Attack of the Jellied Whatsits

Alien encounters are pretty boring these days. Usually, they involve big-headed, black-eyed "Greys" coming into your bedroom, swooping down on your vehicle, or, in some other way, plucking you out of your normal, waking life, to throw your luckless butt into the saucer (or triangle, or indistinct sort-of flying lightship), and giving you a medical exam.

These UFO astronauts always look the same, talk the same (they actually seem to speak telepathically, not with their tiny slit-like mouths), and, after they have finished their exam, seem to just place you back in your normal life, no questions asked, no information proffered, with some sore spots on your body and a "screen memory" of Whitely Strieber pontificating to a barnyard hoot owl.

In other words, nothing to phone home about.

It was not always so. During the Fabulous Fifties and the Stupendous Sixties, UFO occupants and their crazy craft took on a variety of reported shapes, sizes and features that give the weirdest, wildest imaginings of many a drug-tripping Hollywood sci-fi hack writer a run for his or her money.

Case in point: The Swedish UFO Jelly Monster Attack. (How's that for a title?)

Back around the good year 1955, December 20th, to be exact, two Swedish men, Stig Rydberg and Hans Gustafson, were driving along about 3 in the A.M., trying with all their Northern European Viking might to reach Helsinberg for reasons Mr. Brad Steiger (who wrote this account originally, and who passed away recently, and wrote about UFOs and ghosts prolifically, and whom I thank for it emphatically) never quite reveals, when, coming through a forest and noticing a mist gathering in a clearing, said to each other, "What the hell. Let's stop and check out that landed flying saucer in that clearing over there. Where the mist is gathering, you know. I mean, what could possibly happen?"

So we establish, right off the bat, that there was indeed a landed flying saucer. In a clearing, in one of those deep, dark Northern European forests wherein Nordic deities and heavy metal musicians cavort gaily on dark, dripping days when you can just feel the power of the ancient pagan forces seeping into your Eurocentric bones—was, indeed, a landed 50s-style flying saucer on little tripod legs. Outside, blue jelly monsters gamboled in the murk, looking for unsuspecting motorists to suck up and carry into their landed, "shimmering," like a "weird light," craft.

Hans and Stig were grabbed, or rather, sucked, into the jelly monsters' powerful grasps, having to fight their way free. Stig described punching one and finding that his arm sank up to the elbow. And, woo! Did the little blue critters ever stink! Smelled like "ether and burnt sausage," claimed Stig later.

Stig fought his way free and returned to the car, laying on the horn, and hoping against hope, and reason, that a passing motorist would motor by and, instead of driving away at light speed in sheer terror, would assist them in their struggle to free themselves from the predatory purple preserves. That seems to have done the trick, as the little "protozoa-like," blobs suddenly decided to beat a retreat back into the saucer, leaving the luckless Hans still clinging in terror to a fence post.

The craft shot up into the sky, with a weird high-pitched whistling that rang in the men's ears for days afterward.

It was eventually lost to sight. Hans and Stig decided, at first, not to let on that they had been bad-touched by alien jelly blobs, as no one would believe them, and it might wreck their chances of having careers as backup singers for an Abba reunion.

(Someday.)

At any rate, after feeling mighty sick for a few days, the men hightailed it to a doctor—but, he claimed, he could find nothing wrong with them. It was after THAT, they decided to confab with the Swedish Defense Ministry.

Under hypnosis (what else?) it was determined that—the men were telling the truth. As they believed it to be.

Blue flying jelly-bellies from outer space? The yuk-yuks of a Cosmic Trickster, vomiting up this stuff just to keep us on our toes and guessing.

As the tagline of an old television show from the Nineties use to state: "It's a strange universe out there, and we've got it covered!"

You better believe it.