Outlawed obelisk

Alien visitors to Earth may be indiscriminately leaving excess baggage around to avoid paying storage fees.

While American wildlife officers were doing an aerial count of wild sheep in the desert of southern Utah, USA last 18 November, something else caught their attention.

In a craggy nook was a 12-foot, three-sided stainless steel obelisk neatly protruding from the dry ground.

The helicopter crew of the US Department of Public Safety landed near the mysterious monolith so the wildlife staff can inspect the shiny thing.

They left still baffled and clueless about why the object was there and who was behind it.

Their report, photo and video of the discovery soon made the rounds on social media and became viral.

Wild speculations initially attributed the Utah obelisk to aliens as it was comparable to the enigmatic black monolith in the 1968 sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In that award-winning film directed by Stanley Kubrick, a monolith seems to have been planted by highly intelligent and sophisticated beings and appears during different periods of the human evolutionary timeline as if to inspire mankind to progress.

One netizen linked the object to the pandemic and posted that a COVID-19 vaccine is inside it.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which owns the property where the obelisk was found, joked that since it was discovered while counting sheep, the agency BAA — Bureau of Alien Affairs —warned not to go there.

The state’s wildlife, public safety and land management agencies were not disclosing the location to prevent gawkers from trooping there.

Lately, a plausible explanation emerged; it was a work of the late American artist John McCracken, who sculpts monoliths.

His representative David Zwirner was quoted by AFP as confirming that it was McCracken’s sculpture with satellite images of the land indicating it was installed there between August 2015 and October 2016.

Whether an alien or human put up the monolith in the desert, the BLM reminded in a serious Facebook post “that using, occupying or developing public lands or its resources without authorization is illegal, no matter what planet you are from.”