Monolith knocked down by group who said ‘leave no trace’



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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – New clues have emerged in the disappearance of a shining monolith in Utah that appeared to be melting as mysteriously as it appeared in the red rock desert – although it is no longer the only place where a strange structure has come and gone.

Colorado photographer told KSTU-TV that he saw four men come to the remote Utah site on Friday night and push on the hollow stainless steel object.

“Right after he fell and made a thud, one of them said, ‘That’s why you don’t leave trash in the desert,’” Ross Bernards told the TV station. Salt Lake City.

The group broke the structure into pieces, loaded it into a wheelbarrow and left.

“As they loaded it up and walked away, they just said, ‘Leave no trace,’ he said.

The San Juan County Sheriff’s Office in Utah said it did not plan to investigate the disappearance of the monolith, which had been placed on public land without permission. But authorities also said they would accept tips from one of the hundreds of visitors who walked to see the shiny otherworldly object deep in the desert.

The sheriff and the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the land where the object appeared, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on whether they were investigating the kidnapping photographed by the Bernards group.

Visitors left behind a mess of human trash, cars parked over vegetation and other debris, the land agency said. The mysterious structure that evoked the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” has garnered international attention and sparked much speculation about an otherworldly origins, although officials said it was a earthly creation of riveted stainless steel plates.

For Bernards, the damage caused by visitors to the environment convinced him that the remote area was better off without the structure.

“Leave art where art should be and let Mother Nature have her space for art,” he said.

Utah isn’t the only place a monolith has emerged. A similar metal structure was found on a hill in northern Romania, in the town of Piatra Neamt – but has since disappeared, according to Robert Iosub, a reporter for the local publication ziarpiatraneamt.ro.

Like the Utah structure, whoever placed the object didn’t follow the proper steps and didn’t get a building permit, Mayor Andrei Carabelea said in a Facebook post this weekend. end. Still, he took it in stride, joking that some “brazen and terrible” alien teens were probably harboring them around the world.

“I am honored that they chose our city,” he said.

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Associated Press photographer Vadim Ghirda in Bucharest, Romania, contributed to this story.

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