Coincidence? The Turner Movie Channel plays the full version of 2001: A Space Odyssey on the weekend, the 1968 classic film directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Then right on cue a strange, large metal monolith, remarkably similar to the one featured in the 52 year old film is discovered in public land desert in Utah,nestled into a canyon. Of course there were no footprints around the 12 foot (3.6 metre) monolith, but there it was, found by wildlife officials counting bighorn sheep from a helicopter in an undisclosed “remote south-eastern area” of Utah.
As the BBC reports, the helicopter crew landed to take a look at the upright plinth, and scrambled down to its location where it had been placed in a carefully cut rock. They did touch the monolith, and it did not set off any response to summon alien beings.
The Utah Department of Public Safety Aero Bureau tried to be in the fun zone in their statement “It is illegal to install structures or art without authorisation on federally managed public lands, no matter what planet you’re from.”
Fearing that people would find the perfect covid pandemic activity of trying to trek into the location of the monolith, the department has made it a big secret.
It did not take long for sleuthers on Reddit to figure out where the monolith was located, and they even established it had been placed there in 2016.
The giveaway on the monolith is that it is held together with steel rivets and is very similar to the work done by artist John McCracken who passed away in 2011. His pieces are polished to achieve a great sense of reflectiveness that “simultaneously activate their surroundings and seem entirely camouflaged” according to his wikipedia page. It’s no surprise that the monolith has already been added as potentially a last playful piece of artwork.
You can take a look at the YouTube video below of the helicopter crew visiting the monolith for the first time. The comments on the video are very typically just what you would expect for something like this being found at the end of the pandemic year of 2020.
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Image:TheArtNewspaper
