A ‘perfect monolith’ appears in Wales

Not one to let ‘horrific’ weather stop him, Craig Muir left his home in Hay-on-Wye in Powys, Wales early on Tuesday to take his usual walk to Hay Bluff when he spotted something big, shiny and new.

There in the distance, like a beacon, stood a silver monolith with no trace of how it got there or what it was doing there.

It looked as if it had “just fallen from space,” Mr. Muir said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. The sighting immediately attracted media attention and was reminiscent of similar mysterious objects placed around the world in late 2020.

“It’s supposed to be some kind of art installation,” he said. “If you didn’t know anything, when you looked at it you could easily have thought it was dropped by a UFO or something.”

Mr Muir described the location of the monolith as ‘the middle of nowhere’ and said there were no visible tracks but he did see some footprints.

“I don’t know if anyone else saw it,” he said.

Mr Muir, 37, who works as a stonemason, said the monolith is about 3 meters high and about five feet wide at each point. He said he didn’t know how deep into the ground it goes.

Mr. Muir called it a “perfect monolith” and said it was “exactly the same as the monoliths they have in Egypt,” but “made of steel, and there are no markings on it at all.”

The monolith appears to be made of surgical steel, he said, adding that he didn’t think it was aluminum because “it was too shiny.”

“I would say it was some kind of surgical steel because obviously whoever did it doesn’t want it to rust,” Mr. Muir, noting that the monolith must have some weight because it did not move at all despite the strong winds. He also described it as “very, very smooth, very shiny, very sharp edges.”

As someone with welders and metal fabricators in his family, Mr Muir said he does a lot of metal work, and it was his professional opinion that whoever made it did a “really good job”.

“There are no obvious weld marks,” he said. “It was very, very neat.”

Apparently Mr. Muir wasn’t the only one who saw it. Richard Haynes, who spoke to WalesOnlinesaid he noticed the object while running on Hay Bluff.

“I thought it looked a bit bizarre and might have been a scientific media study collecting rainwater,” he said.

The Welsh Monolith is just the latest of these objects to appear suddenly, almost magically.

For a while – a strange few months in the depths of the pandemic – things like Wales’s seemed to be popping up everywhere. In a study of bighorn sheep in Utah, the first was spotted in November 2020 in a remote canyon in Red Rock County. Although that example was dismantled overnight a few days later, others were soon built in California, Romania and Turkey.

People commonly called them monoliths because they were big and steep and appeared in surprising places, like the thing in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” albeit without an aura of mystery and fear. In some cases, people were given credit for their creation. Some other people sought them out, looking for some strange metaphysical experience to rival the one in the movie. But mostly people were taking pictures on their cell phones and making internet jokes.

Hay Bluff, which overlooks the town of Hay-on-Wye, is a hill convenient in the Brecon Beacons National Park, Mr Muir said. Unfortunately, it is this setting that could do away with the monolith sooner or later.

“I honestly can’t say how long it will be there,” he said. “Knowing our national parks, they don’t take lightly when things are installed without their permission.”

Alan Yuhas contributed reporting and Susan Beachy conducted research.