“If you didn’t know anything, to look at it, you could have easily thought it had been dropped off by a UFO or something.”
Silver Light
Beneath a gunmetal gray sky in Wales, a man making his morning ambulation through a soggy, rutted field on Tuesday spotted a strange apparition that wouldn’t look so out of place in an Arthur C. Clarke novel: a 10-foot tall silver monolith.
“It must be some sort of art installation,” 37-year-old stone mason Craig Muir mused to The New York Times about his thoughts when he discovered the tall monolith. “If you didn’t know anything, to look at it, you could have easily thought it had been dropped off by a UFO or something.”
Muir had left his residence in the most Welsh-sounding of places, Hay-on-Wye in Powys, and made his way towards Hay Bluff, a prominent hill located inside the Brecon Beacons National Park, when he first stumbled upon the glimmering beacon, which is quite similar to the silver monoliths that mysteriously appeared across the world back in 2020.
Muir told the NYT that the prismatic-shaped structure was well made, with no visible welding marks, and was possibly made of surgical steel. He described the surface being shiny and smooth with crisp edges. The whole thing didn’t budge in the face of strong winds, suggesting inner heft.
More to Come?
With this sighting of a silver monolith in essentially the middle of nowhere, will there be more to come? It’s a good question to ask because back in late 2020, during the hectic days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a comical number of similarly silver monoliths started appearing around the world.
The first one was discovered by biologists in Utah in November 2020. Others were spotted in locations such as California, Pennsylvania, Romania, England, and Netherlands.
In California, a gang of ne’er-do-wells filmed themselves destroying the one located in Pine Mountain in the city of Atascadero and replaced it with a wooden cross.
“Christ is king in this country,” one man says in the video. “We don’t want illegal aliens from Mexico or outer space. So let’s tear this bitch down.”
The monoliths became an international sensation because of their mysterious origin, and they added to the general surreality of an era marked by a global plague and civil unrest erupting in America and other countries.
It’s not clear who made the first monolith in Utah but the other ones seemed to be copycats. In the case of the Atascadero monolith, a local group of metal artists claimed responsibility and said they were inspired by the original monolith discovered in Utah.
After this latest sighting, we’re going to keep a look out for more — just in case.
More on the monoliths: There Are Officially Too Many Damn Monoliths