Monolith Mania

Mysterious monoliths are appearing across the world. Here’s what we know.

We don’t know where the mysterious monoliths come from. But we do know they’re art.

By Constance Grady@constancegrady  Dec 4, 2020, 12:00pm EST

The Utah monolith appeared with no warning.

 Utah Department of Public Safety

Into the fiery, plague-ridden nightmare-scape of 2020, like a gift from some benevolent higher being, has come a source of true wonder and delight: the wandering monoliths of Utah, Romania, and California.

The monoliths are long vertical slabs of metal, each 10 to 12 feet tall. They appear with no warning and disappear just as quickly: First, one in the Utah desert, which emerged on November 18 and vanished on November 27. Second, one outside the Romanian city of Piatra Neamt, which appeared on November 27 and disappeared on December 2. And most recently, one at the top of Pine Mountain in Atascadero, California, which appeared on December 2 and was taken down on December 3.

They look like alien artifacts. In part, that’s because they are heavily reminiscent of the monoliths of Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, where vast black monoliths are deposited by aliens to guide human beings from one stage of evolution to the next.

Kubrick or no Kubrick, all three of these real-life monoliths are eerie, solitary objects. No one knows whether another will suddenly appear, or whether it, too, will vanish into the night.

We know very little about these monoliths at all, in fact, and that seems to be part of their point. They are a beautifully inexplicable phenomenon, and proof that the world still contains marvels.

Read more: https://www.vox.com/culture/22062796/monoliths-utah-california-romania

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