The Utah Metallic Monolith
With these five little words, the world was plunged headlong into one of the most curious and extensive mysteries of our time.
They were spoken by a member of a Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter crew, as they flew over the vast expanse of Utah’s wilderness on November 18, 2020. The crew had been tasked with counting bighorn sheep for the government, when suddenly, beneath their helicopter, noticeably out of place amongst the red rock cliffs and dusty valleys, stood a shimmering metallic monolith.
Pilot Bret Hutchings would later tell news outlets: “We were joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, I guess the rest of us make a run for it,” adding that the monolith was “…the strangest thing that I’ve come across out there in all my years of flying.”
So what was it, this mysterious metallic monolith, alone in the desert?
“Is this something NASA stuck up there or something?” Hutchings asked. “Are they bouncing satellites off it?”
No, it was not something ‘NASA stuck up there.’ In fact, as the Utah Department of Public Safety said on its website, there was “no obvious indication of who might have put the monolith there.” This led to much speculation. After all, the monolith had appeared many miles from any city, in a place humans rarely, if ever, traversed. The Utah Department of Public Safety offered speculation of their own, releasing a statement which read:
“It is illegal to install structures or art without authorization on federally managed public lands, no matter what planet you’re from.”
Were they suggesting the monolith could be extraterrestrial in origin?
Perhaps they were joking. Except, legally, the desecration of federally protected lands is a serious crime. When a home is burglarized, the police do not joke that it was the work of extraterrestrials; politicians don’t argue that it was aliens who rigged elections against them. So why then would the government organization tasked with stopping the desecration of federal lands joke about their failure to do so?
Certainly, they took certain aspects of their duty seriously, refusing to release the location of the monolith to the public, so as to prevent curious onlookers from trekking out into the desert and causing further environmental harm. Unfortunately for them, mystery hunters soon found the location using a simple search of Google Earth. Oddly, Google Earth revealed that that monolith had been in place since sometime in 2016, leaving many to ask how it had not been discovered for more than four years.
In short order, tourists and social media influencers flocked to the Utah wilderness, looking for answers.
But before answers could be found, the monolith suddenly vanished, not even two weeks after it had first appeared.This was not the end of the mystery. In fact, it was only the beginning.
The Romanian Monolith
The very same day that the Utah monolith disappeared, a new monolith appeared some 6000 miles away in Romania, close to an important archaeological site just outside the city of Piatra Neamt. Was it coincidental that at almost the exact moment one monolith had vanished, another had appeared?
“My guess is that some alien, cheeky and terrible teenagers left home with their parents’ UFO and started planting metal monoliths around the world. First in Utah and then at Piatra Neamt. I am honored that they chose our city.”
Perhaps not too honored, since a few days later, the Romanian monolith, like its counterpart in Utah, suddenly vanished, leaving only a “small hole covered by rocky soil.”
The next day, December 2nd, a third monolith appeared in Atascadero, California, at the top of a hiking path, again seeming to replace the one which had disappeared.
From there, things only got more bizarre.
Metallic Monoliths Appearing All Around the Globe
On December 5, there were new monoliths in Pittsburgh and Las Vegas. On December 6, a monolith was found surrounded by water and covered in ice near the small village of Oudehorne in the Netherlands. That same day, the BBC reported that a monolith had been found on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England.Since then, monoliths have appeared all over the word – one outside of a German castle, another inside the ruins of an ancient church in Spain; one at the bottom of a decommissioned dam in Pinawa, Manitoba, another on the beach in The Bahamas. A monolith discovered in Adelaide, Australia had the coordinates to three locations written on it – Brooklyn, New York, an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean, and mysteriously the Sphinx in Egypt. Meanwhile, a monolith found in Bolivia was engraved with numerous different languages, including Mandarin, Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic. Yes, monoliths have appeared in places as distant and disparate as Poland and Panama, Italy and Iran, Norway and New Zealand. In fact, to date, these ominous metallic monoliths have appeared in hundreds of places all over the world.
But who put them there? Perhaps more importantly, what do they do, and what do they mean?
Some have already provided an answer…
“2001: A Space Odyssey”
Stanley Kubrick’s legendary 1968 cult classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, begins with one of the most celebrated sequences in film, a dialogue-free epiphany for the mind and soul.
It starts in prehistoric times, in a landscape that looks a whole lot like modern Utah. There, two tribes of apes struggle against nature, hunted by predators and frightened by sounds in the night, fighting with each other over the only source of water. Until, one day, a tall black monolith suddenly appears, silent, mysterious. One tribe of apes discovers it, feeling it with their hands in wonderment. Doing so changes them in some fundamental way. Shortly after, they realize they can use a bone as a club. This revelation allows them to dominate and kill the other tribe of apes, taking control of the water supply, and further sets them on the path to dominate the natural landscape around them using tools.
In this way, their contact with the monolith triggered a shift in evolution, setting the entirety of human history into motion. The use of tools becomes the means by which apes would progress and prevail, becoming modern humans in the process.
It is not hard to understand why 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first thing to come to mind for many when mysterious monoliths started showing up all over the world. But to understand what this might mean, it is most interesting to look beyond the film to the short story upon which it was based, Arthur C. Clarke’s seminal 1951 work, “The Sentinel.” This was the work that Kubrick and Clarke together turned into a screenplay for the film just over a decade later.
There, the history of the monolith is explained in more detail. It is said to be the product of an extraterrestrial species which developed intergalactic travel millions or even billions of years ago. These extraterrestrials, called the ‘Firstborn’, traveled the galaxy, discovering as they did that while life was common, the development of intelligent life was often stunted in its development. And so, they set about fostering this intelligent life on distant planets, leaving behind monoliths as remote observers that could carry out tasks and spur evolution. This is what the tribe of prehistoric apes stumbled upon in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which became the catalyst for their use of tools, and thus their evolution into human beings.
Many have asked if, at a time of great global strife, the appearance of metallic monoliths all over the world could mean something similar, some sort of assistance in finally reaching a higher stage of evolutionary development.
But perhaps it goes deeper than that.
Ancient Visitors
Consider the fact that the stories of The Sentinel and 2001: A Space Odyssey are not all that unique across the records of human history. Look to the texts of the ancient Sumerians, the earliest written works ever produced by human beings. These texts speak of human contact with gods who came from the sky, whom the Sumerians called the Anunnaki. These ‘gods’ were said to have brought humans advanced technology and knowledge, in effect stimulating their evolution and assisting the progress of human civilization. There are many who believe these texts are not myth, but historical record, and that the Anunnaki were not gods, but extraterrestrials.
In fact, similar stories of purported gods coming from the sky and bringing humans advanced knowledge and technology exist across cultures and periods of human development – in the Middle East and Asia, amongst the Native American tribes of North America, and the once-great empires of South America. Look even to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. When the titular characters eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they gain knowledge from god, which, even as they are expelled from the Garden of Eden, stimulates their development.
Is it possible that extraterrestrials visited earth some time in the distant past, bringing humans advanced knowledge and technology and stimulating their development, a feat recorded many times over by civilizations across the world? And were Kubrick and Clarke merely retelling this hidden history in their own way with 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Sentinel?
Regardless of whether they were or not, some say the key to understanding the true secret of their work is to look not to the past, but to the future …
The Monolith on Phobos
There is a second monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, after the one introduced in prehistoric times. It is found on the moon by humans in the year 2001, buried just below the surface. In the film, this second monolith serves as a sort of alien ‘burglar alarm’ – when it is discovered by humans it immediately sends a transmission off into space, alerting the aliens who put it there that humans had reached a stage in their technological development which allowed them to leave earth.
Why is this important? To start, just ask Buzz Aldrin, the second man ever to walk on the moon.
“We should visit the moons of Mars. There’s a monolith there — a very unusual structure on this little potato-shaped object that goes around Mars once every seven hours. When people find out about that they are going to say, ‘Who put that there?’ “
These were Aldrin’s words in 2009, in response to the discovery of an enormous 90-meter-tall monolith on the surface of Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. It was discovered standing almost unbelievably in otherwise desolate and completely flat terrain.
Interestingly, Phobos has been called “the most mysterious body in the known solar system.” It is orbiting Mars, but nobody is really sure how it got there. In some ways, it appears like an asteroid that has fallen into the gravitational pull of the planet, but scientists have pointed out that its orbit behaves in a way that is “incompatible with this ‘snatched asteroid’ idea.”
Maybe Phobos didn’t enter orbit because it was ‘snatched,’ but because it was placed there … by whoever placed the monolith on its surface.
Could there really be an ancient alien monolith on one of the moons of Mars, just waiting for us to discover it, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, before sending a message back to its creators? And might this have something to do with the sudden appearance of metallic monoliths all over the world only a few years later?
Some say the answer is not that complicated.
Simple Explanation?
Shortly after the Utah monolith disappeared, a 23-second video appeared on Instagram and YouTube, which seemed to show a group dismantling the monolith in the dark of night. Two men who claimed to be part of the group, Andy Lewis, a YouTube personality known as ‘Sketchy Andy,’ and Sylvan Christensen, released a statement shortly thereafter.
“We removed the Utah Monolith because there are clear precedents for how we share and standardize the use of our public lands, natural wildlife, native plants, freshwater sources, and human impacts upon them…” “Let’s be clear: The dismantling of the Utah Monolith is tragic, and if you think we’re proud, we’re not. We’re disappointed. Furthermore, we were too late.”
If this is true, then it appears one part of the mystery has been solved, the monolith’s disappearance. Yet this does not explain how it got there.
Some have suggested the monolith must be a prop left behind from some sort of Hollywood set, noticing that sci-fi television show Westworld was being filmed in the area around the time that the monolith was determined to have first appeared, as was the futuristic thriller John Carter. Yet, no production house has stepped forward to claim responsibility, while others have gone so far as to point out that they don’t just leave expensive-to-make props lying around.
Elsewhere, an artist group out of Santa Fe, New Mexico called ‘The Most Famous Artist’ has attempted to take credit for Utah monolith’s appearance. First, they posted what appeared to be behind-the-scenes photos of monolith construction on their Instagram and Twitter accounts with the caption, “you mean it wasn’t aliens?” Then, when asked directly by followers if it was “you” who was responsible for the monolith, they responded, “if by you, you mean us, yes.” And yet, they released no footage of the monument being erected, only after-the-fact claims. One might even question the trustworthiness of these claims when, shortly after attempting to take credit, The Most Famous Artist began selling replica monoliths for $45,000 each.
But further than that, even if the Utah monolith was created by a rogue art group and dismantled by environmentalists, as they both claim, this hardly explains the appearance of monoliths in so many other locales around the globe, especially in remote or hard-to-reach places.
Still, consider the inherent suggestion that the monoliths are, in fact, some sort of art project. After all, as monoliths continued to appear all over the world, major news sources like CNN were asking:
“Is the Utah monolith this year’s viral art moment?” Say that it is. We live in an era of information and technology, where we expect answers to any question we can think of instantly. As an art project then, the mystery of the metallic monoliths is a powerful cultural balm, the implicitly unknowable in the age of information. As one commentator put it, the Utah monolith was “…literally sending people into the desert looking, not for answers, but for questions.”What type of artist is capable of delivering such a powerful message?
John McCracken’s Monoliths
Some have suggested the monoliths must be the work of famed sculptor John McCracken, who died in 2011. During his life, he was well known for work eerily similar to the monoliths now appearing.
Curiously, McCracken’s son told The New York Times that he once said he would like to “leave his artwork in remote places to be discovered later.” In fact, The David Zwirner Gallery, which represents McCracken’s estate, even tweeted: “The portal to Utah is David Zwirner 20th street.”
When considering if this might solve the mystery, it must be asked: who was John McCracken?
Most significantly, McCracken was a man known to be extremely interested in extraterrestrials, space, and time travel. As his son described: “He believed in advance alien races that were able to visit earth. To his mind, these aliens had been visiting Earth for a very long time.” In fact, McCracken even kept a diary he called “Remote Viewing and Psychic Traveling.” In it, he recorded contacting “aliens,” “high minded beings,” and “the ghost of my grandfather;” he even described traveling above the earth in a spaceship.
Were these merely the ramblings of an eccentric artist, or something more?
In 2006, five years before his death, McCracken put on an exhibition which consisted of tall, shiny monoliths, described as:
“…sentinels or guideposts [which] seemed to mark some kind of landing strip for extraterrestrials or UFOs.”McCracken himself called his work: “the kind of work that could have been brought here by a UFO.”
Maybe the monoliths now appearing are not the work of McCracken, but rather, maybe the work of McCracken simply knew what was coming, what would be “brought here by a UFO,” and what it would look like when it was. Having, according to his diary, traveled into space, perhaps McCracken knew what alien landing strips would look like when their ships came to earth – a series of metallic monoliths.
The Monoliths Remaining a Mystery
As the mystery of metallic monoliths continues, many cynics are waiting for a disappointing reveal, for one company or another to come forward and disclose that it was all some sort of marketing ploy, a viral ad campaign that worked better than anyone could have hoped or imagined.
But before writing off the metallic monoliths, consider carefully the words of The Guardian:
“It would be ironic if these structures really are the work of highly intelligent extraterrestrials trying to make first contact – but we’re so jaded by art pranks and sci-fi cliches that we’re taking it for an elaborate stunt.”
The message? Keep an open mind, and stay tuned!