Like Utah, mysterious monolith appeared in Seattle nearly two decades ago

Last week a nearly 12-foot monolith was discovered in a Utah desert.

A crew from the Utah Department of Public Safety and Division of Wildlife Resources spotted the gleaming object.

Officials said the smooth, tall structure was found during a helicopter survey of bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah.

Seattle also had a similar mystery two decades ago.

The following is a HistoryLink.org essay about the mysterious monolith in Seattle by Walt Crowley.

n the morning of January 1, 2001, Magnuson Park visitors discover a metalic monolith atop Kite Hill. The oblong object measures approximately three feet wide by nine feet tall and appears to be hollow. There is no indication of the identity of its creators or their planet of origin.

Magnuson Park is located on the grounds of the former Sand Point Naval Air Station in northeast Seattle. The millennial monolith bore a striking resemblance to an alien artifact depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, witnesses said.

Once news of the monolith reached the airwaves, it attracted droves of visitors. Many came to the park to delicately touch the structure, possibly in the hopes of raising their consciousness, and of obtaining a higher plane of thought.

Although no one of this earth obtained permits to install the monolith, park officials’ only concern was that of the safety risk. They pushed against the structure, but it would not give. They decided to let it stand, pending further investigation.

A Migratory Monolith?

It didn’t stand for long. Sometime during the wee hours of January 3, the monolith disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived. All that remained was a hole containing a concrete platform, used to anchor the obelisk. In place of the monolith lay a single red rose, its stem snapped in two.

The “2001 Space Oddity” (as the Seattle P-I dubbed it) was discovered on Green Lake’s Duck Island the next morning. At the same time, artist and Blue Moon Tavern regular Caleb Schaber revealed that he and a band of anonymous collaborators calling themselves “Some People” had fabricated the device and several smaller versions placed around Seattle.

Schaber also said that his group had nothing to do with the monolith hijack. Magnuson Park manager C. David Hughbanks arranged for the “art work” to return to Sand Point at least temporarily. In the latest twist, someone installed a rocket-like aviation fuel tank nose-down on the monolith’s original site during the night of January 6-7, 2001. The mystery continues...

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Cox Media Group