Mysterious monolith is back in Atascadero — and another one just popped up in SLO County
That mysterious monolith is back in Atascadero — and a similar structure has appeared elsewhere in San Luis Obispo County.
Days after installing a towering, three-sided metal monolith in Atascadero’s Stadium Park, only to have it removed, a group of local artists remade the structure and installed it on the same site.
Atascadero residents Wade McKenzie, Travis Kenney, Randall Kenney and Bay Area resident Jared Riddle said they built the monolith to spread positivity and get people outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic.
McKenzie and Travis Kenney told The Tribune on Sunday that they are frequently on the hill in Stadium Park mountain biking or hiking, so when they saw the two monoliths pop up in Utah and Romania, they figured they should build a third one.
Kenney said they were inspired by the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which three monoliths represent human evolution.
“I always wanted to do a secret guerrilla art project,” McKenzie said. “We’re getting older, (so we) might as well do it now. And we’ll do it in our hometown.”
A YouTube video posted Friday shows the men putting the steel structure into a large hole dug into the top of the hill. The shiny, triangle-shaped part of the monolith is fully visible above the ground.
Now, the monolith is secure, Kenney said, with about 720 pounds of concrete around its base beneath the soil.
Second monolith in SLO County appears
The artists restored the Atascadero monolith to its original site around the same time that another monolith surfaced on Los Padres National Forest lands southwest of Pozo.
Matt Carver said that he and his friends were on a camping trip on Saturday morning when they stumbled upon the tall metal structure on Hi Mountain Lookout Road.
Carver said the group heard engines late Friday night near their camping spot and assumed they belonged to a couple of off-road drivers having fun in the mountains. The friends found the monolith on their drive back to San Luis Obispo, he said.
“We were super happy that someone/group went to all that work,” Carver wrote in a Facebook message to The Tribune. “It really did make our day to find it! I think we had huge smiles on our faces for the rest of the ride home.”
The second monolith resembles the monolith in Atascadero, but the structure’s top features “CAUTION” written in red and a picture of a UFO beaming in a human.
It’s not clear if the two monoliths are connected.
Kenney and McKenzie said they did not place the monolith there, but told The Tribune that it could be their first monolith they built and installed in Atascadero on Dec. 1, since that structure was never recovered.
First monolith spotted in SLO County
Hikers first noticed the Atascadero monolith at the top of the Pine Mountain loop in Stadium Park on Dec. 2.
The structure, the first such monolith to be spotted in California, drew international attention.
A similar monolith captured the public’s imagination after the illegally installed structure was discovered in Utah on lands owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management in mid-November.
Officials attempted to dissuade hikers from trekking out to the mysterious structure by refusing to reveal its location, but that didn’t stop scores of people from making a pilgrimage to the monolith over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Then the Utah monolith disappeared.
The Bureau of Land Management said an “unknown party” removed the structure sometime in the evening of Nov. 27.
Ripley’s Believe it or Not is offering a $10,000 reward for information on the structure’s whereabouts.
Days later after the Utah monolith disappeared, another mysterious monolith popped up in the Romanian city of Piatra Neamt. Then it vanished as well.
Men remove California monolith in video
The day it appeared, the Atascadero monolith was removed by a group of young men who left a wooden cross in its place.
A grainy livestream video, shared to streaming site DLive.tv by a user identified as CultureWarCriminal, shows four men driving from the Southern California area to tear down the structure and “tell the alien overlords they are not welcome.”
“We’re going on a 500-mile roundtrip to steal a f---ing monolith,” one camouflage-clad man says during the video, which has since been removed. “That’s how much we love Jesus Christ.”
At one point, one of the men says they are operating “on direct orders of QAnon and President Trump himself.”
After five hours, the men make it to Stadium Park and turn on night-vision goggles as they trek up the hill to the monolith.
“This is go-time boys,” one camouflage-clad member says just before they begin chanting “Christ is king.” The chant continues as they push down the silver structure and tear it from the rebar.
The video then shows one member of the group attempting to drag the monolith away as others try to install their homemade cross in its place.
A second stream posted by the same user that has also since been removed shows the group dragging the monolith down the hill as they chant “America first” and claim to be military veterans.
At one point, the men appear to think they are being chased by someone and hide before returning to their car without the monolith.
“The Illuminati got it, so we’ll strike again when they put another pillar up,” the streamer says.
According to a Dec. 3 news release issued by the city, Atascadero officials said they were disturbed by the group’s decision to tear down the monolith.
“Everybody was so excited at first and wanted to go see the monolith,” Mayor Heather Moreno told The Tribune in an interview Sunday. “And then to find out what had happened was so discouraging. But to have it back now, it’s sort of like ‘yay, the good guys won.’”
In a statement, McKenzie derided the men who removed the Atascadero monolith, adding that he and his fellow artists did not intend to “create a platform for someone to propagate their own agenda using the monolith to gain attention.”
“We will not let these folks looking to create more division among people succeed in their twisted agenda,” he wrote in the statement, quoted by YourTango.com.
“We do not need another event trying to divide our great country and local community,” he added. “We appreciate the time and support of those who have shared their positive energy and support.”
Will the Atascadero monolith get taken down again?
Moreno said she is working with the builders of the Atascadero monolith and city officials to figure out the next steps for the monolith.
On one hand, Moreno said, it would be great for the structure to stay on the hill — but there may be safety concerns regarding the possibility of it toppling onto someone, or drawing crowds during the coronavirus pandemic.
The other option is to move it somewhere downtown where people can enjoy the monolith alongside the city’s other art installations and murals.
“It’s still evolving,” Moreno said of the plan for what to do with the monolith.
Overall, however, Moreno said she’s happy to have the monolith in Atascadero, especially during a year like 2020.
“We’re the kind of community that pulls together — whether we need to pull together for a good cause, or because something bad has happened — that’s what we do here,” she said. “And this monolith is just another great example of that.”
This story was originally published December 6, 2020 at 1:08 PM with the headline "Mysterious monolith is back in Atascadero — and another one just popped up in SLO County."
