..and like that, the mysterious monolith story ends. Not with a bang but with a — well, perhaps with a bang actually, given how it was removed (though apparently it was not some alien metal but rather plywood inside).
Appropriately, much like it was internet sleuths using Google Earth to find the thing, the evidence of how it vanished appeared on Instagram. As Serge F. Kovaleski, Deborah Solomon and Zoe Rosenberg report:
It was left to an adventure photographer, Ross Bernards, to disclose evidence on Instagram. Mr. Bernards, 34, of Edwards, Colo., was visiting the monolith on Friday night when, he said, four men arrived as if out of nowhere to dismantle the sculpture. Mr. Bernards had driven six hours for the chance to ogle the sculpture and to take dramatic photographs of it. Using upscale Lume Cube lights attached to a drone, he produced a series of glowy, moonlit pictures in which the monolith glistens against the red cliffs and the deep blue of the night sky.
Suddenly, around 8:40 p.m., he said, the men arrived, their voices echoing in the canyon. Working in twosomes, with an unmistakable sense of purpose, they gave the monolith hard shoves, and it started to tilt toward the ground. Then they pushed it in the opposite direction, trying to uproot it.
While the mystery ends with a bit of a whimper, it’s still entirely unclear who these men were that removed it or why they did so, other than the comments overheard that “this is why you don’t leave trash in the desert.” That would seem to suggest that they were not the ones who put it there to begin with.
And with that, my monolith beat ends.
