It was a cool, clear sunny day on November eighteenth, twenty twenty, as a small group of biologists from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources boarded the helicopter. As they rose up into the sky, the vast red rock desert terrain of southeastern Utah spread out beneath them, looking for all the world, like the surface of Mars. The biologists were doing a survey of bighorn sheep that were dispersed
throughout the expansive landscape. The team asked the pilot to fly to a particularly remote part of the region which they had yet to survey. The group were flying low over a narrow canyon when one of the biologists suddenly shouted out to the pilot to turn the around. What is it, said the pilot. The biologist wasn't sure, saying only that he'd seen something strange and that they should investigate. The pilot pulled back on the cyclic and turned the
chopper around. As they banked and swooped down back over the canyon. The others finally saw it too. What the hell is that, someone muttered. It was inexplicable, a smooth, metallic slab standing upright about three meters high appeared to be embedded deeply into the red rock of the canyon floor. On closer inspection, the object was revealed to be made
of metal sheets riveted into a triangular prism. Helicopter pilot Brett Hutchings said that while the object appeared to be human made, it had to have been deliberately placed on the ground rather than the sky. He said, we were kind of joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, then the rest of us make a run for it. Two days later, Utah's Department of Public Safety announced the unusual find on social media, along with a video and
photographs of the object, alongside a jaunty alien emoji. They told the press they were bafforders to how and why someone would put such an object there, and that its placement on public land was unlawful. They also withheld the exact location to prevent people from endangering themselves while trying
to find it. However, when the news went viral soon after, within hours read it user Tim Slain had identified the object on Google Earth by comparing the flight path of the State biologists helicopter against the red and white sandstone terrain from the videos. Google Earth Satellite images showed that the monolith had been installed sometime after August twenty fifteen, but before October twenty sixteen, around which time scrub vegetation
surrounding the site had been cleared. In other words, the monolith had gone unnoticed for four years. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard mclin smith. The Utah monolith was in a red sandstone slot canyon in San Juan County, in an area known as Lockhart Basin, part of the Bears Ears National Monument, a remote park with no public services, parking, restrooms, or cell phone service. To put it mildly, the spot was difficult to reach, requiring a drive along a dirt
road followed by a considerable hike. Utah's Division of Wildlife Services were mystified in the days following the identification of the object's exact location. Despite Utah's Department of Public Safety's best efforts, members of the public soon started making their way to the strange pillar. Each side was just over
half a meter wide. It was triangular, not magnetic, seemingly hollow, and appeared to be made of stainless steel or aluminium, all joined together with rivets The bedrock appeared to have been sworn to accommodate the base, which was then stuck
down with some kind of silicon adhesive. Its precise age was hard to tell, though it was definitely human mate For men Ny, it looked like an alien artifact, reminiscent of the monoliths from Arthur se Clerk's Space Odyssey series, as iconically depicted by Stanley Kubrick in his classic film adaptation two thousand one as Space Odyssey. In the story, they appear periodically at key points in human evolution, deposited by aliens to guide human beings from one stage of
technological development to the next. Journalists reporting the story waxed lyrical about the puzzling plinth. They variously described it as a mysterious artifact, maybe from aliens, discovered out of nowhere in the middle of the desert during the collective misery
of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Monolith grkas as they became known, started arriving in droves, in cars, on motorbikes, some even coming by plane, but some of the locals in that remote corner of southeastern Utah were not so pleased with it all. One evening, nine days after the object's discovery. As the skies darkened and cool descended over the desert, four men closed in on the monolith, equipped with head torches, portable saws, ropes, and stretchers typically used for desert rescues.
The men were on a mission. One of the party climbed up onto the shiny metal plint, then shone his torch up into the night sky as another team member took a photo. It would be the last shot of the monolith standing. Base jumper Andy Lewis, along with adventure guide Sylvan Christensen and two others, filmed themselves as they began dismantling the metal installation, pulled out the rivets, then
put the separate panels on the stretchers and hauled them away. Eventually, the now disassembled monolith was handed over to Utah's Bureau of Land Management, who put the pieces into storage. The monolith has not been seen in public since. But then more metal columns just like it began to appear everywhere. The first showed up outside the Romanian city of Piatra Nampt on November twenty seventh, then disappeared a week later.
Another was spotted on top of Pine Mountain in a Tascadero, California, also on December two. A fourth slap appeared in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on December seventh, but was taken down the same day. Over the next few weeks, more and more similar objects appeared in countries across the globe, in locations as far apart as Europe, South America, and Australia. To date, over two hundred similar metal columns have been reported from
various locations around the world. Many of the new monoliths were seemingly built by local artists, imitating the Utah installation, but the mystery of who made the original remained. Speculation was rife as to who might have done it, and there was one prime candidate, an eccentric artist who lived for many years in the desert country of New Mexico. Minimalist sculptor John McCracken was born in Berkeley, California, the
son of ranchers Tall and Rangy. With a weather beaten face, McCracken had eyes, wrote one journalist that appeared to have stared too long at the sun. The artist was a keen reader of science fiction. McCracken was also friends with Leonard Nimoy, who played the pointy eared vulcan hero Spock in the original Star Trek TV series and films, who
collected his work. McCracken believed fervently in time travel and extraterrestrial life, including the theory that advanced alien races had been visiting Earth for a very long time and were committed to helping humanity evolve. Who was a precedent for the Utah Object In McCracken's work, he'd made a metallic monolith nearly identical to the Desert mystery piece, now in the possession of gallery owner david's Werner and on display in New York City. There was just one slight problem
with McCracken being responsible for the Utah Monolith. The artist died in twenty eleven from a brain tumor at the age of seventy six, a good four or five years before the object appeared. When John McCracken's son Patrick heard the news about the Utah Monolith, he got chills. It reminded him of a conversation he'd had when he'd visited his father back in two thousand and two. At that time, the artist was living in Meada, Nalis, New Mexico in
a small Adobe house overlooking a mesa. As father and son stood outside gazing up at the night sky, John said he'd like to leave his artwork in remote places to be discovered later. He wasn't your average sort of dad, Patrick recalled, going on to say that he didn't think his dad was joking, and that the monolith's installation in Utah was very much something his father would do. Quite how it would have got there five years after his death is anyone's guess. Perhaps he found the secret to
time travel after all. In December twenty twenty, the David's Werner Gallery put out a statement that the mystery Utah monolith was indeed a bona fide McCracken, although Werner claimed to have no idea who put it there. However, many friends of the artists disagreed. A partner at the gallery who had worked closely with McCracken over the years, also
disagreed with Werner, as did a number of the gallery staff. Eventually, David Bids Werner conceded that the monolith was most likely not a macraken piece, but had instead been made by someone else, paying homage to the deceased artist. The puzzle remained unsolved. The word monolith is somewhat of a misnomer for Utah's strange metallic plinth and its subsequent copycats. The Dictionary definition of a monolith is a large, single, upright block of stone, especially one shaped into or serving as
a pillar or monument. There are several ancient and mysterious monoliths around the world. One of the oldest is thought to be the broken Manere of Agrath, a Neolithic relic dating from around four thousand, five hundred BCE in the province of Brittany, France, now fallen at about twenty one meters high. When it was upright, it would have houred over the surrounding landscape. The village of Asuka in Nara, central Japan, which dates back to two hundred and fifty CE,
is also famous for its mysterious stones. The most well known is the rock Ship of Masuda, comprised of a huge block of granite, approximately eleven meters long, eight meters wide and five meters high and weighing over eight hundred tons, with a flattened top, curved sides, and two meters squared holes chiseled out at the top. It resembles the upturned hull of a boat and is considered a technical marvel
for its age. Arguments still rage over its purpose. Some say it was a marker for a large burial tomb, others that it was used for astronomical observations. Then there are the Bulbeck Stones, six massive blocks of stone in what was ancient Heliopolis now modern day Lebanon, thought to be intended components of a planned temple of Jupiter. One is known as the Stone of the Pregnant Woman and
thought to weigh around one thousand tons. The biggest, the Forgotten Stone, weighing an estimated sixteen hundred and fifty tons, is believed to have been the largest known stone to have been quarried in human history. But it seems that the great size of these stones was also their downfall, perhaps just too huge to maneuver. In the end, they were never being removed from the quarry and still lie close to where they were cut from the surrounding rock.
Although their origins are obscure, All these ancient monoliths are very obviously the work of humans hewn from earth rocks. But what about something a little less earthly? The night of October nineteenth twenty seventeen was a typically tranquil one at the summit of Mount Holeakala on the island of Maui, Hawaii. The tops of fluffy white clouds covering the terrain hundreds of meters below glimmered dimly, reflecting the light from a
myriad of stars overhead. The observatory's white telescope dome moved slowly, motor drives whirring softly, as the one point eight meter telescope inside precisely tracked the slow rotation of the night sky. The two telescopes of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or PAN Stars, were built with the same wide field design used in the Hubble Telescope, part of a program funded by NASA to find and track asteroids
and comets in Earth's neighborhood. The next morning, variously colored lights blinked on the console in the control room. Astronomer Robert Werick returned to his desk with a fresh cup of coffee and continued his work, poring over the images and data that the Panstar telescope had collected the previous night.
So far, he'd found nothing noteworthy, but just then Wherick noticed with interest a faint point of light on one of the images, which, by referring to subsequent images, could be seen moving noticeably across the starry background, a typical telltale sign of a small, fast moving asteroid. The astronomer made a note to keep track of it. Sure enough,
on subsequent nights he observed the same object again. The extra observations allowed him to calculate the orbit reasonably accurately, and those orbital computations did not fit with any asteroid or comet that had ever been observed before. Robert Werwick had found an object that must have come from interstellar space. It was an arrival that astronomers had been waiting a long time for. As observations came in from other large telescopes around the world, the trajectory of the object was
more accurately confirmed. At first, it was classified as a comet. It had been discovered on September ninth, approximately forty days after it had passed its closest point to the Sun, and it was already hurtling back out into interstellar space. But there was something very strange about it. Comets are typically small bodies of dirty ice which warm up they pass around the Sun, causing the gas to sublimate around its core. This creates what's known as a coma, which
also produces a pronounced tale of gas and dust. This new object showed none of those signs. Some of the world's largest optical telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Seti Institutes Radio Telescope, were then turned on the object, which was already very faint and fast heading toward the outer reaches of the Solar System. Radio data was examined to see if it might be transmitting anything, but nothing
was found. However, analysis by Karen Meech from the Institute for Astronomy in Hawaii found that the object varied in brightness by a factor of ten every seven hours. No previously known asteroid or comet had varied so widely in brightness and had such a large ratio between length and width. It was an extremely unusual monolith hurtling through space. Previously known celestial bodies with an elongated shape similar to the mystery object had been no more than three times longer
than they were white. This object was around four hundred meters long but only forty meters wide. Whatever this thing was, it was cigar shape, and instead of rotating around its long axis, it was tumbling end over end through space.
It had a dark reddish hue similar to other asteroids from the Outer Solar System, but appeared to be completely inert without the faintest hint of any emissions, suggestive of an object that was a dense composite of rock and metals with a surface reddened by light years of irradiation
from cosmic rays. When the question of an official classification and name first came up, Rama was suggested from the name given to an alien spacecraft discovered under similar circumstances in Arthur C. Clark's nineteen seventy three novel Rendezvous with Rama. With scientists unable to determine what it was exactly, the object was eventually put in a new class all of its own and reclassified as interstellar asteroid one I two
zero one seven U one. It was also given the name O Muamoor, from the Hawaiian word meaning scout or first distant messenger, to reflect the notion that the object was like a messenger sent from the distance and past and depths of space to reach out to humanity. Nobody could work out which star System. Oh muh Moor had come from planets, asteroids, and comets in our Solar System orbit around the Sun in closed loops. Oh muor Moor's
path was hyperbolic. It had come hurtling in at just over twenty six kilometers per second relative to the Sun's motion from above the disk of the Solar System, so fast that the Sun's gravity could only deflect its path slightly. Why was it such an unusual shape, and how come its outward trajectory away from the Sun showed some non gravitational acceleration, typical behavior for a comet ejecting dust and water vapor to give it an extra push, but not
for a seemingly inert object like O muamor. One year after O Muamua was discovered, a startling hypothesis was put forward by two Harvard astronomers, Avi Lobe and Schmuel Bayali in no lesser publication than the respected Astrophysical journal Letters. Having analyzed the objects excessive radial acceleration and dimensions, the pair concluded that O Muama represented a new class of thin interstellar material, possibly quote produced naturally through a yet
unknown process in the interstellar medium. But they also proposed that O Mua Mua could have an artificial origin, being quite possibly a probe designed for interstellar travel, a type of interstellar light sail. Perhaps. The pair went on to argue that light sales with similar dimensions had already been built by our own civilization. Such light sail technology might be used by advanced alien civilizations to transport cargo between
planets or stars, they suggest it. Or perhaps Ohmoormoor is a piece of space debris no longer operational and ejected from a planetary system, which would account for its unusual geometry, low thermal emissions, high reflectivity, and strange trajectory. The object's red surface color, very similar to the organic rich surfaces of normal Solar System comets, could just be a covering of interstellar dust, they wrote. But the Harvard astronomers went
even further. Using existing pan stars data from known astrais ut Avi Lobe and Schmuel bay Aali calculated that there should be quite a lot of O Muamor like objects out there. If so, why weren't we seeing more? They concluded that the discrepancy meant O Muamor was not on a random trajectory, but instead a targeted probe. They later stated in their paper that O Muamor might even be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth's vicinity by
an alien civilization. By the time the pair had published their startling paper, it was too late to chase O Muamor with rockets. The technology did exist, but it wasn't available to deploy for the strange object's sudden appearance four years earlier. In November twenty fourteen, the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe became the first spacecraft to perform a soft landing on the surface of a comet. Things didn't exactly go to plan. The harpoon system failed, causing the craft
to tumble for two hours before it finally settled. Nevertheless, the probe did send back some intriguing data, finding ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, and hydrogen sulfide on the comet's surface. In twenty twenty two, the European Space Agency announced that its new Comet Interceptor project will launch in twenty twenty nine.
Designed to lie in wait for long period comets coming from the Oort Cloud on the very edge of the Solar System, the probe will also be poised to potentially perform a close encounter with any other small interstellar object such as O Muamoor should one come by back on Earth. Metallic oneths like the one first seen in Utah in
twenty twenty still appear fairly often. In June twenty twenty four, Las Vegas police found another large metal pillar made out of a reflective sheet of metal and molded into a prism. It was found jutting out of rocks near Gas Peak, just outside of Las Vegas. The authorities removed it and took it to a secret location. It's still not clear
exactly who was behind these objects and what their aim is. Meanwhile, what any advanced alien civilization observing us from a distance is making of our puny attempts to reach out and touch strange large monoliths that come hurtling by our planet remains unexplained. Thank you as ever for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done so. In some other news, Unexplained will be coming to YouTube very shortly in video form, so please watch out for
future developments there. You can subscribe to the channel at YouTube dot com, forward slash at Unexplained Pod You can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok dot com, Forward Slash at Unexplained Podcast. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound recordsed in her own right. You can find out more about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram at in the sound Field.
Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores.
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