"Space Jelly" Falls Near Hopkins Grove

Polk: A strange meteorite struck the Earth March 10th, surprising and intriguing police officer Darryl Hecht. On routine patrol along the northern edge of town at about midnight, he noticed a faintly-lit object descend rapidly from the clouds, striking the ground some 150 yards away. The officer drove down a narrow dirt and gravel lane to investigate. The lane, humbly named Old Road, runs along a line of cedars and pines that is the visual dividing line between two alfalfa farms.

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A "space jelly" from the "Putnam Parallelogram", circa 1947. The intensity of the camera's flash caused it to dissipate immediately.
     Hecht, with five years on Hopkins Grove's police force, took precautions. "I thought it was probably just a meteor, you know?" he says. "But then I considered that it could be a fallen satellite or maybe even worse a piece of a plane explosion." He remained inside the patrol car for a few more minutes to make sure no other debris would come tumbling out of the sky. He got out of the car and carefully walked toward what he now saw was an irregular baseball-sized chunk of rock. The piece had split open and a pool of green ooze was forming around it.

     "There was probably about half a pint of the stuff," adds Hecht. "It was glowing a sort of minty green, but the glow was fading even as I watched it. I poked the liquid with a pen and it seemed to have the consistency of marmalade, but sorta gritty."

     Hecht was surprised when, a minute later, the green goo had mostly evaporated. It was not sinking into the earth, the officer swears, but reducing its mass at an astonishing rate. He tried to scoop a little into a vial of aspirin he had with him, but by the time he got the container back to the station, the "jelly" was gone.

     Unfortunately, Hecht, in his haste to show his buddies the weird slime, left the meteorite on Old Road. Subsequent efforts to recover the space rock have been unsuccessful, and the origin and nature of the space jelly remains a mystery.

    





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