Originally published 2020-12-02.
At the end of November 2020, a shiny metal pillar appeared on Bâtca Doamnei, a wooded hill on the edge of Piatra Neamț in north-eastern Romania. It turned up only days after the world had become fascinated by a metal monolith found in the Utah desert, and it vanished again within about four days.
So what was it? The most likely answer is a local copycat: a roughly 2.8-metre (about 9-foot) column of sheet metal, put up without permission on a protected archaeological site and quietly removed. Reporters in Piatra Neamț noted that it was covered in hand-made swirls and had rough welded joints, very different from the clean riveted panels of the Utah object. No artist or group publicly took credit, and the two monoliths have never been shown to be connected.
Here is what is known about the Romanian pillar, how it fitted into the wave of monoliths that followed Utah, and why the place it stood matters.
When and where the Romanian monolith appeared
The pillar was spotted around Thursday 26 and Friday 27 November 2020 on Bâtca Doamnei hill, which overlooks the city of Piatra Neamț in Neamț County. It stood among trees close to the remains of an ancient Dacian fortress, the kind of setting that guarantees both curiosity and concern from heritage officials.
Early reports put its height at 10 to 12 feet, echoing the Utah figures, but later coverage citing Reuters gave a more modest height of about 9 feet. Pictures showed a tall metal column with a mirror-like surface marked by deliberate circular patterns, which some readers took as mysterious symbols and which looked more like the swirl marks a metalworker leaves when polishing.
By Tuesday 1 December the pillar was gone. Robert Iosub, a reporter with a local Piatra Neamț paper, told Reuters that all that remained was a small hole covered with stony soil. Local police said they were investigating the illegal installation, and Iosub suggested it had probably been made by an unidentified local welder.
Why the location raised concern
Bâtca Doamnei is not just any hilltop. Archaeologists have excavated a fortified Dacian settlement there, dated to roughly the first century BC and first century AD, and it is widely identified with Petrodava, a place name recorded in antiquity. The site is protected, which means building anything on it requires permission.
That was the main point made by local heritage officials. Rocsana Josanu of the Neamț County culture and heritage directorate was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying: "It is in a protected area on an archaeological site." She added that the land was privately owned, that the owner of the pillar was unknown, and that any installation would have needed approval from her office and then from the Ministry of Culture.
Even a light metal structure can damage buried layers if posts are driven into the ground, so the concern was practical, not just bureaucratic. Unauthorised digging is one of the most common threats to archaeological sites in Europe.
The Utah monolith that started it all
The craze began on 18 November 2020, when biologists from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources were counting bighorn sheep from a helicopter. One of them spotted a gleaming pillar in a red-rock slot canyon in the Lockhart Basin of San Juan County, south-west of Moab, and pilot Bret Hutchings circled back so the crew could land and take a look.
The Utah object was about 2.9 metres (9.5 feet) tall, a hollow triangular prism made of thin metal sheets joined with rivets. Officials held back its location, citing the remote, hazardous terrain, but online sleuths found it within about a day by matching helicopter footage to satellite images. Those images suggested it had been installed between July and October 2016, years before anyone noticed.
The US Bureau of Land Management reminded people that installing structures on public land without permission is illegal "no matter what planet you're from." On the night of 27 November, a group of four Moab residents, including Andy Lewis and Sylvan Christensen, dismantled and carried it away, saying they wanted to protect the fragile desert from the crowds the monolith was drawing. Lewis later handed it to the BLM. The news of its disappearance broke at almost the same moment as the reports from Romania.
The link to 2001: A Space Odyssey
Almost everyone who saw the pictures thought of the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film, a perfectly smooth slab appears to early human ancestors and seems to spark the leap to tool use; later monoliths appear on the Moon and near Jupiter. The film's slab is a black block with sides in the ratio 1:4:9.
The real pillars looked quite different: they were shiny rather than black, and the Utah pillar was a three-sided prism rather than a flat slab. But the idea of an unexplained object appearing in a lonely place was close enough. The resemblance turned a local oddity into a global story, and it is a big part of why the mystery travelled so fast.
A wave of copycat monoliths
Romania was only the beginning. On 2 December 2020 another metal pillar appeared on Pine Mountain in Atascadero, California, and was soon torn down and replaced with a wooden cross by a group of young men. More followed on the Isle of Wight in England, where a local designer later said he had made one, as well as in Pittsburgh and many other places.
By mid-2024, at least 245 similar structures had been recorded around the world. Some were art pieces made in tribute to Utah, some were marketing stunts by small businesses, and a few were never explained. The Romanian pillar belongs to that last, loosely explained group: probably local, probably a prank, and certainly not from space.
Myths and facts about the monoliths
"The Romanian monolith was identical to the one in Utah." It was not. It was shorter, decorated with swirls and welded rather than riveted.
"US officials removed the Utah monolith." The BLM said it was not involved. Local residents took it down.
"Aliens or a secret agency placed them." There is no evidence for that. The Utah pillar shows ordinary construction, and several later monoliths were claimed by artists or businesses.
"It was harmless fun." Mostly, but installing anything on a protected archaeological site or fragile desert land can cause real damage, and both locations ended up with crowds and litter.
If you go looking for monoliths, or simply visit places like Bâtca Doamnei, the best practice is the same: stay on marked paths, leave no trace and treat old sites as the irreplaceable records they are.
Sources: Wikipedia: Utah monolith; WSOC-TV/Cox: Mystery monolith reappears in Romania, then vanishes again; Wikipedia: Monolith (Space Odyssey); Daily Mail report quoting Rocsana Josanu; CNN on the Utah monolith's removal.
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