Gazing Groogablue - 1896 Moldavia

When Sir Robert Stawell Ball published his popular Story of the Heavens in 1886 the whole of Victorian was awoken to the fascination of astronomy and gripped with the idea that life could very well live on other planets. Our intrepid explorer and hunter of Lost Impossimals, Charles Burroughs, was quite taken with the whole idea and decided to follow up an old Moldavian folklore tale that centred on a mysterious creature called a Gwiazda Mouse or Star Mouse but is more locally known as a Clanger.

So in 1896 Charles found himself halfway up a mountain in deepest Bessarabia on a cold moonlit night looking for the fabled creatures. What he found instead was even more fascinating. On the opposite mountain Charles saw, using his powerful telescope, a creature that we now know to be a Gazing Groogablue, scanning the heavens through its own powerful telescope.

Adjusting his own telescope he also noticed little pink pointy nose creatures in various knitted garments excitedly pointing up and communicating with the Groogablue. Charles believed that these were the fabled Clangers and judging from their strange garments also deduced that they were inhabitants of another planet. After studying them for sometime Charles also came to the conclusion that the Groogablue was helping the Clangers find something they had lost, maybe they were looking for home, maybe they were looking for the ‘ius extraho’, another fabled creature that dispensed soup from a cave.

Unfortunately we will never know for shortly after the Groogablue and the Clangers noticed the reflection of Charles telescope, removed a small dustbin lid from the ground and disappeared, never to be seen again. Charles published his celebrated paper on the Gazing Groogablue and the Clangers under the title of Mooma’s & Moopa’s – The Darwinian Mystery, a paper that excited fellow scholar H.G.Wells to publish ‘War of the Worlds’ in 1898.