As the world ponders what's going on with the Princess of Wales, another mystery has cropped up in the UK, in the form of a large metal monolith in the middle of the Welsh countryside. The Independent has footage of the odd 10-foot-tall structure, which it describes as sticking up out of the ground in the town of Hay-on-Waye "like a Toblerone" and "baffling locals." "I thought it looked a bit bizarre and might be a scientific media research thing collecting rainwater," resident Richard Haynes tells WalesOnline. "But then [I] realized it was way too tall and strange for that."
Haynes notes that the shiny silver monolith is hollow and likely "light enough for two people to carry it up and plant it in the ground." A 30-something builder also stumbled across the structure in the county of Powys while hiking this week, and he was similarly shocked. "I was a bit taken aback, as it looked like some sort of a UFO," Craig Muir tells the Herald. He adds that the monolith is situated on the top of a hill that can't be reached by car, meaning it might've been dragged up there by a group of people or dropped off from the air, perhaps by helicopter.
Muir, who happens to hail from a family of metalworkers, tells the New York Times that the "perfect" monolith—which some are comparing to the one seen in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey—seems too shiny to be aluminum. Instead, Muir suggests it's made of surgical steel to prevent rusting. He also says whoever made it did a "real good job," with not even a welding mark. "It was very, very neat."
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It's not the first monolith to pop up: CBS News notes that in 2020, two of them (or maybe the same one?) turned up in Utah and California within just a few weeks of each other, while monoliths have also emerged in other parts of the UK, as well as in Turkey and Europe. "It must be some sort of art installation," Muir muses. (More strange stuff stories.)
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