A helicopter crew from Utah’s Department of Public Safety recently discovered a large metal monolith in the rocky desert of southeastern Utah. So far, no one knows what the metal object actually is, or how it got there.
Last Wednesday, while helping the Division of Wildlife Resources count bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, members of a helicopter crew from the Utah Department of Public Safety’s Aero Bureau spotted something unusual in the rocky, barren desert below. A smooth, shiny metallic block rising up from the earths isn’t something you usually stumble into around those parts, so the crew decided to land and take a closer look at it. While it failed to do anything worthy of a sci-fi movie, the mysterious structure did raise a lot of questions, most of which remain unanswered.
Photo: Utah Department of Public Safety
“One of the biologists … spotted it, and we just happened to fly directly over the top of it,” pilot Bret Hutchings told CNN affiliate KSL. “He was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, turn around, turn around!’ And I was like, ‘What.’ And he’s like, ‘There’s this thing back there — we’ve got to go look at it!'”
The team landed near the monolith and went to investigate, with one member joking that if something were to happen to any of them, the other should make a run for it. The metal rectangle, which stood between 10 and 12 feet (3 to 3.6 m) tall, failed to do anything special, and appeared to consist of metal sheeting held together by screws. Whoever put it there didn’t just drop it, they went to the effort of cutting the cut rock base and plating the monolith there.
“That’s been about the strangest thing that I’ve come across out there in all my years of flying,” Hutchings said. “I’m assuming it’s some new wave artist or something or, you know, somebody that was a big (‘2001: A Space Odyssey’) fan.”
The Department of Public Safety has decided to keep the location of the mysterious object confidential, for fear that science fiction enthusiasts would flock to it and risk getting injured of stranded in the process. The area is remote, and has very few roads, which makes you wonder how the monolith was brought there. Aliens are out of the question, apparently…
Despite efforts to keep the location of the monolith a secret, the internet has been hard at work trying to pinpoint its whereabouts based on photos released by Utah authorities. According to several Reddit threads, a search location has already been narrowed down.
News of the mysterious monolith found in the remote Utah desert has already made international news headlines, but if whoever is responsible for it comes forward or is discovered by authorities, they risk a hefty fine.
“It is illegal to install structures or art without authorization on federally managed public lands, no matter what planet you’re from,” the Utah Department of Public Safety wrote on its website.
