In November 2020, a helicopter from the Utah Dept. of Public Safety Aero Bureau was conducting a routine headcount of bighorn sheep in the Red Rock area. A biologist with the team could barely believe his eyes when the copter flew over a metal monolith sticking out of the ground, right in the middle of nowhere.
A few days later, the monolith was removed by four "Moab-based recreationists Andy Lewis, Sylvan Christensen, Homer Manson, and an anonymous companion." It's unknown if the four men had a hand in putting the monolith there.
“Somebody took the time to use some type of concrete-cutting tool or something to really dig down, almost in the exact shape of the object, and embed it really well,” said Lt. Nick Street, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety. “It’s odd. There are roads close by, but to haul the materials to cut into the rock, and haul the metal, which is taller than 12 feet in sections — to do all that in that remote spot is definitely interesting.”
What made the monolith so intriguing was that it was placed in a spot where the odds of someone seeing it were extremely low. If it was "public art" of some kind, it wasn't very public.
Now, another monolith has made a mysterious appearance, this time north of the Las Vegas Valley.
NEW MONOLITH
— dove (@dove_360) June 17, 2024
According to a post on X by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, one of those monoliths was spotted by Las Vegas Search & Rescue near Gass Peak just north of the Las Vegas valley over the weekend.
In total, 23 documented monoliths were found around the… pic.twitter.com/nzbyFTcM0z
The mysterious trend from 2020 has resurfaced with the appearance of a new mirrored column near a peak north of Las Vegas in mid-June.
"Over the weekend, Las Vegas Metro Search and Rescue spotted this mysterious monolith near Gass Peak north of the valley," the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Force posted on Facebook. "HOW did it get up there??"
Gass Peak is about 20 miles north of Las Vegas and is easily visible throughout most of the Las Vegas Valley.
Other monoliths were placed around the world during a two-week stretch in late 2020 — including one at Las Vegas' Fremont Street Experience, one in California, one in Utah and one in Romania.
"HOW did it get up there??," wondered the Las Vegas police on Facebook. Gass Peak is the highest peak in the Vegas area, easily seen from anywhere in the city and suburbs. If it's "public art," we're left once again with the conclusion that it's art that no one can see except by accident.
Maybe that's the point.
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Craig Muir recorded footage showing the shiny object in March while hiking Hay Bluff near Hay-on-Wye, according to Storyful.
“I come up here most days and I’ve never seen this before,” Muir says in the video, adding that it “almost looks like a UFO.”
Similar monoliths also have been found in Belgium, Romania and the Isle of Wight – an island in the English Channel.
Arthur C. Clark used a monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey" to represent the mystery of human consciousness. Some weird and wonderful powers in the ancient earth monolith gifted early hominids with a cognitive intelligence that gave them an evolutionary advantage over other hominids.
If it's art (and that's the best guess), like all good art, it makes us ask questions of ourselves and, in this case, our environment.
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