Well, one mystery has been solved in regards to the mysterious Utah monolith: who removed it. The Utah Bureau of Land Management wasn’t lying when they denied doing it. It wasn’t them.
KSL.com reported that “slackliner and climber Sylvan Christensen, along with BASE jumper Andy Lewis, took credit for dismantling the monolith in a YouTube video showing a piece of the structure.”
Removing the Monolith
The video was posted to the MrSlackline YouTube channel. If you can get it to play, you’ll see that it’s very short. Only 23 seconds long.
It starts with a couple of blurry still shots, followed by some shaky video of a group of guys carting out pieces of the monolith in a wheelbarrow.
The description that accompanies the video reads:
On the night of November 27, 2020, at about 8:30pm— our team removed the Utah Monolith. We will not be including any other information, answers, or insight at this time.
It doesn’t show them actually toppling it over, but according to one witness mentioned in the KSL.com article, all it took was pushing it over. Seems a little anticlimatic.
Why They Removed the Monolith
Why did they feel compelled to remove it? After all, they did it of their own volition. They weren’t authorized to remove it any more than whoever decided to put it up was authorized to do that.
The KSL.com article referred to a statement Christensen released, which read in part, “We removed the Utah Monolith because there are clear precedents for how we share and standardize the use of our public lands, natural wildlife, native plants, fresh water sources, and human impacts upon them. The mystery was the infatuation and we want to use this time to unite people behind the real issues here — we are losing our public lands — things like this don’t help” and also because of the “damage caused by the internet sensationalism and subsequent reaction from the world.”
Safety was a concern even the Utah Bureau of Land Management cited when it opted not to share specifics of the monolith’s location. But people still figured out where it was.
The Video
Reaction to the Monolith Removal Video
Hopefully, Christensen and Lewis weren’t expecting or looking for kudos, because people are throwing big time shade at them in the video’s comments.
Most feel they did it as a shameless and pathetic publicity stunt.
Well, if that’s what they were after, it worked. The video premiered on December 1 and as of now it already has over 500,000 views.
Two Unsolved Monolith Mysteries Remain
We now know who removed the mysterious monolith, but we still don’t know two things:
- Who put it there in the first place or why. Its creator has still not yet come forward.
- What will Christensen and Lewis do with the monolith’s pieces?
Check-In
Do you think it was right they removed it? Or do you think they overstepped their bounds and should’ve waited for a government agency to do it?
Courtney Mroch is a globe-trotting restless spirit who’s both possessed by wanderlust and the spirit of adventure, and obsessed with true crime, horror, the paranormal, and weird days. Perhaps it has something to do with her genes? She is related to occult royalty, after all. Marie Laveau, the famous Voodoo practitioner of New Orleans, is one of her ancestors. (Yes, really! As explained here.) That could also explain her infatuation with skeletons.
Speaking of mystical, to learn how Courtney channeled her battle with cancer to conjure up this site, check out HJ’s Origin Story.
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I understand why they removed it, but if they didn’t have a right to . . . well, I wouldn’t have done it because I wouldn’t want to get into any legal trouble.
Same. On all accounts. I understand it but I wouldn’t take it upon myself to do it. Nuh uh. No way. lol