The aluminum monolith that was found by a passing helicopter survey team on November 18 has now disappeared. The monolith was strikingly similar to a sculpture by artist John McCracken, “Fair” which was created in 2011. According to the New York Times, McCracken told his son Patrick in May of 2002 that he would like to leave work in remote areas to be discovered later. Patrick McCracken added that his father had believed in advanced alien races and thought that they had been visiting earth for a long time, and were not malevolent. He was an avid reader of science fiction and believed in time travel and extraterrestrial life. He was a friend of Leonard Nimoy, who collected his work, and had spoken with Whitley Strieber who says, “He told me he was an artist and knew a lot about ET phenomena. I did not make the connection until I saw his face in the New York Times.” Whitley is attempting to recall more details of where and when he met the artist. “It was only the briefest of encounters,” he added, “perhaps at a convention or a bookstore.”
Was McCracken, then, the creator of the Utah Monolith, and if so was it reclaimed by his family or by his gallery, the David Zwirner Gallery? The gallery has asserted that the monolith is a genuine McCracken. However, there is no record of his ever mentioning it to his dealer or anybody else.
Not only that, as Linda Moulton Howe has pointed out on Earthfiles.com, the monolith was not present on an image taken in August of 2015, and McCraken died in 2011. To read the Earthfiles story, click here.
To read the New York Times story, click here.
The image “Untitled Monolith 1974” is used under creative commons license. An even more similar artwork, “Fair” can be viewed beside the monolith in the New York Times story.
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There may have been witnesses to the departure of the monolith, a pair of hikers on their way to see the object, when they were passed by a truck with an object in the back, at around 11:00 pm on Friday.
“We had passed a truck, a long bed truck, early 2000s light-colored truck with a large object in the back, and I joked out loud like oh look., there’s the Utah monolith right there,” according to Riccardo Marino.
When he and his girlfriend reached the cove where the monolith was supposed to be, all they found was a triangular-shaped hole cut in the rock and a matching metal plate that was left behind.
At least it gave them a chance to make a long exposure image that makes it appear as if the monolith was being beamed into the sky…
https://kutv.com/news/local/hikers-say-they-were-among-the-first-to-capture-video-of-the-utah-monolith-disappearance
In the written text of an interview with the hikers, it is revealed that the monolith was not removed cleanly as implied in the KUTV telecast. It was probably pulled down by the truck that passed them as they drove to the site. Nothing was left but an obscene scrawl in the sand and a puddle of urine. The monolith, a valuable work of art emplaced by the son of the late artist, will now not be found intact, but probably used for target practice.