Mysterious desert monolith disappears, heralding either doom or reveal of viral ad campaign
Aux Features Aux
Last week, a mysterious metal monolith was discovered in a remote area of Utah. A few investigators, failing to heed the lessons of basically every sci-fi and horror story ever told, arrived, proceeded to touch the thing, and announced basically that none of them knew how the hell it had come to be implanted in the desert floor. Now, the monolith has disappeared just as inexplicably as it arrived.
Utah’s Bureau Of Land Management tweeted on Saturday that “the illegally installed structure, referred to as the ‘monolith’ has been removed by an unknown party.” The account recently followed up on that message to say only that, “we may not know if an extraterrestrial or earthling installed the ‘monolith’ structure, but we can confirm that it has been taken by an unknown party or parties.”
This cheeky tone suggests that the government either doesn’t really care about the weird monolith or that they know exactly what it is and are covering up its removal to a secret underground base where 12-foot tall reptiles are eager to have it back so they can continue watching alien sitcoms through its holographic display. Even if our officials won’t give us any answers to the many questions the monolith raises, though, people like a YouTuber who goes by Heavy D (hell yeah, brother) are trying to fill in the blanks. Heavy D filmed himself locating the thing “in the middle of nowhere,” noting that one of its GPS coordinates contains the numbers “666.” He was disappointed to discover it looked to be made with human technology.
Now that it’s gone, this might be all the information we’re going to get on the monolith. Our natural inclination is to suggest that its disappearance is part of a secret alien-government conspiracy that will culminate with the arrival of an apocalyptic alien invasion fleet on New Year’s Eve and the transformation of Earth into an intergalactic resource-extraction hub where humans toil endlessly in service of evil extra-dimensional monsters. Another part of us knows it can all be chalked up to something more banal—the creation of a dedicated Kubrick fan or a viral ad campaign for Tenet’s home video release.
This is the modern day and if the end times are coming, we sure as hell can’t separate the signs of our species’ impending doom from the work of obsessive hobbyists or marketing campaigns.
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36 Comments
The monolith died on the way back to its home planet.
Wow! The monolith came from another planet?
Whenever the monolith is not in an A.V. Club article, everyone should ask, “Where’s the monolith?”
Isn’t the more obvious Simpsons reference that fake angel skeleton Lisa discovered, which turned out to be an elaborate marketing stunt for the new mall?
monorail!
MONOLITH!
Boy, I sure hope someone got fired for that blunder!
All we need to worry about it keeping a close eye on Jupiter and just remember HAL’s message:
In real life I’d give it about six months before this led to us racing to land on Europa because who are these alien jagoffs to tell us what to do?
Basically it’s what happens in The Expanse.
That video is the best descriptor of a Trumper I’ve ever seen, from his awesome “Back the Blue” shirt to his first inclination to start punching a strange object he finds.
we, as a species, deserve extinction at this point.
Technically, because it was presumably made of metal, not stone, shouldn’t we use a different term besides “monolith”?
Well, “lith” is from the Greek “lithikos” meaning “stony.” The Greek word for metal is… “métallo”. So “monometal” would be the eqiuvalent.
Monolouminius
Now I know what to name my metal band, thank you!
RoboBoner, perhaps?
Wasn’t it replaced with a small pyramid? Or is that gone now too?
It was a pyramid shaped rock and some other rocks stacked where the monolith used to stand.
Earthlings of AV Club. The Monolith was always meant to be a marker, a sentinel if you will, marking your progress from the Dawn of Man through to the future. We even developed a far more streamlined version in gleaming unobtanium to reflect back exactly who and where you are in the Cosmos. Sorry to say we have pulled up stakes; we’ve all but given up on you guys. Get your shit together and maybe we’ll be back on Jan 20, 2021
that’s….a very specific date.
They originally scheduled it for tbe 18th, but they had to reschedule due to the Earth being closed for Martin Luther King Jr. Day
The merchandising will never forget.
I have that. 0 points of articulation.
The aliens really thought our civilization would’ve been farther along by 2001 or so.
2001: A Space Odyssey2010: The Year We Make Contact2020: Get Your Shit Together, Earth
Alternative title: 2020: An Arse Oddity
Well, the Alaskan parks service had to move the “Into the Wild” bus because so many ass wipes were getting stranded or dying trying to reach it to take selfies. My bet is something similar happened or the person who originally placed it there came back for it because once the first idiot posted a video of himself in front of the monolith it had lost all its beauty and mystery so fuck ‘em, fuck ‘em all.
“Heavy D did a monolith video? Man, I gotta see— wait, hold up, isn’t he dead?”That 3 second moment was a small rollercoaster of disappointment.
The aliens do not arrive on New Year’s Eve. They arrive on December 23rd. Everyone knows that.
a viral ad campaign for Tenent’s home video release.A movie so good nobody can spell its (five letter) title!
Meh. It totally wasn’t cool anymore after it got so popular. I only liked its early stuff anyway.
. . . I got nothin’.
you spelled ‘tenet’ wrong
the government removed it because they knew crazy people would wander off and die if they left it now that enough people who know how to do deep desert hikes have posted youtube videos. they also wont say it because they don’t want crazy people to yell at them about aliens, which is deeply fair
It was said you can see the monolith in Google Earth picts going all the way back to 2016.
Well, it might not have granted us a higher level of intelligence, but it did inspire the game Interstellar Pong.