August 2024 - Spotted Hyena
Imagine if you will, being on a morning walk with your four-legged best friend, in an area you are very familiar with. This beautiful, early summer morning dawns bright and clear. As the 2 of you stroll along, a reflection comes from the top of a nearby hill. The area should not have anything up there to reflect, but this morning is different.
As you cautiously sidestep up the fairly steep hill, watching closely so as not to step on any of the cactus that call the area home, lest you finish the walk with a limp, you notice this is no ordinary source of the bright reflection. What you discover is a monolith, standing over 8 feet tall, four feet wide, and at least 8 inches deep. You would think you left the house and stepped into an episode of The Twilight Zone.
The monolith is covered with a very shiny metal, highly polished so that a mirror-like surface is exposed in all directions. The theory is that is manmade because it has a poured concrete base, and the monolith is attached to bolts set in the concrete, with bolts securely holding the heavy object in place.
If I came home from my morning walk and tried to explain what I saw to my wife of many years, she would start checking the content of my breakfast cereal. That is the way the folks of Bellevue, in Northern Colorado felt when they saw this thing suddenly appear.
The monolith sits behind the Morning Fresh Dairy Farm, atop a hill, in the rugged foothills near the Poudre River Canyon. The hill is steep, and covered in cactus, so however it got there, with a poured in place concrete base, someone or something really worked to get it there.
The monolith seems very similar to the one in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but it is definitely not the first. Nearly 250 mysterious monoliths, many of them 3 sided and prism shaped, have been discovered around the world since 2020. In June of 2024, a monolith was discovered in the Nevada desert.
The Las Vegas Police Department was assisting with a search and rescue mission north of the Las Vegas Valley, when they spotted the monolith, which was similar to the others popping up around the world. The tall, rectangular, reflective structure was spotted near Gass Peak, a hiking area in the Nevada desert about an hour north of the city of Las Vegas. Authorities have no idea how it got there but admit it had to be quite an undertaking to get it there.
Four years earlier a monolith appeared in the Utah desert. This one was discovered by a helicopter pilot flying overhead in November of 2020. Around the same time, one was found in Romania, one in California, and one on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. More recently, one appeared on a hilltop in Wales, and everyone was amazed at just how perfectly level the structure was and that it looked like a UFO.
People in the “tinfoil hat fraternity” are speculating aliens are randomly depositing these structures around the earth, possibly in speculation of a future takeover of the planet. Others believe the monoliths are part of a secret, worldwide, art project. Don’t plan on visiting any of these monoliths, as most of them vanish as quickly and mysteriously as they appeared. The Nevada and Utah monoliths were removed by authorities, but many of the others left no clues to their disappearance.
Monoliths have been around for centuries. Most of them are a great stone, often in the form of an obelisk or column. The term can also be used to describe a tall building or skyscraper.
I have to side with the crowd that thinks these are just another, albeit elaborate, hoax. Think back to the “flying saucer nest” discovered in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England, back in 1976. The crop circle became a cultural phenomenon as thousands of “experts” appeared on the scene with conspiracy theories.
During the 1980s and into the 1990s, cornfields all over the country became known for their mysterious “crop circles.” These crop circles were areas in fields where crops had been flattened in circular, geometric patterns. The patterns appeared mysteriously out of nowhere, usually overnight.
Investigators went to great lengths to rule out aliens, magic, and hoaxers, often rigging potential targets with motion sensors and cameras. Despite all their efforts, they never succeeded in witnessing the formation of a crop circle. Some of them were clearly hoaxes, while others remain unexplained. Localized weather events, such as tornados, or electrical events seemed to be the plausible explanation.
Reality ended up taking over, leaving many scientists and investigators with very embarrassed faces as the truth finally came out. In the late 1990s, 2 farmers, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, confessed to single handedly starting the whole fiasco in 1976.
The 2 farmers, using ropes and planks of wood, described the ways they would sneak into a field, even a guarded one, undetected, and rapidly flatten crops. Most of the other pranksters that joined the bandwagon, simply walked through dry fields when nobody was looking, and created the designs. Everyone eventually admitted that they had been duped.
I am pretty sure the truth will eventually come out on this. For those of you that want to follow this ongoing craze, check out the Monolith Tracker page, at www.monolithtracker.com. In the meantime, if I see one of these on my morning walk, I will probably not mention it to my wife. I kind of like my breakfast cereal the way it is, loaded with sugar.
Mark Rackay is a columnist for the Montrose Daily Press, Delta County Independent, and several other newspapers, as well as a feature writer for The Nautical Mile, and several other saltwater fishing magazines. He is an avid hunter and world class saltwater angler, who travels around the world in search of adventure and serves as a Director and Public Information Officer for the Montrose County Sheriff’s Posse.
Mark Rackay
Mark Rackay is a columnist for the Montrose Daily Press, Delta County Independent, and several other newspapers, as well as a feature writer for several saltwater fishing magazines. He is an avid hunter and world class saltwater angler, who travels around the world in search of adventure and serves as a Director and Public Information Officer for the Montrose County Sheriff’s Posse.