Men discover mysterious metal monolith in Utah wilderness, immediately touch it

General rule of thumb for when you stumble upon something weird: Don’t touch it. Especially if it’s a big-ass metal structure of unknown (though, okay, likely human) origin. But that’s exactly what the folks on a sheep-counting expedition (truly) in a remote area of southern Utah did over the weekend. As reported by local NBC affiliate KSL TV, a helicopter crew from the Utah Department Of Public Safety was assisting Division Of Wildlife officers on a mission to count bighorn sheep last week when a biologist spotted a large metal structure on the ground and told them to circle back. Reminiscent of the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, this metal structure is said to be about 10 to 12 feet high and looks as though it was planted—not dropped—into the ground.

“We were kind of joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, then the rest of us make a run for it,” said pilot Bret Hutchings. “We were, like, thinking is this something NASA stuck up there or something. Are they bouncing satellites off it or something?” Hutchings also noted the similarity to 2001 and posited that the monolith could’ve been made by “some new wave artist or something.”

As you can see in the above video, these chuckleheads wasted absolutely no time monkeying around with the structure, and while it’s almost definitely man made and probably harmless, that’s not an assertion that can be made with 100 percent certainty. At the very least, the officials involved are intentionally not sharing specific details of the monolith’s location, lest some other chucklehead ruin the fun. SPEAKING OF WHICH: None of you better spoil this mystery with some boring information like “it’s for satellites.