The Tagsweird monolith that appeared in the Utah desert quickly disappeared, making the whole ordeal even more mysterious. Of course, that led to online virality and speculation.
But we've now at least learned the disappearance wasn't anything supernatural — a group of people apparently came and ripped it down.
Photographer Ross Bernards made a trip to snap some pics at the sleek, metal sculpture. He just happened to be there when, as he described it on Instagram, four guys came along and tore down the monolith. A friend took grainy photos of the takedown, which Bernards posted to Instagram.
Bernards wrote on Instagram that the group pushed the monolith down with relative ease, one person remarking "this is why you don’t leave trash in the desert."
The grainy photo posted by Bernards show a group working to take down the sculpture in the dark.
The photographer wrote on Instagram: "They quickly broke it apart and as they were carrying to the wheelbarrow that they had brought one of them looked back at us all and said 'Leave no trace.'"
Mashable reached out to Bernards but has yet to receive a response.
It's unclear if the people who took the monolith were those who installed it, or (it seems more likely) people who were offended that the sculpture disrupted the natural landscape. Of course this all can be one big viral marketing scheme that has yet to be revealed.
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"It must have been 10 or 15 minutes at most for them to knock over the monolith and pull it out," he told the New York Times. "We didn’t know who they were, and we were not going to do anything to stop them."
The metal monolith — nicknamed that because of its resemblance to an object in 2001: A Space Odyssey— was discovered last week by officials with the Utah Department of Public Safety and Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. By Sunday it was gone, even as a copycat sculpture popped in Romania.
In case you were actually concerned the monolith was otherworldly, the Times report noted the interior was made of plywood. I'm no expert, but it seems you'd need sturdier stuff for interstellar travel.
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