Residents of Bellvue, Colorado, just northwest of Fort Collins, woke up this week to a shiny, rectangular monolith standing over six feet tall, and no one has yet reported it constructed or placed on the hillside.
The structure is similar to others that have popped up across the country in the past few years. Earlier this month, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department reported one such monolith in the desert of Grass Park, which is on the outskirts of the city.
The monoliths have often been compared to something out of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and have been spotted as far away as Turkey, Romania and Ukraine. In 2020, the monolith hype reached a peak when two that had appeared in New Mexico and Utah sold for a listed price of $45,000.
There have been no reported connections to the Fort Collins monolith or others around the world. Each time a monolith appears, however, people suspect alien activity has led to the mysterious structures, and the Fort Collins area is no stranger to perceived evidence of alien life.
Colorado has higher UFO sightings reported per 100,000 residents than the average across the United States, and Larimer County, where Fort Collins and Bellvue are located, is no exception. The national average is 34.3 UFO sightings reported per 100,000 residents this century, according to the National UFO Reporting Center. In Larimer County, there have been 78.5 sightings per 100,000 residents.
However, a Reddit user in the r/FortCollins subreddit shared that aliens and artists aren't the answer.
"Apparently, the story is one of the homeowners in the area believes in aliens and conspiracies so his neighbor decided to build one and set it up on the hill to mess with him," the Redditor wrote. "Sadly nothing out of this world."
That report is unconfirmed and, as another Reddit user commented, something aliens would say to cover up their presence on Earth.
