Secret location: The location is so remote officials are worried people might get lost trying to find it. Photo / Utah DPS
Secret location: The location is so remote officials are worried people might get lost trying to find it. Photo / Utah DPS
Deep in the Mars-like landscape of Utah's red-rock desert lies a mystery: A gleaming metal monolith in one of the most remote parts of the state.
The smooth, tall structure was found during a helicopter survey of bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, officials said Monday.
A crew from the UtahDepartment of Public Safety and Division of Wildlife Resources spotted the gleaming object from the air on 18th of November and landed to check it out during a break from their work.
They found the three-sided stainless-steel object is about as tall as two men put together. But they discovered no clues about who might have driven it into the ground among the undulating red rocks or why.
Monolith: film buffs immediately drew similarities to the object from 2001: Space Odyssey. Photo / Utah DPS
"This thing is not from another world," said Lt. Nick Street of the Utah Highway Patrol, part of the Department of Public Safety.
Still, it's clear that it took some planning and work to construct the 4-meter monolith and embed it in the rock.
The exact location is so remote that officials are not revealing it publicly, worried that people might get lost or stranded trying to find it and need to be rescued.
The monolith evokes the one that appears in the Stanley Kubrick movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." Because it's on federal public land, it's illegal to place art objects without authorization.
