![]() It is still possible for an artist, or a prankster, or an artist-prankster, to slip undetected into the backcountry and leave something weird and alluring behind. ![]() The appearance of a monolith in a hinterland is a satisfying reminder that the world remains very large. In an age of GPS mapping and Google Earth, we may feel that the planet has been demystified, down to the centimeter - that there is no more unsurveilled terrain. Their spread so captivated social media that many wondered whether the world was falling for a viral marketing campaign.īut the appeal of the monolith touches deeper depths than the usual dopamine hits of the viral internet. and around the globe, from Romania to Morocco to Paraguay. Weeks after the structure vanished, monolith fever has not abated, with copycats springing up across the U.S. If we accept that it was a guerrilla art intervention, it was clearly successful, seizing public attention in ways a commissioned work never could. The mystery of who created the monolith may never be solved. One clip shows workers in green jumpsuits descending a rock formation while a voice chuckles off-camera: “OK, the intrepid explorers go down to investigate the alien life form.” A second video focuses in on the “life form”: a triangular pillar, nearly 10 feet tall, sheathed in metal and held together with rivets. What followed is documented in brief cellphone videos. The crew landed and went to investigate on foot. 18, a Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter crew, flying over public land in San Juan County with a team of biologists to conduct an aerial count of bighorn sheep, spotted an object that, clearly, was not a sheep. Recently, an alien presence of another kind brought this place into the news. The desert is, literally, home to would-be Martians. Since 2001, a group advocating the human settlement of Mars has maintained a research center outside a small town called Hanksville, where crews live for weekslong stretches to simulate habitation on the red planet. sightings, and its arid terrain, dotted with crimson sandstone outcroppings, has often been likened to Mars. Other local legends hold that the desert is haunted by screaming ghosts or stalked by a phantom wolf. Indigenous people from the region have told stories of deities who formed the mountains by sweeping rocks through a hole in the heavens, and of warrior gods who stomped the topography into existence with their mighty footfalls. It is a fantastical landscape, the kind of scenery that pulls your thoughts toward things not quite of this earth. The desert of southeastern Utah is a wilderness of flat-topped mesas, jutting buttes and plunging canyons.
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