2020 just got even more bizarre with a mysterious metallic monolith popping up the Utah desert. Was it put there by aliens?! As a random prank by an unknown artist? For what purpose? And when did it show up?! Inquiring minds need to know!
Of course I want to believe that it was aliens. That’s pretty much the only explanation that will excite me and lift me up out of my doldrums at this point. But there are plenty of other plausible possibilities as well. Including one that is equally intriguing: the idea that the monolith is a left over, never used prop from one of my all-time favorite TV shows, Westworld.
As Smithsonian mag puts it:
“On the Internet, speculation about the monolith’s origin abounds. As Matt Novak reports for Gizmodo, some amateur Internet sleuths attempted to piece together the coordinates of the structure using satellite images from Google Earth. The structure appears to sit very close to Canyonlands National Park, which leads Novak and others to speculate that it might be a leftover bit of a Hollywood set. A number of well-known movies and television shows have filmed in the park, including HBO’s “Westworld,” which began filming in 2016, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Thelma & Louise, and 127 Hours, to name a few.”
If the prop was from Westworld I would love to know for what purpose it was staged. Perhaps the showrunners had something in mind for it before the show jumped the shark and went completely off the rails in the third season.
But even if the mysterious monolith has nothing to do with aliens or Sci-Fi I’m still thankful for its existence. For pondering its true origin gives me something to do other than despairing over the the current state of affairs in my own life.
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