If you’re a fan of crappy horror movies, you’re probably aware of Chuck Russell’s 1988 classic The Blob. For those who aren’t, the film, which is a remake of a 1958 film of the same name, centers around a group of teens, as horror movies typically do, who are trying to warn everyone about a strange, pink space blob that keeps eating people. Sounds pretty strange, right? Well, it turns out that the movie’s weird plot is actually based on a real event that took place in Philadelphia in 1950. 

On September 26, 1950, two police officers in Philadelphia witnessed a strange parachute-like object falling to the ground in the distance. The officers drove to where the object landed and found a puddle of purple goo filled with some sort of crystals and giving off a light mist, reports iO9. Then, for some reason that defies logic, one of the officers stuck his hand in it. The FBI was called in to investigate, but by the time they got there the blob had evaporated without a trace.

The story quickly made its way to local news sites and captured the public’s attention enough to warrant a movie adaptation in 1958. However, over 60 years later, we still are unsure what the strange substance was or if the story was real in the first place.

So what could the blob have been? Well, some have claimed it was star jelly, which is a mystery of its own. According to The Huffington Post, star jelly is a slimy goo that randomly appears in fields. It looks like this:

MarianneWildArt

When it was first discovered, this weird slime caused quite a stir because some people were claiming that it literally came from stars. Blatant ignorance of what stars are made of aside, some have claimed that the jelly may come from an airplane, a meteor shower or some strange weather condition. The exact reason is still debated, but the general consensus is that star jelly is actually the remains of unfertilized frog spawn, which looks like puddles of this:

Fanghong

The idea here is that a predator had killed and carried off the actual frog but left behind the jelly-like ovum, a theory that makes sense because no one has ever witnessed star jelly falling from the sky. It’s also very likely that the police officers in Philadelphia happened upon something like this back in 1950. It doesn’t, however, explain why they said it was purple or how it evaporated so quickly. So, in a way the mystery still lives on.

We will probably never know what happened to the real life blob, but at least we  have the hypothetical movie to see how things could have played out if we lived in a weird horror movie world.

(h/t iO9)