Watch: Mysterious obelisk in US desert draws wild theories [video]
A mysterious metal obelisk found buried in the remote western Utah desert in the United States has inflamed the imaginations of UFO spotters. Conspiracy theorists and Stanley Kubrick fans, too.
The shiny, triangular pillar protrudes approximately 12 feet from the red rocks of southern Utah. It was spotted on Wednesday, 18 November by baffled local officials counting bighorn sheep from the air.
The mysterious metal monolith in Utah
The Utah Department of Public Safety crew members found “a metal monolith installed in the ground”. However “no obvious indication of who might have put the monolith there.”
“It is illegal to install structures or art without authorisation on federally managed public lands; no matter what planet you’re from,” warned the agency in a tongue-in-cheek press release Monday.
News of the discovery quickly went viral online. Many noted the object’s similarity with strange alien monoliths that trigger huge leaps in human progress in Kubrick’s classic sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Others remarked on its discovery during a turbulent year that has seen the world gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic. They also optimistically speculated it could have a different function entirely.
COVID-19 and 2020 jokes
“This is the ‘reset’ button for 2020. Can someone please press it quickly?” joked one Instagram user. Another wrote, “Up close it reads: ‘COVID vaccine inside'”.
Although officials have refused to disclose the object’s location out of fear that hordes of curious sightseers would flock to the remote wilderness, a Reddit user said they had managed to geo-locate the obelisk using surrounding rock formations.
Sharing the Google Earth location – where a small structure can be seen, roughly six miles from the nearest road – the user said the structure was first photographed by Google in 2016.
Bret Hutchings, the pilot who happened to fly over the obelisk, speculated that it had been planted by “some new wave artist.”
Long-lost artwork?
Meanwhile, some observers pointed out the object’s resemblance to the avant-garde work of John McCracken; a US artist who lived for a time in nearby New Mexico and died in 2011.
On Tuesday a spokeswoman for his representative David Zwirner said it was not one of McCracken’s works; but possibly by a fellow artist paying homage.
However, later in the day, Zwirner gave another statement. He suggested the piece was indeed by McCracken, meaning it had lain undiscovered in the desert for nearly a decade. Zwirner said
“The gallery is divided on this. I believe this is definitely by John. Who would have known that 2020 had yet another surprise for us? Just when we thought we had seen it all. Let’s go see it.”
Either way, Hutchings also admitted it was “about the strangest thing I’ve come across out there, in all my years of flying.” He told local news channel KSLTV:
“We were kind of joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, then the rest of us make a run for it”.
© Agence France-Presse
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