Among the most interesting objects found on low dispersion IllaJ objective prism plates taken with the UK Schmidt telescope are a large number of compact and intrinsically very bright ‘extragalactic HII regions’. Spectroscopically they are indistinguishable from the giant HII regions found in spiral and irregular galaxies except that they are much more luminous with absolute magnitudes in the range My -14 to -23. The stellar continuum is extremely blue indicating a predominantly young stellar population. The Hf3 luminosities, 1038 to 1042 ergs/sec indicate that they must contain 105 - 107 OB stars with a total mass in stars of 106 - 109 Mʘ. The associated high rate of star formation cannot have continued for more than 107 years, which implies that these systems are either undergoing star formation for the first time, or that they undergo intermittent bursts of star formation. The chemical composition of these systems is also remarkable in that the oxygen abundance is invariably less than solar.