In a year of unprecedented events, no news story in 2020 has brought me as much wide-eyed curiosity and bottomless fascination as the unexplained appearance of a free-standing monolith statue in northern Utah.
In mid-November, state biologists of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources were conducting a survey of bighorn sheep from a helicopter when they noticed a shiny metallic object nestled into a red sandstone slot canyon in a remote area less than 20 miles outside Moab.
When the scientists circled back to get a closer look, they discovered that the object was three panels of metal riveted to a frame, moored into the ground, with no apparent disruption to the land around it. The desert area is public land, but only after it was removed from the previously protected Bears Ears National Monument in 2017 by President Trump. Even though it’s public land, it lacks public services like roads, parking, restrooms, and even cell-phone service.
Utah's Department of Public Safety and the US Bureau of Land Management had no idea what this object was, where it came from, who made it, and how long it had been there. Citing public safety concerns, federal and state governments were loath to identifying the object's specific location. Media outlets began playfully referring to the object as a "monolith" - a reference to the free-standing item of unidentifiable origin from the 1968 science-fiction masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey." Naturally, this only stoked public interest.
Within a few days of the news announcement, internet sleuths pieced together the object's location using satellite imagery, news photographs, Google Earth mapping, and GPS. Research also revealed that the item had seemingly been installed sometime around 2016. Having solved at least two of the monolith's mysteries - its location and its installation's rough date - the public began arriving in droves.
The local government continued to ask people to stay away, adding that an influx of visitors could damage local sites that belong to Indigenous/Native American communities. It didn't stop visitors from coming.
It's not hard to understand the curiosity, and for every simple explanation, countless conspiracy theories emerged. Some speculated that it was an art installation, with many pegging the piece to deceased installation artist John McCracken. Others rejoiced in the possibility that it was from an alien world, an idea certainly supported by all of the "2001: A Space Odyssey" talk. Ultimately, though, this was most unlikely based on the object's very Earth-based construction.
My curiosity saw it as something else entirely - it felt like a marker or memorial, perhaps an altar, that was intended to recognize something significant that happened in that place.
It's not an outrageous thought - our daily lives are full of markers and remembrances of important things that happened in unimportant places. Since the earliest days of our species, we've planted markers in the ground to serve as checkpoints, navigational guides, and as a way to acknowledge the dead.
There was something about the simplicity of this object that captured my imagination and lead me to think it was more than art but less than science-fiction. Most of the photos that emerged of the item showed that it reflected the rocks around it. From every angle, you could see the dark reddish hues of the sandstone that surrounded the area. This, too, felt symbolic to me - as if the thing it was memorializing was the crumbling rock around it. At the end of this insanely horrific year, the Utah monolith provided a distraction full of hope, curiosity, and perhaps even humanity’s reverence. One thing was sure - it didn't arrive there accidentally. Someone put it there to serve some kind of purpose.
The sudden inrush of visitors brought no answers, but it did inspire copycats. A similarly-constructed monolith appeared in Romania and another in Northern California. More theories emerged about a global conspiracy of monoliths. Yet, despite an apparent similarity, each of the copycats was made of different material and design.
On December 1, the monolith in Utah was destroyed and removed by a team of four athletes concerned about the impact all of the visitation was having on the surrounding natural habitat. The Romanian monolith was removed a day after its discovery, with reports indicating that it had been installed on private property and uninstalled for that same reason. The California monolith disappeared 24 hours after its discovery as well.
When futurist and author Arthur C. Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick invented their imposing monolith in 1968 for "2001: A Space Odyssey," it served as more than just a symbol, but a marker, meant to usher in a new phase in human evolution.
It appears four times in the film, and always shortly before humanity makes its jump to a new epoch. It's first discovered by a horde of prehistoric apes, and it quickly comes to represent how something foreign and inexplicable creates tension and anxiety. The apes fear the monolith. That fear eventually leads to the discovery of tools, which then become weapons. Once the apes learn to kill for the benefit of self-preservation, the apes enter into the dawn of man.
The last time we encounter the monolith is right before the film's final shot, looming over the body of the movie's protagonist as he dies and is reborn as a massive fetus - a star child orbiting Earth as a representation of an unwritten future full of endless possibilities.
Though I initially rejected the cutesy media narrative of comparing the Utah monolith to that story of "2001: A Space Odyssey," in the end, the two are actually quite relative and similar. In Clarke’s and Kubrick's vision of the future (hard to believe the story they told takes place almost twenty years in our past), the monolith's origin and purpose are never revealed. Ditto that of the object in Utah.
At this point, the copycatting of what happened outside Moab leads me to believe that we will never have a reliable explanation, and that's OK. Whether it was art or memorial, a bit of whimsy or something more extra-terrestrial, it was more than the human species could respect. Instead of treating it with reverence or searching ourselves for a higher meaning, it became a tourist attraction in a part of the country that was still free from corporate influence and oversight.
Instead of seeing ourselves or the world around it reflected in the muted metallic walls of that inexplicable object, we trampled its territory, endangered its neighbors, and ultimately tore it down and carted it off in a wheelbarrow.
I am sure more of these things will pop up all over the world. Wherever they show up next, I hope we are smart enough to learn when to give up on our destructive impulses and finally evolve into creatures of endless possibilities.