Monolith watchers seeing double
Earthlings are wondering: where in the world will a shiny metal monolith appear next?
First there was the mystery of a gleaming, 3.6-metre pillar discovered in a remote part of the Utah desert on November 18. It vanished 10 days later – but by then a similar object had been found on a hillside in Romania.
Like the first pillar, the slightly smaller one recalled the alien monoliths that play a vital role in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was in a protected archaeological area near an ancient Dacian fortress in Neamt county, but also disappeared this week.
Excitable science fiction enthusiasts are hoping for a third close encounter of the same kind soon. In the meantime, the prevailing view is that both pillars are the work of anonymous artists.
A Colorado photographer told KSTU-TV that he saw four men come to the remote Utah site on Saturday and push over the hollow, stainless steel object.
‘‘One of them said, ‘This is why you don’t leave trash in the desert,’’’ Ross Bernards told the Salt Lake City TV station.
The group broke down the structure into pieces, loaded it into a wheelbarrow and left. ‘‘They just said, ‘Leave no trace’,’’ Bernards said.
The sheriff’s office in San Juan County, Utah 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 accept tips from any of the hundreds of visitors who trekked to see the otherworldly gleaming object deep in the desert.
The visitors had left behind a mess of human waste, cars parked on vegetation and other debris, the Bureau of Land Management said.
Like the Utah structure, whoever placed the object on a hill in the city of Piatra Neamt in northern Romania didn’t follow the proper steps and get a building permit, Mayor Andrei Carabelea said in a Facebook post.
Still, he took it in his stride, joking that some ‘‘cheeky and terrible’’ alien teenagers were likely putting them up around the world, and ‘‘I am honoured they chose our city’’.