Originally published 2020-11-26.
On 18 November 2020, wildlife biologists counting bighorn sheep from a Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter spotted a shiny metal pillar standing alone in a red-rock canyon in south-eastern Utah. It looked strikingly like the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and within days it was one of the most talked-about objects on the internet. It turned out to be a hollow, riveted sheet-metal sculpture about 9.5 feet tall that had quietly stood there since 2016. Its maker has never been confirmed, and it was taken down only nine days after it was found.
What the helicopter crew found
The flight was routine wildlife work. Officers from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources were surveying bighorn sheep, with DPS pilot Bret Hutchings at the controls. One of the biologists noticed the glint below and called for the helicopter to circle back. The crew landed nearby and walked over to take a look.
Hutchings later joked with KSL-TV about the crew’s first reaction. “We were kind of joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, then the rest of us make a run for it,” he said. His more serious guess was that an artist, or a big fan of the Kubrick film, had put it there.
The KSL news team filmed the object and the crew on the ground, and the footage spread quickly around the world.
The @UtahDPS helicopter was assisting the @UtahDWR in counting bighorn sheep in remote southern Utah Wednesday when the crew encountered something entirely 'out of this world'...@KSL5TV #KSLTV #Utah
— Andrew Adams (@AndrewAdamsKSL) November 21, 2020
Photojournalist: @Photog_Steve5 pic.twitter.com/f8P0fayDIS
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How big was it, and what was it made of?
The crew estimated the pillar at 10 to 12 feet tall. Later measurements put it closer to 9.5 feet (2.9 metres). It was a three-sided prism, not a rectangular slab like the film prop, with each side of its triangular base about 1.9 feet wide.
The panels appeared to be stainless steel or aluminium, roughly an eighth of an inch thick, joined with blind rivets. It was hollow and not magnetic. The base sat in a hole cut into the sandstone, which showed it had been deliberately installed on site rather than dropped from the air.
How long had it been there?
Internet sleuths found the site, in Lockhart Basin in northern San Juan County, within a day or two by matching the crew’s video to satellite imagery. Historical satellite pictures then showed something the crew had no way of knowing: the monolith first appears in images taken between July and October 2016. In other words, it had stood in the canyon for about four years before anyone in authority noticed it.
The location lies about 17 miles south-west of Moab, in land that is now part of Bears Ears National Monument.
Who made it? The leading theories
- John McCracken: the late American sculptor made sleek, monolith-like pieces and once talked about leaving works in remote places. His gallery, David Zwirner, at first said the object looked nearly identical to his 2011 piece Fair, then said it was more likely a homage by another artist.
- The Most Famous Artist: an artist collective that sold “monolith” pieces online claimed credit, then admitted the Utah object was not theirs.
- Petecia Le Fawnhawk: online speculation pointed to this Utah-linked artist, who denied any involvement.
As of 2025 the creator remains unknown. Given that it was made from thin, light panels, a small team could plausibly have carried and assembled it; earlier claims that a large crew must have been involved are guesswork.
Why officials kept the location quiet, and what happened next
The DPS crew deliberately kept the location vague, worried that curious visitors would get stranded or hurt in rugged country with no water, no phone signal and steep drops. Officials also reportedly noted that installing structures on federally managed public land without authorisation is not allowed.
The secrecy did not last. Crowds of visitors drove in over a single weekend, leaving tyre tracks and litter in the fragile desert. On the night of 27 November 2020, four men, including the BASE jumper Andy Lewis and the guide Sylvan Christensen, pushed the pillar over and carried the pieces away, saying they wanted to protect the landscape. Lewis later handed the parts to the Bureau of Land Management.
Utah’s long history of land art
A sculpture in the wilderness was not as strange as it sounded. Utah is home to some of the best-known works of land art, the movement in which artists use the landscape itself as their material. The most famous is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, built in 1970 at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake: a counter-clockwise coil about 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide. It is made of basalt rock and earth, not mud alone as is sometimes said, and salt crystals form on it when the lake is low. Since 1999 it has belonged to the Dia Art Foundation.
The difference is that Spiral Jetty was built openly, on leased land, and is now a protected destination. The monolith was an anonymous installation on public land, which is why its admirers and its critics disagreed so sharply.
Why one metal pillar captured the world
The timing helped. In late 2020 many people were stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a mystery that combined science fiction, art and a treasure hunt was a welcome diversion. Copycats followed almost immediately, including pillars in Romania and California, and by 2024 hundreds of similar structures had been reported worldwide. Most were open homages, which only underlined how unusual the original was: a well-made object, placed quietly years earlier, that nobody has ever convincingly claimed.
Sources: Wikipedia: Utah monolith · KSL-TV: DPS crew discovers mysterious monolith (21 Nov 2020) · Wikipedia: Spiral Jetty
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