A mysterious monolith that disappeared shortly after being discovered in a Utah desert captured the nation’s attention last week and sent America’s imagination running: What did it mean? How did it get there? And more importantly, who put it there?
It is still unclear who placed the sculpture in the remote section of desert, but we do know who dismantled it: a group of Tik Tokers who said they removed the monolith “because there are clear precedents for how we share and standardize the use of our public lands, natural wildlife, native plants, fresh water sources, and human impacts upon them,” the group said in a statement to CNN.
“The mystery was the infatuation, and we want to use this time to unite people behind the real issues here — we are losing our public lands — things like this don’t help,” the standardizers explained.
But maybe the “loss of public lands” is not the real poverty of our time. Maybe it’s the desire to standardize.
Dozens of hikers traveled to the area to capture pictures of the statue, even though Utah officials did not disclose the monolith’s exact location. Internet detectives, however, managed to locate the monolith’s GPS coordinates using Google Earth.
“This was just a once-in-a-lifetime experience that we couldn’t miss out,” Riccardo Marino, who was traveling from Colorado to California and decided to stop to see the monolith on the way, told KUTV.
Entire internet forums popped up to discuss what the monolith might mean and who might have put it there. Some users believe it was created by an artist “paying homage” to minimalist artist John McCracken, who died in 2011. Others have suggested Petecia Le Fawnhawk, who is known for erecting sculptures in remote locations. Le Fawnhawk, however, has denied creating the Utah monolith.
“Although I cannot claim this one, I did have the thought to plant secret monuments in the desert,” she said in a statement to the Verge. “As we can see, perhaps we could all use a little more mystery.”
She’s right. We’re living in an age where true mystery is hard to come by. It seems everything can be explained away by something or someone who knows more than anyone else. Even the crop circles lost their mystery when it became clear that they were the work of humans, not aliens.
But that didn’t stop the public from going mad every time a new crop circle was discovered. It was this kind of attention that Dough Bower and his co-conspirator Dave Chorley had in mind when they created the first crop circle in 1976. Legend has it that Bower said to Chorley one night, “Let’s go over there and make it look like a flying saucer has landed.” And for years after, the “flying saucer landing spots” remained a cultural phenomenon.
Whoever created the Utah monolith might have been trying to capture that same cultural attention. After all, monoliths popped up in California and Romania almost immediately after the one in Utah was taken down, which suggests someone is trying to keep the object in the news.
Or perhaps the artist is like Le Fawnhawk — someone who understands the thrill of a good mystery and decides to give it to others every once in a while.
