell associated with that.
Speaker 4: We also, I think we did fetle pigs instead of cats.
Speaker 4: There was a time where people would do cats. I
Speaker 4: think that's what we've fallen out of fashion. But last
Speaker 4: thing on frogs, did you guys know that frogs? I
Speaker 4: guess probably with no malicious intent. They will often eat
Speaker 4: their young. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a that's a weird one
Speaker 4: for me. Frogs are amazing.
Speaker 2: Frogs are amazing. What I would say is that I
Speaker 2: feel like there's other stuff. I've seen pictures of stuff
Speaker 2: online that purport to be star jelly that are, in
Speaker 2: my opinion looking at the images, are not this.
Speaker 3: That's yes, that's a great point, Matt. I'm glad you
Speaker 3: brought that up. What we're what we're establishing now is
Speaker 3: that when you encounter this stuff in the wild. First off,
Speaker 3: congratulations for going outside. Please do it more often after dark.
Speaker 3: This is not some kind of love crafty and formless
Speaker 3: horror out to cause you harm or to hurt you
Speaker 3: in any way. Sadly, you shouldn't need it because of
Speaker 3: possible bacterial contamination. Just you know, and don't be stuck
Speaker 3: up about eating frogs. If you ever eating fish that.
Speaker 4: Tastes like chicken. Yeah, sure. I do think it's interesting though,
Speaker 4: because you know we're talking. The thing that was sort
Speaker 4: of the I guess twist or whatever, or the thing
Speaker 4: that made people think that, you know, there were there
Speaker 4: were fish and frogs raining from the sky was the
Speaker 4: fact that this is all associated with rainfall. And in
Speaker 4: this situation, these things aren't necessarily raining down from the sky,
Speaker 4: but they happen when there are rains. So it's easy
Speaker 4: to kind of, you know, kind of go from A
Speaker 4: to Z and be like, well, if they happen when
Speaker 4: it rains, they must have been rained down.
Speaker 3: There's also confirmation by us at play over thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, it's the same thing we talked about with
Speaker 2: the frog and fish rains where sometimes there's local flooding
Speaker 2: or you know, flooding of areas that then push the
Speaker 2: wildlife out towards wherever the humans are. We talked about
Speaker 2: that on the previous episode.
Speaker 4: And you just associated with oh rain, Now all of
Speaker 4: a sudden there's frogs crawling out of the woodwork. They
Speaker 4: must have come from heaven. And with the next example
Speaker 4: we're going to get to, it's another case where this
Speaker 4: potential culprit for what star Jelly is is actually created
Speaker 4: because of these moist conditions. Moisture.
Speaker 3: Yeah so yes, uh, what a fantastic setup to the
Speaker 3: earlier points. The idea of amphibium predation does not explain
Speaker 3: all of the star Jelly phenomena. To look to that Uh.
Speaker 3: To look toward a fuller explanation, we need to look
Speaker 3: at something called nostoc Commune.
Speaker 2: That's just its name just is awesome. And it sounds
Speaker 2: like something right out of Eldin Ring. By the way, it.
Speaker 3: Sounds like a place or it sounds like a weird uh,
Speaker 3: a weird weapon or armor that requires you to have
Speaker 3: your incantation levels super hot or what is it not
Speaker 3: incantation level?
Speaker 4: Are we like?
Speaker 2: No, there's intelligence and faith, intelligent faith.
Speaker 3: It requires high faith, so you can use like the
Speaker 3: sigils and stuff. Not nostock Commune. Sounds like we're the
Speaker 3: you would use, But.
Speaker 2: That's not what it is. It's some more weird stuff.
Speaker 3: It's like the chocolate milk to the star jelly. It's
Speaker 3: a different color.
Speaker 4: I was wondering, are there any examples of man sureley
Speaker 4: in culinary circles that they try to use all kinds
Speaker 4: of weird stuff. Have people ever used frog spawn in
Speaker 4: Halt cuisine? Why not?
Speaker 2: I'm sure, I'm sure of it.
Speaker 4: It seems to me like no grosser than eating caviar.
Speaker 4: I guess they. I don't be stuck up. Yeah, exactly, Well,
Speaker 4: this stuff we're talking about nostock commune. It's a cyanobacteria
Speaker 4: that is another potential I guess suspect for what might
Speaker 4: be considered star jelly. It's found around the world because
Speaker 4: it's tough as nails. It knows how to survive, I
Speaker 4: mean much Matt to your point, the egg sacks, the
Speaker 4: egg clutches that we're talking about with frogs, they're very
Speaker 4: versatile and they know how to they know how to
Speaker 4: create life. They survive, they can like put up with
Speaker 4: some serious dryings and wettings, and you know, and the
Speaker 4: fact that there's so many of them and it only
Speaker 4: takes I think one in fifty to hatch. It's all
Speaker 4: about being resilient. And so are these gnostic commune cyanobacterias.
Speaker 4: They are particularly common in polar regions. They are also
Speaker 4: prevalent in mega harsh climates like arid regions or polar regions.
Speaker 2: And there's a reason for that, right because these things,
Speaker 2: these things can become dormant when there's no water around,
Speaker 2: no moisture around, for over one hundred years, and they
Speaker 2: can still be good to go. So, if let's imagine
Speaker 2: that a place, the desertification happens in an area right
Speaker 2: where there's a lot of this stuff that already exists.
Speaker 2: These Nosta communes. They're hanging out, they're very happy with
Speaker 2: the current moisture levels. But then it all goes away
Speaker 2: for fifty years or some you know, hundreds of years.
Speaker 2: Then all of a sudden, some moisture comes back in
Speaker 2: and these things that have dried up are they spring
Speaker 2: back to life as though nothing happened. That's incredible.
Speaker 3: Well, they're they're right on the edge of what we
Speaker 3: will call extremophiles right in that they just like a
Speaker 3: tartar grade. They could take a hell of a beating.
Speaker 3: They're a different kind of life form. But it shows
Speaker 3: us how durable this sort of life form is. I
Speaker 3: will point out that it is considered terrestrial or fresh water.
Speaker 3: And you can find it in loose clumps and soil, gravel,
Speaker 3: paved surfaces. You can find it between cobble stones. It
Speaker 3: kind of moves like mold, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: It also does, and this is true, it is used
Speaker 3: in culinary purposes. I've actually eaten some of this stuff
Speaker 3: in a salad and say, once you get past the appearance,
Speaker 3: the texture and the taste, and it's worth it.
Speaker 4: Apparently it has sort of a citrusy quality to it.
Speaker 2: Well, that's nice. I'm glad, you're glad you tried it.
Speaker 2: It would definitely give me that feeling been like that.
Speaker 2: I don't know, because it could be well, and we
Speaker 2: should say here, by the way, just when we're thinking
Speaker 2: about it as star Jelly in the way that has
Speaker 2: been described over the years.
Speaker 3: Because that's a street name for Gnostic Commune.
Speaker 4: Is star Jelly.
Speaker 2: It is, But there's different colors to it. There's the
Speaker 2: yellow kind of flavor. There's a yellow tint that could
Speaker 2: be in there. There's some kind sometimes this like green
Speaker 2: blue thing that can happen, but that's just after a rain,
Speaker 2: after there's moisture that's been in an area, it will
Speaker 2: be that color. If the moisture is gone for just
Speaker 2: a little bit, it turns into one of its other
Speaker 2: street names. What do they call it, which is butter?
Speaker 3: Which is butter? I'm so glad you mentioned that, Yeah,
Speaker 3: which is.
Speaker 2: Like a dark brown like black color.
Speaker 3: As it begins to desiccate. Yeah, it's also oh god,
Speaker 3: I don't want to do the whole translation, but basically,
Speaker 3: the way it's sold to people in Asia, it translates
Speaker 3: to like after the rain mushroom or post rain mushroom.
Speaker 3: So it sold the way you would sell a mushroom.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I feel like man, I feel like I've
Speaker 2: had some too, like just unknowingly hanging around Beauford Highway
Speaker 2: or something. But just because I've eaten stuff in a
Speaker 2: salad and in soups before, that looks eerily familiar to
Speaker 2: the images I'm seeing right now this stuff. Well, the
Speaker 2: other thing was when it is dry and crusty, right,
Speaker 2: it looks there's no rain.
Speaker 3: When it's gone from snotty to boogery, yes.
Speaker 2: But then but also dry looking, right. I imagine if
Speaker 2: it was in grass especially or just in a field,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't even see the stuff because there's other things
Speaker 2: growing above it it. It looks kind of like the
Speaker 2: dirt maybe. But then after the rain and it gets
Speaker 2: the hues to it, and it becomes a little more again,
Speaker 2: kind of sparkly with the moisture.
Speaker 3: And it absorbs and expands with moisture, just like the
Speaker 3: just like the frog jelly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're way more likely to notice it hanging out
Speaker 2: down there, so you can see why after the rain.
Speaker 2: You know, after a meteor shower, even you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: what the heck.
Speaker 3: Is this, especially if there's a meteor shower that happens
Speaker 3: to coincide with rain. Right now, it's no longer just
Speaker 3: some cool stuff in a salad. Now it's a sign
Speaker 3: from the divine we speaking of. We've got a sign
Speaker 3: that is going up right now that tells us we
Speaker 3: need to pause for a word from our sponsors and
Speaker 3: get into angel hair phenomenon. Quick disclaimer, folks, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of Iraqnet conversation coming up, So if you're a
Speaker 3: person with the ractophobias, forward a little. We're back angel
Speaker 3: hair all right, Okay, so we talked about this. A
Speaker 3: little angel hair is wispy strands of some sort of
Speaker 3: substance that appears to fall from the sky as in
Speaker 3: human witnesses have on multiple occasions described watching it lose
Speaker 3: elevation and hit the ground, and for many, many years
Speaker 3: millennia even people claimed this was a divine thing of
Speaker 3: some sort. We mentioned strands from the torn veil of
Speaker 3: the Catholic figure the Virgin Mary. We've mentioned also knitting,
Speaker 3: the idea that you know, the apocryphal kind of story
Speaker 3: of Virgin Mary and knitting, and we know it's been
Speaker 3: seen in France, Finland, Canada, all over the northern hemisphere,
Speaker 3: the southern hemisphere as well. But here's the bag of badgers.
Speaker 3: For most of human history, the claim was we don't
Speaker 3: know what this is because it disappears every time we
Speaker 3: try to analyze or measure it. And who are we
Speaker 3: to interfere with these signs from God? And I'm not
Speaker 3: trying to sound snarky. I'm not being anti religious at all.
Speaker 3: This is what people would say. They'd say, I saw
Speaker 3: this thing. I don't have physical proof. It evaporated before
Speaker 3: I could bring it to you.
Speaker 2: Yes, and there are tales of scientists. Again, these are
Speaker 2: tales of scientists who have attempted to get a sample,
Speaker 2: put it into a jar, something translucent that they could see, Yes,
Speaker 2: there are stuff in this jar. They take it on
Speaker 2: their way to the laboratory or the house or wherever
Speaker 2: they're going to actually study it. And by the time
Speaker 2: they arrive, or they by the time they at least
Speaker 2: are ready to take the top off of that jar
Speaker 2: and look at the stuff, it's gone, or it's dissipated
Speaker 2: into some other substance or nothingness, mostly disappeared. Is what
Speaker 2: is at least written down.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, which also kind of leans into the folkloric aspect.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Even the UFO stories are often folklore. As we said,
Speaker 3: the names and the terminology change, but the plot remains
Speaker 3: much very similar.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: So, abducted by fairies, wish I could prove it to you.
Speaker 3: Abducted by UFOs, Wish I could prove it to you,
Speaker 3: But the evidence just seems to dissipate. This happens even
Speaker 3: in the modern day. In twenty fourteen, there was a
Speaker 3: rain of angel hair phenomena in Portugal and it happened
Speaker 3: not just one weekend, but two consecutive weekends, and so
Speaker 3: there was a lot of scuttle. But there was a
Speaker 3: witness who said, I captured a sample of this. It
Speaker 3: was analyzed and when it was subjected to infrared light,
Speaker 3: nothing happened. When it was subjected to UV ultraviolet light.
Speaker 4: It came alive. Uh.
Speaker 3: There was no report on what that meant.
Speaker 2: And that was also an anonymous person that spoke to
Speaker 2: somebody and Metro dot co dot UK ended up writing
Speaker 2: about it in twenty fourteen and it's like a three
Speaker 2: paragraph each on one or two sentences, and it was just.
Speaker 3: Like the thing is, if you go to the original
Speaker 3: Portuguese sources. They it's there's more writing about the locale
Speaker 3: and the circumstances. Really yeah, but there's no there's no
Speaker 3: citation of the source who was making these claims, and
Speaker 3: there's no explanation of what came alive means, and there's
Speaker 3: no follow up in any language we can find about
Speaker 3: what happened to this alleged source, which leads us to
Speaker 3: possible explanations for angel hair phenomenon. There By the way,
Speaker 3: I think there's still a mystery of foot. But is
Speaker 3: this the spider part.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's by aircut of the spider part for anyone
Speaker 4: that might be triggered. But really quickly, I just now
Speaker 4: I'll say it. I just want to talk about maybe
Speaker 4: some science fiction examples of like angel Harry type, black
Speaker 4: goo or whatever it might be. I think there's some
Speaker 4: fun ones. But spiders are as we know, I think
Speaker 4: we're all Whether or not we find them creepy or terrifying,
Speaker 4: we can at least give them the respect that they
Speaker 4: are due. They do some really incredible things. They engage
Speaker 4: in mass migration through the air on literal like improvised
Speaker 4: hand gliders kind of they make out of their own
Speaker 4: web that they can shoot out of their bodies.
Speaker 3: It's so inspect your gadget unbelievable.
Speaker 4: I didn't even know about this phenomenon, Benil, until you
Speaker 4: hit me to it. It's called ballooning.
Speaker 3: I think we mentioned it briefly in Rain of Fish
Speaker 3: and Frogs.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I mean.
Speaker 4: This was relatively new to me until we've been kind
Speaker 4: of jumping down these rabbit holes. Oh geez.
Speaker 3: The main thing this teaches me, guys, is that human
Speaker 3: civilization has a lot to learn about spiders. The spider
Speaker 3: populations over millennia were associated with angel hair phenomenon the
Speaker 3: same way that frog populations were associated with star jelly.
Speaker 2: Why because it looks like spider webs, right the pictures
Speaker 2: at least that I've seen. There's a couple pieces of
Speaker 2: video from I don't know if it's from that twenty
Speaker 2: fourteen event or it's from something else or has nothing
Speaker 2: to do with actual angel hair, but I've seen some
Speaker 2: video that's purported to be angel hair that looks like
Speaker 2: clumps of spider webs to me.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like we were saying earlier, cobwebs made of some
Speaker 3: sort of gelatinous substance. But definitely. They look like more
Speaker 3: gooey forms of the spider silk familiar.
Speaker 2: With but in high in the sky and almost like
Speaker 2: in individual strand clubs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in the northern hemisphere we owe a big thank
Speaker 3: you to a huge population of spiders. They're still not
Speaker 3: fully understood, the tiny, humble and now ubiquitous LiTi fi
Speaker 3: day spiders l I n y p h.
Speaker 4: I I dae. They we know that they.
Speaker 3: Cause a lot of angel hair phenomena events because they
Speaker 3: move posse style. They migrate en mass. You can recognize
Speaker 3: a photo of these bad boys. If you see them,
Speaker 3: they'll look familiar just because they're again ubiquitous. Their street
Speaker 3: names are things like cheet weavas or money spiders because
Speaker 3: there's folklore about them, because humans knew about them for
Speaker 3: so long. There's folklore where if you see them behaving
Speaker 3: certain ways, just like pusatani phil, then it may bode
Speaker 3: well for you in the future. So it's yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Think it's because you're either going to or not going
Speaker 2: to be hit with a mass ballooning of spiders, and.
Speaker 3: As you will, that's on your own vibe, you.
Speaker 2: Know, Yeah, great day the balloon spiders are on their way.
Speaker 4: From a distance, it probably looks kind of beautiful until
Speaker 4: they get closer and closer, and then you realize that.
Speaker 3: Okay, most things look beautiful from a distance.
Speaker 4: That's very fair.
Speaker 3: I mean, but I love this idea that we're painting
Speaker 3: to Like Mother, Father, Lord Baden, you come and see
Speaker 3: Come see the spiders.
Speaker 4: They're ballooning, like seeing a whale breach or something like that. Oh,
Speaker 4: it's glorious. Look at the spiders ballooning and the sunset.
Speaker 2: Oh, the mother opens a window wide and then just
Speaker 2: spiders ju Because yes are.
Speaker 4: Often used as like sort of the stuff of nightmares,
Speaker 4: like the idea of like I think you know what
Speaker 4: it was. I think it was on the Regular Show
Speaker 4: where it was like would you rather they play this game?
Speaker 4: Would you rather have uh, spaghetti for fingers? Or every
Speaker 4: time you sneeze, spiders would come out of your mouth.
Speaker 4: And the obvious question is can I eat my spaghetti fingers?
Speaker 4: And if I can't, will they grow back? Well, you
Speaker 4: guys know, I have.
Speaker 3: The situation, so the in the in the idea.
Speaker 4: We're not gonna let you come on spaghetti spaghetti finger situation,
Speaker 4: spiders situation.
Speaker 3: Well, you know it's like you cut yourself and sometimes
Speaker 3: it's blood and sometimes it's spiders.
Speaker 2: Do you have that old infinite blood? Eh?
Speaker 3: I will never I rolled weird in character creation.
Speaker 4: I will never, as long as I live, forget the
Speaker 4: scary stories to tell them the dark about the girl
Speaker 4: that had like a blow and then she and spiders
Speaker 4: just poured out and the illustration so much more terrifying
Speaker 4: than the story, and that stuck with me as long
Speaker 4: as I live.
Speaker 3: I was just talking about this as always researching the
Speaker 3: scary stories to tell in the dark? Is ten ten
Speaker 3: a great read, the whole series, even if you consider
Speaker 3: yourself an adult. Uh, it's real folklore. It's super good.
Speaker 3: Shout out to Schwartz, Alan Schwartz wrote.
Speaker 4: It and then her head fell off. Yeah, but.
Speaker 2: That book is do you guys remember the rest of
Speaker 2: the development, the time the father tries to teach lessons.
Speaker 4: Yes, And that's why you always leave it though using
Speaker 4: the amputated leby.
Speaker 2: That book and that particular story for me is the
Speaker 2: and that's why you don't pop your pimples because.
Speaker 3: Can you say that again with more of a jersey accident,
Speaker 3: Because we're.
Speaker 2: On the way, and that's why you don't pop your pimples.
Speaker 3: Face slap you listen to me, Giuseppe.
Speaker 4: The Internet that was really I don't think the Internet
Speaker 4: got the memo because there's all these like pimple popping websites.
Speaker 4: Now that's so not my bag. But man, you gotta
Speaker 4: wonder how many of those involve spiders to sew this up. Yes,
Speaker 4: it is.
Speaker 3: It is possible for spiders to do a lot of
Speaker 3: meat amazing and perhaps disturbing things, some of which are
Speaker 3: as we record this evening, not fully understood by human civilization.
Speaker 3: But that's just because there's a lot to learn about spiders.
Speaker 2: We know.
Speaker 3: You can go to Snopes. They have an excellent article
Speaker 3: on angel hair phenomena where they talk about this crazy
Speaker 3: thing that happens in Australia, Oceania, New Zealand. They have
Speaker 3: frequent encounters with mass spider or mass erected migration events
Speaker 3: and the whole time it looks like snow has descended
Speaker 3: upon the town. It looks like a scene from a
Speaker 3: horror film like in the or like works of fiction
Speaker 3: like I don't want to spoil it by Stephen King,
Speaker 3: but or think about it this way, we could spoil
Speaker 3: Lord of the.
Speaker 4: Reasons to say, the like the spiders damn where Yeah,
Speaker 4: Like poor Frodo is just wrapped up in the stuff.
Speaker 4: And it's like in any in Skyrim, You'll be in
Speaker 4: you know, dungeons and they'll just be the stuff, just
Speaker 4: like covering the walls. And then you realize that spider's web.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's wild. The the the capabilities of these
Speaker 4: little you know, bodily produced strings.
Speaker 3: It's rain and bugs. I'm kidding arachnids, but yeah, we
Speaker 3: know that several native species of spider and rachnid are
Speaker 3: capable of creating these massive angel hair phenomena events. And
Speaker 3: our old pal Linifida, which we mentioned earlier, was apparently
Speaker 3: introduced to this part of the world sometime ago. I
Speaker 3: wonder it made me think of something that doesn't really
Speaker 3: apply to this conversation. But guys, at what point is
Speaker 3: a given species no longer considered invasive? Is it like
Speaker 3: moving to Brooklyn? Like, is it like ten years?
Speaker 4: It's a good question. I mean, yeah, no, I think
Speaker 4: that might be longer than that. I mean, is it
Speaker 4: once it has to be long? It would be once
Speaker 4: they're no longer an active threat to native species perhaps,
Speaker 4: or the sort of like the damage has been done
Speaker 4: and it's sort of assimilated almost right.
Speaker 2: I was just reading about those, uh what do they
Speaker 2: They call them jorro spiders. I don't know if that's
Speaker 2: the correct term for them, but it's the ones that
Speaker 2: are all over Georgia right now. They like big web
Speaker 2: spinning spiders that are kind of yellowy.
Speaker 3: The ones where you're like, could I fry this?
Speaker 2: You? It looks like you could totally fry it. And
Speaker 2: they're pretty big, at least compared to other spider species
Speaker 2: that we get around here, and just how much of
Speaker 2: a problem they are. But again, people have been talking
Speaker 2: about those for a while now, and I don't know
Speaker 2: when people are just going to say, nah, they're.
Speaker 4: Good, fine, fine, I know his mother.
Speaker 2: Yeah, spiders. At least they not throw webs in the
Speaker 2: air and flying across Piedmont Park. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: Tell you what, I'd have a saw one of them
Speaker 3: run a stop, like forget about.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Our Jersey listeners are very upset right now. I just
Speaker 4: want to play.
Speaker 2: I don't know these are Atlanta residents.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, everybody's welcome in Atlanta. Also, I just watched
Speaker 3: Donnie Brasco again, so that's that's part of it. We
Speaker 3: know that, we know that locals in Australia have learned,
Speaker 3: similar to our friends in Honduras, to predict these events. Uh.
Speaker 3: There's one guy who talked to the Goldburn Post part
Speaker 3: of my pronunciation in May of twenty fifteen and said
Speaker 3: the following. He said, Look, here's what happens during a
Speaker 3: particular time of this year in May or August. Young
Speaker 3: spy in the outback, the rural area of Australia somehow
Speaker 3: throw these threads of spider webs up in the air.
Speaker 3: They use them as a parachute and detach themselves from
Speaker 3: the ground and move in large colonies through the sky.
Speaker 3: They fly through the sky. We see the folds of
Speaker 3: spider webs that look almost as though it is snowing.
Speaker 3: I'm paraphrasing here. But we also have to remember ballooning
Speaker 3: is a great explanation for a lot of these events
Speaker 3: because people also get this. We'll find small spiders crawling
Speaker 3: around and threads.
Speaker 2: But even if you didn't find a spider, some of
Speaker 2: those spiders lose their parachutes, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: They to fall right out of the sky and then
Speaker 2: just the parachutes flying around, and if there's no weight
Speaker 2: to that thing, because imagine the weight of a spider web,
Speaker 2: if you're walked into one, it's almost negative. There's nothing
Speaker 2: there almost And if that just catches wind, I imagine
Speaker 2: how far that could go. Or if there's a storm
Speaker 2: or something that comes through and pushes the wind, pushes
Speaker 2: those webs in a different direction than it was headed
Speaker 2: and spreads them out even more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, come on, imagine. Also, are you guys familiar with
Speaker 3: the with the research into making bulletproof garments out of
Speaker 3: spider silt?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 4: Yeah, like some sort of really intense weave of it.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, okay, it's just the tensile strength. It's just
Speaker 3: is interesting, all right, story for another day. And of
Speaker 3: course there are other possible explanations, because we have had
Speaker 3: so many instances people experiencing this kind of thing. There
Speaker 3: does not appear to be a silver bullet nor a
Speaker 3: silver spider answer to this, that's a joke. For like
Speaker 3: four people, we knew that there was well, there was
Speaker 3: some stuff that got published in Italian journals, reputable Italian
Speaker 3: journals back in the nineteen nineties where they said there
Speaker 3: may be an electrostatic precipitation of atmospheric dust that could
Speaker 3: create the kind of thing we're talking about, similar Matt
Speaker 3: to your analogy about an aerosol container creating solid matter.
Speaker 4: As an offshoot.
Speaker 3: This stuff sounded interesting and possible, but then we have
Speaker 3: to realize a lot of folks took that question or
Speaker 3: that theory, that hypothesis, and they ran with it, and
Speaker 3: they said, yes, it is electrostatic precipitation. And here's why
Speaker 3: it's coming from UFOs. The aliens are real shout out
Speaker 3: to various UFO centric cults.
Speaker 4: So they took it a little further, you know what
Speaker 4: I mean than they needed to take. Imagine they're doing that.
Speaker 4: Imagine they're taking things too far.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna take it even further. Guys, we've seen the
Speaker 2: movie Nope. We know now that some UFOs out there
Speaker 2: are actually extraterrestrial multidimensional beings. Well, what if two of
Speaker 2: those beings get together and they want to make a
Speaker 2: little baby multidimensional Nope being thing? Well Star Jelly.
Speaker 3: Okay, wait, guys, we're in the brainstorming phase.
Speaker 4: There are no bad ideas. Okay, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: I got you back on this one. And we also
Speaker 3: know that, unlike star Jelly, we have not completely solved
Speaker 3: every explanation of angel hair. A lot of it is
Speaker 3: definitely created by arachnid ballooning. And as wild as those
Speaker 3: photos may look, please do pull them up check it out.
Speaker 3: As wild as they may look, we guarantee you that
Speaker 3: a lot of them are genuine. But what are we
Speaker 3: to make of the multiple reports claiming the angel hair
Speaker 3: evaporated before it could be documented or tested? Could it
Speaker 3: be something else? And so before we close speaking of
Speaker 3: something else, we have some other takes on star Jelly.
Speaker 4: Just one in particular that stood out. I think we
Speaker 4: covered the majority of the types of occurrences, but there
Speaker 4: was one that I thought was interesting in terms of
Speaker 4: like another possibility. I found this. There's a reference to
Speaker 4: several articles on New Cryptozoology dot. It's like a wiki
Speaker 4: fandom kind of page. And there was a case in
Speaker 4: the late seventies in Frisco, Texas where there were reports
Speaker 4: of like purple globs of goo in a woman's front yard,
Speaker 4: Missus Sybil Christian, following a meteor shower. And once again
Speaker 4: that confirmation bias that A to b like, oh it rained,
Speaker 4: and now there's this stuff. It must have come from
Speaker 4: the rain. Okay, there's this goo in my yard after
Speaker 4: this meteor shower. It turns out that it was actually
Speaker 4: some kind of caustic soda that was the result of
Speaker 4: basically poor environmental mitigation at a nearby battery reprocessing plant.
Speaker 4: So it was like causing like runoff of this caustic
Speaker 4: soda used to clean impurities in the leads of batteries.
Speaker 4: We've all seen it. If a battery gets corroded, you know,
Speaker 4: it can like form this kind of crust, and if
Speaker 4: you use caustic soda you can clean that off. So
Speaker 4: apparently when that's done, the runoff is this purpleish kind
Speaker 4: of compound that then creates something that can sort of
Speaker 4: balloon out like the previous examples of star jelly that
Speaker 4: we were talking about. So I just thought that was
Speaker 4: an interesting one worth mentioning. There are a few other
Speaker 4: examples here if anyone wants to go check it out.
Speaker 4: Another one really quickly was just the idea that there
Speaker 4: were already impurities present in the soil, like in dorsets
Speaker 4: in the UK in January twenty twelve, granules of sodium
Speaker 4: poly acrylate that were already present of the soil, which
Speaker 4: is apparently very common in agricultural use, and when it rained,
Speaker 4: it caused these dehydrated granules of this stuff to balloon
Speaker 4: up and then kind of create their very highly absorbent
Speaker 4: So there's another couple of random examples sea of industrial
Speaker 4: contenders exactly. Yeah. And then just last last thing, if
Speaker 4: anyone's interested. I mentioned the question of whether frog spawn
Speaker 4: had a culinary use, So I looked that up. And
Speaker 4: while I did not find any examples of actual use
Speaker 4: of frog spawn in the way you would of course
Speaker 4: cavia or other you know, aquatic eggs, there was a
Speaker 4: delightful recipe for frog spawn tie tapioca pudding from Bonappetite
Speaker 4: magazine from June of two thousand and six, and you
Speaker 4: can find that as well, and it involves some coconut milk, ginger,
Speaker 4: cilantro kaffir, lime leaves, whole milk, and some pearl tapioca
Speaker 4: and they have it presented with tiny plastic frogs in
Speaker 4: the bowls. So it says in the recipe specifically the
Speaker 4: plastic frogs are not required, though they are recommended.
Speaker 2: What about the agar agar, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're definitely some agar agar up in there. Gotta be.
Speaker 4: I want to make this. I'm a big fan of
Speaker 4: squishy boba e gummy kind of things. I would totally
Speaker 4: eat the what was it, the cyana bacteria version of
Speaker 4: star jelly. It's not bad.
Speaker 3: There's no thank you for me, more for me and men,
Speaker 3: and more for you as well, fellow conspiracy realist. As
Speaker 3: we mentioned earlier, there is so much weird wild stuff
Speaker 3: out there, even in these our modern evenings. Head over
Speaker 3: to Ridiculous History to learn more about, for instance, the
Speaker 3: Kentucky meat shower. Most importantly, let us know about any
Speaker 3: strange similar weather phenomena that you have encountered personally.
Speaker 4: Please let us know.
Speaker 3: Thank you, by the way, to the folks who have
Speaker 3: already reached out with various similar stories and reactions. We
Speaker 3: can't wait to hear from you. We try to be
Speaker 3: easy to find online.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's right. You can find it to the handle
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Speaker 4: also find it to that handle on x FKA Twitter.
Speaker 4: Ben I think is the most of us individually active
Speaker 4: on Twitter, always dropping some singers. I just don't have
Speaker 4: the I don't have the skill set for it, Ben,
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