Suspected 'UFOs' 'mysteriously' disappear from US, Romania
MANILA, Philippines — Now you see it, now you don't.
A mysterious protruding monolith disappeared in Romania barely a day after it made headlines for its discovery in an archaeological site last November 27.
A similar one was found in a Utah desert in the United States last November 18, but this, too, has reportedly mysteriously disappeared.
Internet was abuzz yesterday after the metal structure discovered in Petrodova Dacian Fortress in the Romanian city of Piatra Neamt is now nowhere to be found atop the hill, one side of which faces Mount Ceahlau, locally known as the "Holy Mountain" and is one of the seven natural wonders of Romania.
Romanian journalist Rober Iosub from the Ziar Piatra Neamt newspaper, who had seen the monolith, told Reuters that the 2.8-meter (9 feet) structure "disappeared overnight as quietly as it was erected last week." Earlier reports said that the metallic structure stood at 13 feet.
“An unidentified person, apparently a bad local welder, made it... now all that remains is just a small hole covered by rocky soil,” local reporters had discovered, he said.
Related: UFO again? Monolith disappears from US, another found in Romania
Netizens have been speculating about the origins of the monoliths. A number of them thought it was an ode or tribute to the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film "2001: A Space Odyssey," which featured monoliths mysteriously appearing on different parts of the universe. It came out a year before the 1969 Apollo 11 mission of American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The movie jumps off from the 1951 book "The Sentinel" by Arthur C. Clarke.
Another popular theory of the Utah monolith is that it was the work of US artist John McCracken, who died in 2011.
Insider.com reported that it has "examined Google Earth data and found that the Utah monolith appeared sometime between August 2015 and October 2016."
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