When Craig Muir spotted an object while hiking the summit of a hill, he thought he was having a close encounter of the third kind. However, while (apparently) not a UFO, the shiny, silver monolith in a muddy patch of Powys uplands was strikingly mysterious.
“When I first saw it, I was a bit taken aback as it looked like some sort of a UFO,” said Muir, a builder who lives in Hay-on-Wye nearby. “It seemed like a very fine metallic [material], almost like a surgical steel. The steel structure was almost 10ft long and looked perfectly levelled and steady, despite the weather being windy.”
Following a spate of monoliths appearing around the world in 2020 – in the Isle of Wight, Romania and the Utah desert – conspiracy theorists speculated that aliens could be behind the structures.
Since there is no way to drive up to the top of the Hay Bluff hill, Muir suggested it could have been taken by a group of people or dropped off by the helicopter on its spot.
“It didn’t seem like it was chucked in there, instead it has been accurately put in the ground,” he told PA Media. “However, there were no obvious tracks around it and one would think that there would be a lot of mess around it, but there wasn’t.”
No one has yet come forward to claim responsibility for the Welsh monolith, which bears a resemblance to the one that features in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The latest monolith – a large, upright structure usually made of stone – is similar to one found on Compton Beach on the Isle of Wight four years ago, which was also described as being around 10ft tall.
The first monolith reported in Utah was originally spotted by state wildlife officials who were helping to count bighorn sheep from a helicopter.
The 10-12ft structure was discovered in the ground, tucked into a red rock cove, and was subsequently removed by the Utah Bureau of Land Management.
An anonymous collective called The Most Famous Artist took credit for the structures in the US in 2020.
