Free Republic

A metal structure that mysteriously appeared on a roundabout in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been destroyed over fears about its origins. People in the capital, Kinshasa, stoned and torched the 12ft (3.7m) triangular prism that looked like other metal monoliths that have cropped up around the world over the last few months. It had begun to draw selfie-takers, which fuelled rumours on social media. Some feared it was satanic or put there by aliens or by a secret cabal.

China has revised its National Defence Law, expanding the power of its armed forces headed by President Xi Jinping to mobilise military and civilian resources to defend its national interests both at home and abroad. The new law, effective from January 1, weakens the role of the State Council, China's Cabinet headed by Premier Li Keqiang, in formulating military policy, handing decision-making powers to the Central Military Commission (CMC), the overall high-command of the two million-strong People's Liberation Army (PLA) headed by Xi, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Sunday. Xi, 67, has emerged as the Communist Party...

Late last month, a 2001 Odyssey-like monolith appeared in the Utah desert. Not long after, another identical-looking structure appeared in Romania. They've both since vanished (men were photographed dismantling the Utah monolith). Now, yet another monolith has been discovered, this time in California.

Four men were spotted removing the mysterious metal monolith when it disappeared from a remote section of Utah, an eyewitness claims. The three-sided stainless-steel structure first spotted by wildlife officials counting sheep in southeastern Utah on Nov. 18 was taken down late Friday by a team of four men who worked in pairs and shoved it to the ground, the New York Times reported. Ross Bernards, a 34-year-old photographer from Colorado, told the newspaper he drove six hours earlier that night to get a glimpse of the peculiar structure that prompted worldwide speculation over how it got there, since it...

A mystery metal monolith identical to one which recently disappeared from a desert in the US has been discovered in Europe.

It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, buried in the desert: His dealer says yes. His son says maybe. His artist buddies, like Ed Ruscha, say, no way the sculptor created this tall, silvery object.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A mysterious silver monolith that was placed in the Utah desert has disappeared less than 10 days after it was spotted by wildlife biologists performing a helicopter survey of bighorn sheep, federal officials and witnesses said.

A giant, metal mystery slab has captured the attention of millions, as people speculate over how such a structure came to be in a remote part of southern Utah.

2020: Another Oddity. Wildlife officials in Utah were in a remote area counting sheep from a helicopter when they discovered a shiny metal monolith that looks straight out of a Stanley Kubrick film. It is estimated to be about 10 to 12 feet high, and its glistening surface is in sharp contrast to the large red rocks that surround it. Wednesday’s discovery appears to have been firmly planted in the soil, and not dropped from above. On Instagram, Utah’s highway patrol shared a picture of the bizarre finding with a caption reading: “Counting big horn sheep with DWR this week....

General rule of thumb for when you stumble upon something weird: Don’t touch it. Especially if it’s a big-ass metal structure of unknown (though, okay, likely human) origin. But that’s exactly what the folks on a sheep-counting expedition (truly) in a remote area of southern Utah did over the weekend. As reported by local NBC affiliate KSL TV, a helicopter crew from the Utah Department Of Public Safety was assisting Division Of Wildlife officers on a mission to count bighorn sheep last week when a biologist spotted a large metal structure on the ground and told them to circle back....

Undersea Monolith Reveals Genius Engineering by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Of all the scientific disciplines, underwater archaeology may be one of the most fascinating. These researchers examine artifacts our ancestors left behind before global sea level rose and covered them. A newly discovered monolith—a gigantic rock placed in what is today the Mediterranean Sea—confronts a few evolution-based errors about human origins. Divers visited the monolith in 2014, capturing high resolution sonar images and underwater photographs. It lies on the undersea Adventure Plateau, found south of Sicily and north of Tunisia, Africa. Archaeologists from Italy and Israel described the results in...

A 12-METRE monolith, hacked out of limestone by stone-age humans some nine thousand years ago, has been found at the bottom of the Mediterranean. The enormous stone totem, now split in two and sitting in the Sicilian Channel between Tunisia and Sicily, was hewed from a rocky outcrop some 300m away when the Mediterranean Sea was still a dry basin. It’s now under 40m of water. The new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, says the area was submerged about 9350 years ago (give or take 200 years) when the last Ice Age retreated. Before that time the...

La Paz, Mar 27 (EFE).- The government of Bolivia announced it will start exploratory excavations this year at the ancient fortress of Tiahuanaco after a buried pyramid was detected. Ludwing Cayo, director of the Tiahuanaco Archeological Research Center, told Efe that the formation is located in the area of Kantatallita, east of the Akapana pyramid. In a presentation for the media, Cayo outlined a five-year for further research at Tiahuanaco, an archaeological site 71 kilometers (44 miles) west of La Paz that was the cradle of an ancient civilization predating the Incas. Excavations may start in May or June, depending...

This post is a conglomeration of several articles, sources of information, on research that I've gathered, circumstances of which can be interpreted, lead to the conclusion of the seeming existence of two monoliths, uncovered in situations unrelated to each other. One of the so-called monolith-shaped objects was discovered by the Mars Global Surveyor in 2009 on the planet Mars, whereas the other so-called monolith-shaped object found located on the Martian moon of Phobos in 2007. I perused through many numerous articles to find the most straight-forward, scholarly, scientifically non-committal, links, sources of information, assiduously avoiding any histrionic, hysteria-driven conspiracy-type sources...

On March 25, 2010, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on their blog that ESA’s study of the mass of Phobos had been accepted for publication in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. The announcement excerpted startling conclusions of ESA’s findings: “We conclude that the interior of Phobos likely contains large voids. When applied to various hypotheses bearing on the origin of Phobos, these results are inconsistent with the proposition that Phobos is a captured asteroid.” (1,2) Since that time, a number of prominent ancient astronaut blogs have had plenty to say about the findings. The ESA findings were most...

Researchers Say Gardom’s Edge Monolith Is Astronomical Marker A team of researchers from the Nottingham Trent University has suggested that a 4000-year-old unique triangular shaped monolith, known as the Gardom’s Edge monolith, was aligned to be an astronomical marker. The 2.2 meter high monolith, located in the Peak District National Park near Manchester, UK, has a striking, right-angled triangular shape that slants up towards geographic south. The orientation and inclination of the slope is aligned to the altitude of the Sun at mid-summer. The team believes that the monolith was set in place to give symbolic meaning to the location...

SAUGERTIES, N.Y. (AP) -- Harvey Fite spent 37 years turning an abandoned bluestone quarry in the Catskill Mountains into a strange and striking landscape sculpture. Visitors to Opus 40 walk through rock-wall mazes that swirl around a 9-ton monolith looming in the center like a Stone Age exclamation mark. Fite was still working on his multi-acre artwork when he died in 1976 at age 72. His family has kept the Woodstock-area attraction open to seasonal visitors and the occasional concert, but now they're trying to sell the land, and local officials are working with them to keep this novel Hudson...