(paraphrased from "More of the Straight Dope" by Cecil Adams, pg. 285-87).

A Mrs. Sybil Christian of Frisco, Texas found a number of
blobs on her lawn after the Perseid meteor shower of August 11, 1979.
She described them as looking like "smooth whipped cream, [only]
purple". The blobs were about the size of a telephone and weighed a
couple of pounds apeice, were warm to the touch and contained small
chunks of lead. One melted away on the lawn, but police took the
remaining two to the Heard National Space Museum nearby and, eventually,
one ended up at NASA...

One of Sybil Christian's neighbors claimed to have seen a meteor
hours before the blobs were discovered and rumors of their
extraterrestial origin began circulating. Ron DiIulio, assistant
director of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, heard
these rumors and didn't buy it. Investigatiors discovered a battery
processing plant a mile and a half away from the Christian home with
several tons of purple and reddish blobs. The stuff was a caustic soda
used to clean impurities out of lead that had been salvaged from old
batteries. It was also learned that trucks carrying scrap iron went past
the caustic soda dump and the Christian house every day.

Soon after, "Fate" magazine published a long article claiming the purple
blobs were "Star Jelly", also known as "Pwdre Ser" or "Rot of the
Stars". The article speculated that the Pwdre Ser may be "advanced
cellular organic matter" that exists in "pre-stellar molecular clouds"
floating around in space. As evidence, Fate claimed that (1) a simple
test that could have conclusively proved the purple blobs were caustic
soda was never performed, (2) the one test that <was> performed was inconclusive, (3) the blobs at the plant were hard, whereas the ones on
the Christian's lawn were soft and (4) Mrs. Christian herself does not
believe the goo she found was the same as the substance found at the
plant. In rebuttal, scientists claimed that Mrs. Christian's blobs were
soft because they absorbed water when she'd squirted them with a garden
hose (Mrs. Christian's notions of planetary defense were a bit
abductors. It's probably similar to UFO/alien abductor/abductee
conversations, but at least her abductors were human.

Carol,
telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23
http://ricksbbs.synchro.net:8080
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