I watched an episode of Cartoon Network’s Secret Saturdays recently, due in no small part to the fact that Phil plays Doc Saturday, and the idea of atmospheric jellyfish refreshed itself in my mind. Following up my recent post on  siphonophores I thought I’d push out some information about this often side-lined cryptid.

In the episode, entitled “The Swarm at the Edge of Space”, atmospheric jellies are represented as stinging creatures that dwell in the graduated edge of Earth’s atmosphere. This is consistent with both theories of what these creatures are. One camp believes them to be space-dwelling animals that like to “swim” around planets, where others believe them to be naturally occurring on planets like Earth, but more common on gas giants.

I remembered seeing a news story about a strange rain or jellyfish-like mass some years ago in Washington, the details of which are scarce online.  Unsolved Mysteries did a report on it, and most coverage seems to want to link it a chemical weapon of sorts.

I like to keep an open mind to the idea that there may be an atmospheric ecosystem yet unknown to us. Although some sources attribute the possibility of atmospheric jellyfish to discovers such as aerogel there is a far less exotic possibility. With known lighter-than-air gasses including Hydrogen, Helium, and Methane, common on Earth is it too much of a stretch to consider small creatures as thin and fragile as jellyfish producing a gaseous bi-product that can keep them afloat? What the everyday experience of humanity betrays us is that we’re all settled in the bottom of a vast gas ocean just as encompassing to us as the liquid world is to aquatic life. Physics will still apply. The question to me would be what type of food source is fueling them. Unless these mysterious jellies are photosynthetic, converting available light into energy and producing light gasses within a thin sack structure. It would be of great evolutionary benefit for a photosynthetic plant to rise above the cloud cover. Some plants, like the famous Venus Fly Trap, exhibit many animal-like behaviors.

This, of course, debunks the idea that stories like those put forward by Robert Gardner are related to these organisms. The story goes,

“back in the summer of 1939, when a US Army Air Force plane with 12 passengers and a crew of two aboard took off from an Army base in San Diego, California. The plane, had been flying for just about an hour before sending out a distress call. After sending out that distress signal to the base, the plane with its passengers and crew returned to the base in San Diego. Upon arrival, Army servicemen opened the hatch to the interior of the plane and were horrified when they saw that all 12 passengers and one of the pilots were dead. The other pilot, the commander of the flight, was the only person, who stayed alive, but he died in several minutes after landing the plane. Investigators from the army examined the dead military men, to discover that all of the men on board that had died had strange burn marks on their skin, but it did not become possible to find out their origin point, and what really happened on board the plane during the flight. Investigators further determined that all of the passengers onboard the plane had used their personal firearms as the hull paneling of the plane was riddled with gunshots exit points, as if the people inside the plane were trying to kill a very fast yet unseen enemy.” – Wikipedia

If these creatures are photosynthetic the only reason I can find for them to have adapted stingers would be to fend off rival organisms, not for hunting. Perhaps they thin their gene pool by “popping” sexual rivals?

In either case, there would be serious doubts that such adaptations would be harmful to humans, but one never knows. Does one?