While hiking in the Welsh countryside, one might expect to find green pastures, spindly deciduous trees and fluffy sheep — but one hiker on Tuesday discovered a large monolith mysteriously placed atop a hill in the county of Powys.
Craig Muir said he was hiking up Hay Bluff in Wales when he came across the steel-like structure standing in a muddy patch at the hill’s peak.
Muir, who filmed his finding, told news agency PA Media the structure appeared to be made of a “very fine metallic, almost surgical, steel.”
He said the monolith is about 10 feet (nearly 3 metres) tall “and looked perfectly levelled and steady” despite the region’s windy weather.
“When I first saw it, I was a bit taken aback as it looked like some sort of a UFO,” Muir said.
In his video, Muir filmed himself as he approached the monolith on the gusty hilltop.
“I’ve never seen this before,” Muir prefaced.
The visual is strikingly odd — just the shiny, straight structure alone on the weedy, brown hilltop.
“It didn’t seem like it was chucked in there, instead it has been accurately put in the ground,” Muir said, adding that there was no way to drive to the top of the hill.
Even stranger, Muir said he saw no tracks or markings in the dirt around the monolith. He suggested perhaps a helicopter dropped the structure in its spot.
It is not yet clear how or why the monolith was placed atop Hay Bluff.
The monolith in Wales is not the only one to be discovered in recent years. In 2020, a number of similar looking metallic structures were found around the world, including in the U.S. states of Utah and California, on the Isle of Wight in the U.K., and even in Canada, in Vancouver.
The discovery of these monoliths triggered a flurry of conspiracy theories online, with many suggesting, like Muir, that the structures were physical evidence of aliens.
An anonymous collective called The Most Famous Artist took credit for several of the monoliths in 2020. The group later tried to sell the monoliths for US$45,000 (almost C$60,880).
When USA Today reached out to artist Matty Mo from the collective, Mo told the outlet, “People sure seem to think it was me.”
He did not provide further comment, and the mystery lives on.