A party has come clean about that Fort Worth monolith. No, it’s not aliens.
On the Fort Worth-area airwaves on Wednesday morning, two radio hosts had a confession to make regarding the Fort Worth monolith that popped up over the weekend and gained attention Tuesday.
“We found out definitively who put that there,” said Mark “Hawkeye” Louis, a co-host of the Hawkeye in the Morning show that plays on New Country 96.3.
Julie Fisk, the woman behind the Haunted AF paranormal podcast, was on the phone. “Who?” she asked.
“We did,” Louis said, referencing him and his co-host Michelle Rodriguez. “We hired the kids from Millsap High School out in Millsap, Texas to build that for us. We’ve been working on that for a month.”
Fisk, who spoke with the Star-Telegram about the monolith on Tuesday, couldn’t stop laughing. She later said in a Twitter message, “I DID feel like a bit of a chump but it was all in good fun.”
The confession brought to an end the mystery over the roughly 10-foot-tall hollow sculpture planted along the Trinity Trail, which attempted to continue a myth that began in 2020 with taller and shinier monoliths found in places like Utah, California and Romania. In many ways, it succeeded: News of the monolith spread over Twitter, and crowds gathered around the object on Tuesday.
Other people weren’t quite impressed, saying it looked more like it had been made in a high school woodshop class. They were actually right.
Louis said in a Twitter message on Wednesday his radio show audience was in on the monolith from the beginning, when he and Rodriguez asked one morning if anyone was willing to help them build a monolith. They hired a metal shop instructor from Millsap High School, who enlisted the help of his students.
They had wanted to put it up in early December, Louis said, but it took longer than anticipated and wound up costing more than $300. He acknowledged in the end it didn’t look like it was “made by an advanced society.” He and Rodriguez wheeled it out on a cart on Saturday.
They pretended to know nothing about it as the news began to trickle out on social media, he said.
“That was part of the fun, we acted as if we had no idea how it got there,” Louis said.
The Tarrant County Regional Water District, which owns the land off of the I-30 Beach Street exit, said on Tuesday they had moved the monolith away from the trail on Monday night due to safety concerns but it was moved back.
Louis, however, said, “We haven’t touched it since we installed it on Saturday.”
He said he wanted to come clean once the media started to cover it on Tuesday. The Fort Worth Police Department also tweeted about it, he said, “which is ironic because when we were installing it on Saturday somebody called the police on us.”
He hopes the monolith can stick around in some way, he said.
“As for the future of the monolith, it seems to be a big hit,” he said. “We’d be interested if the City of Fort Worth would want to permanently install it somewhere.”
This story was originally published January 13, 2021 at 7:32 PM.
