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New clues have emerged in the disappearance of a gleaming monolith in Utah that seemed to vanish as mysteriously as it appeared in the red rock desert, though it is no longer the only place where a strange structure has come and gone.
A photographer from Colorado told KSTU-TV he saw four men arrive at the remote Utah site Friday night and push the hollow stainless steel object.
“Right after he fell and made a thud, one of them said, ‘That’s why you don’t leave trash in the desert,'” Ross Bernards told Salt Lake City television.
The group broke the structure into pieces, loaded it onto a wheelbarrow and left.
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“As they were carrying it and driving away, they just said, ‘Leave no trace,’” he said.
Terrance Siemon / AP
This photo from Terrance Siemon last Friday shows a monolith that was placed in a red rock desert at an undisclosed location in Utah’s San Juan County. New clues have emerged in the disappearance of the gleaming monolith that seemed to vanish as mysteriously as it appeared in the red rock desert.
The San Juan County sheriff’s office has said it is not planning an investigation into the disappearance of the monolith, which had been placed without permission on public land. But authorities also said they would take advice from any of the hundreds of visitors who came out to see the gleaming otherworldly object deep in the desert.
The bailiff and the Bureau of Land Management, which monitors the land where the object appeared, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on whether they are investigating the removal that Bernards’ group photographed.
Visitors have left a mess of human waste, cars parked on vegetation and other debris, the land agency said. The mysterious structure evoked by the movie 2001: a space odyssey It garnered international attention and sparked much speculation about otherworldly origins, though officials said it was an earthly creation of riveted stainless steel plates.
For Bernards, the visitors’ damage to the environment convinced him that the remote area was better off without the structure.
“Leave art in places where art should be and let Mother Nature have her space for art,” he said.
Utah / AP Department of Public Safety
The exact location of the monolith was so remote that officials did not disclose it publicly, concerned that people would be lost or stranded trying to find it and would have to be rescued.
Utah is not the only place where a monolith arose. A similar metal structure was found on a hill in northern Romania, in the city of Piatra Neamt, but has since disappeared, according to Robert Iosub, a journalist for the local publication ziarpiatraneamt.ro.
Like the Utah structure, whoever placed the object did not follow the proper steps or obtain a building permit, Mayor Andrei Carabelea said in a Facebook post over the weekend. Still, he took it easy, joking that some “cheeky and terrible” alien teens would probably be placing them all over the world.
“I am honored that they have chosen our city,” he said.
