It definitely wasn’t planted in a remote Utah canyon by aliens.
Probably.
After all, this is 2020 we’re talking about.
While on a mission to count bighorn sheep last Wednesday, Wildlife Resources officers aboard a Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter spotted a curious sight: a steely, triangular 10- to 12-foot-tall monolith, firmly planted at the bottom of an isolated sandstone gulch.
“During the counts we came across this, in the middle of nowhere, buried deep in the rock,” the department wrote in a caption accompanying the photo on Instagram. “Inquiring minds want to know, what the heck is it? Anyone?”
“One of the biologists is the one who spotted it and we just happened to fly directly over the top of it,” pilot Bret Hutchings told KSLTV.
“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!’”
Hutchings speculated it might be some sort of way-finding device for NASA, but ultimately conceded it’s more likely an art project than something with a deliberate scientific purpose.
Hutchings declined to share the monolith’s exact location, fearing someone might endanger themselves while trying to reach it.
The installation seems to have been ripped straight from a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which a group of ape-men encounter a similar monolith for the first time:
Neither the Bureau of Land Management nor the United States Geological Survey immediately responded to a request for comment Monday regarding the monolith’s potential utility or, if it’s an art project, questionable legality.