The Blob

One Strange Thing: Paranormal & True-Weird Mysteries

One Strange Thing

True Crime, History

4.4 • 697 Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Texas is invaded by a very unwelcome, and extremely gelatinous, visitor. Could this blob be a particularly virulent fungi--or, as residents suspect, something a little more extraterrestrial?

Pre order Laurah’s book LAY THEM TO REST: https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/laurah-norton/lay-them-to-rest/9780306828805/

Special thanks to Bradley George of WUSF for lending us his voice.

Hosted and Edited by Laurah Norton

Written, Researched, Engineered, Scored, and Produced by Maura Currie

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing,
0:08.6	the show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.
0:26.9	You've probably seen clips of early sci-fi films,
0:31.9	boxy robots, spaceships that look like milk cartons, and aliens that are definitely people in a lot of silver makeup.
0:37.9	But in 1958, B-movie science fiction got a little more amorphous.
0:45.3	By that, of course, we mean that the blob was released.
0:50.8	As the title suggests, the movie concerned an alien, well, blob, that crashes to Earth in a meteorite.
1:00.1	It proceeds to dissolve entire towns, growing bigger and redder and more jelloy as it goes.
1:08.8	Though ostensibly serious horror, this movie is a lot of fun, and camp at its
1:14.5	absolute finest. Still, the blob is a little creepy for all the cheesy special effects.
1:23.4	There's something deeply unnerving about a creature that's so clearly not human or plant or animal.
1:31.4	We find ourselves uneasy because it looks so otherworldly.
1:36.4	And that's been the case for a very long time.
1:40.3	Throughout history, we've seen that whenever humans encounter a weird slime, chaos ensues.
1:48.6	According to The Guardian, we have written records expressing anxiety about star jelly,
1:55.4	appearing on trees and grass, dating back to the 14th century.
2:01.3	Semi-translucent, milky white, and wiggly, this star jelly baffled our ancestors,
2:08.8	who, understandably, assumed it was brought to Earth on astral transport like meteors.
2:16.5	It's this same star jelly that inspired Hollywood to glamorize the blob to begin with,
2:23.3	and the scattered sightings of such weirdness in nature still mystify today's scientists.
2:29.3	Back in 2009, the National Geographic Society got a hold of some apparent star jelly-esque
2:37.4	samples discovered in the United States.
	...

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