Aliens, or amateur artist? Sci-fi lovers, skeptics check out monolith in Fort Worth
The 10-foot-tall hunk of metal appeared in front of the field of wheat with no explanation, leaving science-fiction lovers to wonder if it was a gift left behind by extraterrestrial visitors, or perhaps the work of an amateur artist.
A Twitter user first spotted the object, hollow and spray-painted silver, along the Trinity Trail in east Fort Worth on Saturday. The discovery has spread over social media in the days since, fueled by those noting the monolith is continuing a mysterious phenomenon that started in 2020 with glossier and taller monoliths found in places like Utah, California and Romania.
On Tuesday morning, a crowd of about a dozen stood around the box with speculative eyes. One young man, unimpressed, rocked it onto its side with a loud thud before propping it back up.
It’s unclear to the Tarrant Regional Water District, which owns the land off the Beach Street exit on I-30, how it got there, spokesman Chad Lorance said in an email. The agency, he said, did move it farther away from the trail Monday night due to safety concerns. But someone moved it back overnight.
Chad McCarty and James Nevels, co-owners of the Brotherhood Classics auto shop in Fort Worth, walked up to the object and started knocking on it. It was sheet metal, they concluded, with a strong but not necessarily clean welding job holding it together. They could see jagged flecks of black in the silver paint.
It was definitely made by man, Nevels said with a laugh as he walked away from the object. Though it didn’t look as good or mysterious up close as from afar, he was glad some nameless person was keeping the myth alive.
He and McCarty had been driving on the freeway on Tuesday morning when they heard about the monolith on the radio and decided to stop by.
“We need something like this,” said McCarty, formerly the principal of Eastern Hills High School. “It kind of keeps your mind off of other stuff going on in the world.”
People who live in the neighborhood, and at least one visitor to Fort Worth from out of town, were happy to have a break from news about the worsening pandemic and the deadly insurrection at the Capitol to check out America’s newest monolith.
For the time being, the Tarrant Regional Water Authority is OK with the sculpture staying in its current location by the shack for the Fort Worth Row Club, Lorance said. “It has been a good distraction considering the times,” he said, “and we also hope this will be an opportunity to introduce people to the outstanding Trinity Trails System.”
The monolith reminded Jimmy Sweeney, the owner of the Grand Berry Theater in Fort Worth, of the 2002 M. Night Shyamalan movie “Signs,” where abstract crop circles in cornfields mean the existence of intelligent life beyond Earth. Sweeney and his wife, Brooke Sweeney, took a break from working at home to bring their dog and 6-month-old daughter to the Trinity River waterfront on Tuesday.
It looked more like something Brooke said she would’ve made in high school art class, not as shiny as the first sculpture discovered in November 2020 in a Utah desert and later removed from the public land. She and Jimmy nonetheless took photos with their new daughter.
“We’ll show her when she’s older that she got a picture with the aliens,” Jimmy said.
Julie Fisk, the Dallas-based host of the Haunted AF Podcast that delves into tales of the paranormal, said in an email she went to the monolith on Monday morning after learning of it on Twitter. She has dubbed it the “Minilith,” however, because it’s smaller than other iterations.
“I think it’s awesome that people are jumping on the monolith bandwagon,” Fisk said. “The world needs a little fun and mystery right now, even if it DOES come from an Earthbound blow-torch.”
Jesus Diaz, a 38-year-old Fort Worth man who drove to the monolith on Tuesday, was more impressed with the monolith than others, thinking its smooth edges made it look as if it weren’t made by hand. He wondered how someone could’ve gotten it out there without being noticed. He thought about all the other U.S. monoliths.
Diaz loves the extraterrestrial movie “The Fifth Element,” and said all these sculptures make him ask the question, “Is there another life form out there?”
“It’s amazing how it appeared, overnight. I didn’t see no tire tracks,” Diaz said. “Who could’ve put it there? How did it get there?”
This story was originally published January 12, 2021 at 2:19 PM.
