‘Alien super weapon? Xbox prototype?’ Internet sleuths uncover coordinates of ‘Utah monolith’ as netizens debate origin & purpose

Ever-resourceful internet detectives have sussed out the alleged location of the puzzling Kubrick-like “monolith” discovered in the Utah desert by state officials, stoking debate online over how long the structure has been there.

Less than a day after the discovery went viral, the gumshoes of 4chan were on the case, apparently using a series of photos to determine the solar azimuth, declination and elevation of the site to find the coordinates of the mysterious silver slab. A Reddit user later replicated the same feat, suggesting the monolith was planted sometime after August 2015, based on Google Earth images.

The structure was stumbled upon by Utah wildlife officials earlier this month as they carried out an aerial count of bighorn sheep over a remote stretch of desert, stopping to inspect the object – an “alien life form,” as one of the state employees joked – and even releasing photos and videos of the encounter.

Before long, the hunk of metal became the talk of Twitter – with its clear resemblance to the foreboding black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ – sending ambitious netizens on a hunt to find it. But even with its location a known fact, debate continued to rage about the strange object, some suggesting it was placed in its current location before 2015, and that there may have been other similar structures nearby at some point.

While more popular – and unimaginative – theories posit that the structure is either a marketing gimmick, a publicity stunt or an art installation, others online have conjured up more elaborate ideas as to its purpose, including an “alien super weapon,” or perhaps an “old prototype next-gen Xbox.”

Unfortunately for the curious, no inscription or other identifiers were left with the slab to indicate its purpose, leaving netizens to have it out in the comment section until its creators, humanoid or not, decide to let the cat out of the bag.

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