While surveying remote areas of Southern Utah for bighorn sheep, a biologist aboard a Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter assisting the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources spotted a strange metallic object rising up from out of the sandstone.
Bret Hutchings, a pilot for the Utah Department of Public Safety, told St. George News that the biologist “started saying, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa — turn around. We got to go check this thing out.’”
A few minutes after circling back, they were able to locate it: a stainless steel prism rising up out of the ground. After landing, they hiked out to check it out. The object was a stainless steel prism approximately 10-12 feet tall and planted firmly into the ground. Each panel is about 2 feet wide.
Upon first seeing it, Hutchings said his first thought was that “someone’s got way too much money and too much time on their hands.”AdvertisementVolume 0%
He said he also wondered if it was something NASA had put in the ground.
“Whoever put it together did a very quality job on it. My guess is it’s some sort of New Age artist or something like that that had seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey that was done clear back in 1968.”
The object is very similar to the one at the beginning of that movie, he said.
“We tried to see if we could move it — we couldn’t,” he said. “We scoured the whole thing to see if there was any kind of writing on it. There’s not.”
He said he lifted one of the biologists up onto his shoulders and they were putting a lot of weight on it, but it wouldn’t budge at all.
“We’ve seen a lot of weird stuff out in the desert,” he said, “but nothing like this.”
There’s no telling how long the object has been there, he said. As far as whether he felt like the object has extraterrestrial originations, he said he might have had it not been for the marks in the ground left from a cement saw.
“You can see where they had taken a cement saw and had cut down into the sandstone to put the thing in. My guess is that it’s probably cemented in because it’s very solid,” he said. “It definitely looks like it’s totally manmade.”
They are not releasing the exact location at this time due to concerns of safety and possible vandalism.
“They’ve asked us to not reveal its location. They’re just worried people will get injured and stuff trying to get to it. It’s in a really remote area of Southern Utah, that’s about all they want us to say.”
This is not an area they frequent more than every three years when they work with the DWR to do biology counts on the bighorn sheep.
“We just happened to literally fly right over the top of this thing, or I don’t think we would have even seen it,” he said.
Utah Highway Patrol Lt. Nick Street told St. George News they do not plan on investigating any further into how the metal got there.
“It will stay where it is. I think it’s pretty well entrenched where it is,” Street said. “Also there’s a base to it that’s fairly deep. Without construction equipment, you couldn’t just go in there and yank it out.”
Street said if this was done by a person, and they found out who it was, that person could possibly be charged with littering as well as potentially damaging the soil.
“I know there is some federal code that follows BLM and Forest Service land that disallows this.”