A shiny metal monolith puzzlingly vanished on Tuesday from Romania’s mountainous Neamt county, four days after its sudden appearance close to an ancient Dacian fortress. Its mysterious disappearance sparked conjecture that it may be related to a similar structure previously spotted in the United States. “The 2.8-metre-tall structure disappeared overnight as quietly as it was erected last week,” said journalist Robert Iosub of the Ziar Piatra Neamt local newspaper, who had seen the structure. He added, “An unidentified person, apparently a bad local welder, made it… now all that remains is just a small hole covered by rocky soil. The sheet metal structure had a badly-welded join.”
A spokeswoman for Piatra Neamt police, Georgiana Mosu, revealed officers are conducting an inquiry into the illegally-installed structure, which was positioned in a protected archaeological area from November 27. The disappearance of the monolith in Romania comes amid the ongoing controversy surrounding the origin and then the disappearance of a shiny monolith in the remote desert of Utah. The mysterious metal, which no one knows how it got there in the first place, went missing after its discovery on November 18.
It disappeared after creating a great amount of buzz among science-fiction fans, hearkening to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on a novel by Arthur C Clarke. In the Kubrick movie, an alien monolith is a recurring symbol that appears to play a role in the development of human evolution. Rather than being an alien structure, the truth of the Romanian monolith may be more prosaic. The Bureau of Land Management in Utah said it received “credible reports” that the object had been removed “by an unknown party”. The bureau “did not remove the structure which is considered private property,” it said in a statement.
