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A stark, featureless monolith, standing alone in the middle of a vast, quiet desert. No one knows who made it, how it got there, or what purpose it serves, but its minimalist, futuristic appearance sticks out in bizarre contrast to the rugged, untamed landscape surrounding it. Sounds like I'm describing the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey , right?
Well, not this time.
In a bizarre example of life imitating Kubrickian art, a mysterious monolith suddenly appeared in Mojave Desert over the weekend. The inexplicable appearance of the monolith has left most people baffled, but others came away with a sense of deja vu, and not just because of its cinematic parallels.
According to @abcworldnews , this monolith appeared near a hiking trail outside of the Las Vegas area- and not in a particularly "convenient" delivery spot either. CBS News reported that local authorities found the monolith 20 miles outside of Las Vegas on Gass Peak, the highest peak in the Las Vegas range at nearly 7,000 feet.
Related: Friends' Attempt to Follow Google Maps Out of Las Vegas Ends in a Major Misadventure
"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!" Las Vegas Metro Police shared in a Facebook post Monday, advising any curious hikers to prepare accordingly and stay safe on the trail. The authorities were seemingly just as baffled as anyone else about this bizarre monolith, which was discovered on the desert mountain peak by the local search and rescue team.
Are Monoliths Making a Comeback?
As noted in the ABC report, this isn't the first time a real-life 2001 -esque monolith has popped up in a random place with no explanation. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, these monoliths began appearing in bizarre, remote places, mostly in the American Southwest.
According to Vox 's timeline of events, the first monolith was discovered in the Utah desert on November 18, 2020, before disappearing nine days later. The day the Utah monolith disappeared, another appeared in northern Romania, where it stayed until December 2 - the same day another monolith popped up in Atascadero, California . The California one remained for only 2 days, and a final monolith showed up for one day only on December 7 in Albuquerque, New Mexico .
According to The Independent , multiple artists and art groups have tried to take credit for the monoliths, including the original one in Utah, but the first monolith's origins remain unclear . Stranger still, while the Utah monolith was discovered in late 2020, it was actually out there for much longer. According to the BBC , internet sleuths who went scrubbing through Google Earth found the monolith recorded on satellite imagery as far back as October 2016, over four years prior to its discovery.
Like the Utah monolith, the origins and purpose of the new Las Vegas monolith remain a total mystery. Conspiracy theories and odd speculations about its creator(s) abound across the internet- avant-garde artists, aliens, pranksters, occultists - but no one's come close to a definite answer. Will 2024 be the year we finally unravel the monolith mystery, or will the obelisks' origins remain obscured?
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