The bright triangular pillar protruded about 12 feet from the red rocks of southern Utah.
The Angels:
A mysterious metal monolith found in the remote desert of the western United States, which sparked a national guessing game about how it got there, has apparently disappeared, authorities said.
The Utah Bureau of Land Management said Saturday it had received “credible reports” that the object had been removed “by an unknown party” on Friday night.
The office “did not remove the structure that is considered private property,” it said in a statement.
“We do not investigate crimes related to private property that are handled by the local sheriff’s office.”
The bright triangular pillar, protruding about 12 feet from the red rocks of southern Utah, was discovered Nov. 18 by bewildered local officials counting bighorn sheep from the air.
After landing their helicopter to investigate, crew members from the Utah Department of Public Safety found “a metal monolith installed on the ground,” but “no obvious indication of who could have put the monolith there.”
2020 ‘reset button’
News of the discovery quickly went viral, with many noting the object’s similarity to strange alien monoliths that unleashed huge advances in human progress in Stanley Kubrick’s classic sci-fi film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Others commented on its discovery during a turbulent year in which the world was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, optimistically speculating that it could serve an entirely different function.
“This is the ‘reset’ button for 2020. Can anyone quickly press it?” joked an Instagram user.
“Someone took the time to use some kind of concrete cutting tool or something to really dig, almost exactly the shape of the object, and embed it really well,” Nick Street, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety told the New York. Times.
“It’s strange,” he added. “There are roads nearby, but transporting the materials to cut the rock and transport the metal, which is over 12 feet in sections, doing all of that in that remote location is definitely interesting.”
Some observers noted the object’s resemblance to the avant-garde work of John McCracken, an American artist who lived for a time in nearby New Mexico and died in 2011.
His son, Patrick McCracken, told the Times recently that his father had told him in 2002 that “he would like to leave his artwork in remote places to be discovered later.”
Although officials had refused to reveal the location of the object for fear that hordes of curious tourists would flock to the remote desert, some explorers had been able to track it down.
Instagram user David Surber said he walked to the monolith using coordinates posted on Reddit.
“Apparently the monolith is gone,” he later posted.
“Nature returned to its natural state, I guess. Something positive for people to come together in 2020.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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