A mysterious metal “obelisk” found buried in a remote western US desert has inflamed the imaginations of UFO spotters, conspiracy theorists and Stanley Kubrick fans around the world.
The shiny, triangular pillar — which protrudes about 3.7m from the red rocks of southern Utah — was spotted on Wednesday last week by baffled local officials counting bighorn sheep from the air.
Landing to investigate, Utah Department of Public Safety crew members found “a metal monolith installed in the ground,” but “no obvious indication of who might have put the monolith there.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
“It is illegal to install structures or art without authorization on federally managed public lands, no matter what planet you’re from,” the agency said in a tongue-in-cheek press release on Monday.
News of the discovery quickly went viral online, with many noting the object’s similarity with strange alien monoliths that trigger huge leaps in human progress in Kubrick’s classic sci-fi 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Others remarked on its discovery during a turbulent year that has seen the world gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic, and optimistically speculated it could have a different function entirely.
Photo: AFP / Utah Department of Public Safety
“This is the ‘reset’ button for 2020. Can someone please press it quickly?” one Instagram user joked.
“Up close it reads: ‘COVID vaccine inside,’” another wrote.
With officials refusing to disclose the object’s location out of fear that hordes of curious sightseers would flock to the remote wilderness, a race has also begun online to geolocate the “obelisk” using surrounding rock formations.
Bret Hutchings, the pilot who happened to fly over the obelisk, speculated that the obelisk had been planted by “some new wave artist.”
Some observers cited the object’s resemblance to the avant-garde work of John McCracken, a US artist who lived for a time in New Mexico, and died in 2011.
A spokeswoman for his representative, David Zwirner, on Tuesday 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 in which he suggested the piece was indeed by McCracken, meaning it had lain undiscovered in the desert for nearly a decade.
“The gallery is divided on this,” Zwirner said. “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,” he added.
Either way, Hutchings said it was “about the strangest thing I’ve come across out there, in all my years of flying.”
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