Curious adventurer-seeking tourists have tracked down the mysterious metal monolith that was discovered deep in the Red Rock desert earlier this month.
When a crew from the Utah Department of Public Safety and Division of Wildlife Resources spotted the gleaming object, they refused to announce the exactly location of the structure.
However, the move did not deter amateur adventurers from setting off to find it.
“I decided to go there first because I was drawn to the fact that this object had been there for five years, hidden in nature,” David Surber, a 33-year-old former US Army infantry officer, said in an interview.
He shared how he drove six hours through the night after finding a Reddit post claiming to have pinpointed its exact location.
The Reddit user who posted the coordinates, Tim Slane, used the flight path of the helicopter until it went off-radar, then scanned the map for the exact features of the terrain seen in official photos and videos.
“I knew that once the location became public knowledge that people would visit the area,” Slane said.
“I have received some angry messages for my revealing of the location. If I had not found it, someone else would likely have found it soon enough.”
Surber, who lives in Utah, arrived in the early hours when it was pitched black, then others who also found the coordinates online started to turn up.
“It was a good escape from all the negativity we’ve experienced in 2020,” he said.
As it turns out, this is not the first time a mysterious monolith appeared out of nowhere, as a similar structure was discovered in Seattle two decades ago.
In the morning of January 1, 2001, a metallic monolith was found atop Kite Hill in Magnuson Park, which is located on the grounds of the former Sand Point Naval Air Station in northeast Seattle.