HAY-ON-WYE, Wales — Craig Muir was hiking along the windswept ridge of Hay Bluff, a tall hill straddling the border of Wales and England, when an jarring sight caught his eye – a tall, shiny metallic monolith towering over the landscape.
“I come up here most days and I’ve never seen this before,” Mr. Muir can be heard saying with surprise on video footage he recorded of the strange object on Tuesday. “It almost looks like a UFO.”
The monolith, estimated at around 10 feet tall, reflected the overcast sky, its smooth metallic surfaces glistening as wind whipped over the 677-meter (2,220-foot) peak. In the video, Mr. Muir slowly circles the object, revealing its geometric contours and tight seamless construction.
“When I first saw it, I was a bit taken aback as it looked like some sort of a UFO,” he told the Press Association news agency. “It didn’t seem like it was chucked in there, instead it has been accurately put in the ground.”
The unexplained origin and purpose of the monolithic structure immediately sparked speculation that it could be the work of alien visitors or pranksters emulating previous unexplained monolith discoveries around the world in recent years. Whatever the truth, it has captured public fascination in Britain and rekindled the monolith mystery mania of 2020.
That was the year when the first in a series of tall, metallic monoliths began appearing and disappearing without explanation from remote public lands in Utah, California, Romania, Belgium and other locales around the globe. The initial Utah discovery set off a frenzied international guessing game over who placed the objects and for what reason.
While some inevitable speculation veered into de rigueur UFO conspiracy theories, most observers suspected the orchestrated placement of the monoliths was an elaborate prank or piece of anarchic street art carried out by anonymous sculptors or collectives.
One group, a New Mexico-based art collective called The Most Famous Artist, went so far as to claim responsibility for the Utah monolith and at least one other. But their unverified claims did little to resolve the mystery, which only deepened in the following months and years as more monoliths continued popping up in unexpected places with no clear indications of the culprits.
The latest such incident in Wales seems destined to rekindle the mystery all over again. And just as before, theories are already emerging to explain the monolith’s origins, ranging from the seemingly plausible to the farcically unbelievable.
“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,” Mr. Muir observed of the Hay Bluff monolith’s pristine surroundings, a detail likely to fuel conjecture about supernatural or alien explanations.
Tom Dunford, a hiker who stumbled upon one of the monoliths on the Isle of Wight off southern England in 2020, offered a more grounded perspective, telling Sky News at the time, “The person who put it there knows what they’re doing. It’s really reflective. It’s someone playing a practical joke, I don’t believe in any of these conspiracy theories.”
Indeed, the seemingly immaculate craftsmanship and precise installation of the monoliths argues against easy dismissal as random pranks. Their appearances — always in relatively remote locales, often on elevated geography with striking vistas — suggest a degree of artfulness and conceptual intention behind their placement.
“Whoever or whatever is behind this installation has gone to extreme lengths to ensure it was solidly installed and perfectly balanced upright,” assessed the Times of London, which described the Hay Bluff monolith as embodying “the Mount Everest of enigmas.”
Local authorities said they were looking into the situation. The Brecon Beacons National Park, which manages lands surrounding the monolith site, said it was aware of “reports of a monolith being discovered.” But beyond that, little was known about its provenance.
For now, the monolith remains in place atop Hay Bluff, mesmerizing hikers and confounding observation. Like its unexplained predecessors, its origins are shrouded in delicious mystery, fueling speculation and fevered theories while igniting the imagination of all who lay eyes upon its shining extraterrestrial-seeming form.
“It’s certainly one of the most unusual things I’ve encountered in my eight years as a ranger here,” said Richard Vaughan, who oversees that section of the park. “Who knows if we’ll ever get to the bottom of who’s behind it and why it’s here?”
Perhaps the monolith makers’ motivations aren’t as complex as we assume. Maybe they simply seek to provoke awe, inspire curiosity and inject some whimsy into our often dreary world.
Or maybe real aliens are just having a laugh at our wonder over such seemingly mundane creations. For now at least, the monolith’s presence seems to be accomplishing exactly what its creators intended – delighting, baffling and capturing the imagination of anyone fortunate enough to catch a glimpse.
