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Metal monolith in Utah that has since disappeared: is there a twin now in California?
Photo: Terrance Siemon / AP
The story apparently began by chance: while counting sheep from a helicopter, officials in the desert of the US state of Utah discovered a metal monolith in November - and no one knew how it got there.
The column has now disappeared, as has a similar one in Romania, thousands of kilometers away.
But that doesn't stop the guesswork.
Because now there is apparently a new monolith, again in the western United States.
As the "Atascadero News", a local weekly newspaper in western California, reports, such a mysterious monolith appeared on a mountain in the city of Atascadero on Wednesday - apparently practically overnight.
After the discovery became known, quite a few onlookers climbed the mountain and viewed the mysterious object.
According to the report, the column on the highest point in the city, Pine Mountain, is apparently made of steel and has three sides of equal length.
It also looks very heavy, but does not seem to be anchored in the ground.
The newspaper therefore warns that the monolith could fall over and injure people.
The three-and-a-half meter high metal pillar in Utah, which had puzzled over its origin, was discovered in mid-November in the middle of red rocks in southern Utah.
The strange find led to diverse and not always very serious speculations about the originator and meaning of the object - from the work of aliens to fans of science fiction films to a reset button for the Corona year 2020.
Some suspected that the column could be the work of the US artist John McCracken, who died in 2011 and who had lived in nearby New Mexico for some time.
His son told the New York Times that his father told him in 2002 that he would like to leave his works of art in remote places for “later discovery”.
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