2020, it’s fair to say, was an odd year. With a pandemic moving across the world and all the life changes that involved, it’s easy to forget smaller stories, like that weird few months when monoliths started popping up around the world like Starbucks, sometimes containing cryptic messages.
Well, good news if you missed it, because they are back and doing what they love; randomly appearing in deserts. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department stumbled across one such “mysterious monolith” last weekend.
The new monolith looks a lot like the old monoliths.
Image credit: LVMPD
“MYSTERIOUS MONOLITH!” the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department wrote on X (Twitter). “We see a lot of weird things when people go hiking like not being prepared for the weather, not bringing enough water… but check this out. Over the weekend, [the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department] spotted this mysterious monolith near Gass Peak north of the valley.”
It’s unclear when the “monolith” was placed, or by who. It is the latest in a long line of monoliths, which have shown up in Romania, California, and Turkey. People have claimed credit for some of them (though we should note somewhere that real monoliths are made of a single block of stone, unlike these) and others can be dismissed as likely copycats, but the person/group behind the original monolith remains unknown.
The first monolith, discovered in Red Rock County, Utah, in 2020, was dismantled and found by Internet sleuths trawling Google Maps to have been placed there some time between August 2015 and October 2016. It was removed shortly after discovery and returned to the Bureau of Land Management, which still has it now pending an “investigation”.
As for who put it there, several artists have been suggested, and several have denied involvement. One Twitter user believed they had solved the mystery, with some fairly compelling evidence to back it up.
They shared a screenshot of the Instagram page of photographer Eliot Lee Hazel. The “builder” of the monoliths tagged in the Instagram photos, the tweeter claimed, lives in Utah relatively near where the new monolith was found. He and the agency the photographer worked with appear to have deleted posts showcasing similar artworks, though this of course could be an unrelated social media clear-up.
Lee Hazel has since denied being behind the monoliths, suggesting another local artist and monolith maker, Derek DeSpain, may have been involved.
In summary, we may never know who exactly placed the monoliths, but we can hedge our bets and say it was an art project, or perhaps a prop from a film, left behind carelessly and prompting a strange craze in an even stranger year.
We’d imagine that this new monolith may have been placed during the original craze and hasn’t been noticed until now, or perhaps people are already getting nostalgic for one of the worst years in recent times.
