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LOS ANGELES (AFP) – A mysterious metal “obelisk” found buried in the remote desert of the western United States has fired the imaginations of UFO watchers, conspiracy theorists and Stanley Kubrick fans around the world.
The bright, triangular pillar, protruding approximately 3.6 meters from the red rocks of southern Utah, was discovered last Wednesday (November 18) by puzzled local officials counting bighorn sheep from the air.
Upon landing to investigate, crew members from the Utah Department of Public Safety found “a metal monolith installed in the ground,” but “no obvious indication of who might have put the monolith there.”
“It is illegal to install unauthorized structures or art on public lands administered by the federal government, no matter what planet you are from,” the agency warned in an ironic press release Monday.
News of the discovery quickly went viral online, with many noted the object’s similarity to strange alien monoliths that unleashed huge strides in human progress in Kubrick’s 2001 science fiction classic: A Space Odyssey.
Others commented on its discovery during a turbulent year in which the world was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and optimistically speculated that it could serve an entirely different function.
“This is the ‘reset’ button for 2020. Can anyone quickly press it?” joked an Instagram user.
“Up close it reads: ‘Covid Vaccine Inside,'” wrote another.
With officials refusing to reveal the object’s location for fear that hordes of onlookers will wander into the remote desert, an online race has also begun to geolocate the “obelisk” using the surrounding rock formations.
Bret Hutchings, the pilot who flew over the obelisk, speculated that the obelisk had been planted by “some new wave artist.” Some observers noted the resemblance of the object to the avant-garde work of John McCracken, an American artist who lived for a time in nearby New Mexico and passed away in 2011.
On Tuesday, a spokesman for his representative, David Zwirner, said it was not a work by McCracken, but possibly a fellow artist paying tribute.
However, later that day, Zwirner gave another statement in which he suggested that the piece was by McCracken, meaning that it had remained undiscovered in the desert for nearly a decade.
“The gallery is divided on this,” Zwirner said. “I think it’s definitely John’s.” He added: “Who would have known that 2020 had another surprise for us. Just when we thought we had seen it all. Let’s see it.”
Either way, Hutchings admitted it was “the strangest thing I’ve come across in all my years of flying.” “We were joking that if one of us suddenly disappears, the rest of us will run away,” he told local news channel KSLTV.
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