Star jelly

Explanations have ranged from it being the remains of frogs, toads, or worms, to the byproducts of cyanobacteria, to being the fruiting bodies of jelly fungi or masses of amoeba called slime molds.

[6] A fourteenth-century Latin medical glossary has an entry for uligo, described as "a certain fatty substance emitted from the earth, that is commonly called 'a star which has fallen'".

Sir Walter Scott, in his novel The Talisman, wrote:[2] "Seek a fallen star," said the hermit, "and thou shalt only light on some foul jelly, which, in shooting through the horizon, has assumed for a moment an appearance of splendour.

"An unidentifiable substance that falls to earth during a meteor-type event forms the background to "The Colour Out of Space", a 1927 short story by the American horror and science fiction author H. P. Lovecraft.

Paramount Pictures was also sued for this movie by the author Joseph Payne Brennan, who had written a short story published in Weird Tales Magazine in 1953 called "Slime" about a similar creature.