The Philadelphia Purple Glob-- Pennsylvania

Most paranormal researchers assume that UFOs are spacecraft piloted by beings from other planets or even other dimensions.  A few investigators, however, have postulated that these strange objects may actually be living creatures-- another type of Atmospheric Beast like the unknown entities that may produce star jelly (which I mentioned briefly in the Crawfordsville Monster entry). 

One intriguing incident which may support this view happened in Septemnber, 1950.  Two Philadelphia police officers, Joe Keenan and John Collins, spotted a glowing mass drifting towards the ground in an open field.  Upon reaching the touch-down site, the officers reported finding a six-foot wide domed mound of what appeared to be purple jelly, so light that it barely even bent the stalks of the weeds it had landed on. The mound was faintly luminescent and appeared to pulse faintly like a living thing.  According to some reports, part of the thing had even begun to crawl up a nearby telephone pole.

Keenan and Collins called for backup and once the other men had arrived, all four decided to try to move the thing.  Collins, however, found that when touched, pieces of the glob broke off like foam and quickly evaporated, leaving behind an odorless, sticky residue on his hands.  Over the course of the next half hour, the glowing purple glob slowing dissolved until nothing was left to mark its brief existence.

The story of the Philadelphia glob doesn't end there, though.  Seven years later movie producer Jack H. Harris tasked his friend Irvine Millgate with coming up for an idea for a marketable film.  This being the 1950s, science fiction monster movies were huge.  So Millgate used the Philadelphia Glob incident as the basis for a story of a malignant extraterrestrial jelly-monster that terrorizes a town in Pennsylvania.   Originally intended only as a cheesy B-movie to make a little cash, Millgate and Harris' film, 1958's The Blob, became a hit and helped start the career of its star, Steve McQueen.

Not to mention creating a pretty catchy earworm:

The Raleigh Sewer Creature-- North Carolina

In 2009, sanitation workers running a camera through a private sewage system came across a colony of strange, red blobs that throbbed and shuddered like living things.  Video of the sewer things got pretty huge on Youtube, with all the usual wild guessing. 

So what were these things, exactly?  It turns out they were nothing more than colonies of Tubifex worms.  These worms normally live in sediment at the bottoms of lakes or, as happened here, in sewers.  Since there was no soil for the worms to burrow into, they were simply coiled around each other, forming the odd, lumpy balls.  When the hot camera lights got too close, the worms would collectively retract, creating the illusion of a single large moving being.  Apparently these colonies are fairly well known to sewer workers, who have given themt he delightful nickname "ass urchins".

Tubifex are pretty interesting animals.  They're annelids, a large, successful group that includes earthworms and leeches.  Tubifex often live in polluted, or low-oxygen sediments-- such as the aforementioned lake bottoms and sewers.  To get oxygen in such inhospitable environments, they have tons of hemoglobin in their bodies, which gives them their bright red color.  You can learn everything you'd ever want to know about Tubifex worms here. 

For this drawing, I added a couple of large "queen tubifex" heads coming out of the mound like hydra heads.  There's no report of the ass urchins sprouting giant heads, but then again there aren't any reports that say they DON'T sprout giant heads.  Besides, how could I not include a depiction of a tubifex's adorably doofy face