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It began in a remote Utah desert and within a few months has quickly spread across the planet. According to a recent tally, about 200 different monoliths have now been reported from Austria to Morocco. Yes, someone is actually counting! Recent reports have been recorded from California to the Democratic Republic of Congo. In late February, a monolith was found in the ice on a lake in Alberta, Canada. When a monolith suddenly appeared in Turkey in early February, hopes were raised of possible extraterrestrial involvement when press photos appeared showing armed guards surrounding the structure – followed by reports that it had mysteriously vanished. It turned out to have been a publicity stunt orchestrated by Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan to promote the country’s space program.
What is so interesting about these structures is how the phenomenon has spread around the world. What does it all mean?
Firstly, I think we can safely eliminate space aliens from the picture unless they frequent earthly hardware stores and are building with rivets and other materials from early 21st-century Earth. Clearly, these are human creations, but what does their appearance tell us?
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a monolith is “a single great stone often in the form of an obelisk or column.” Humans have been creating these structures for thousands of years. Their meaning varies depending on the culture, time, and place. To outside observers, and particularly for cultures with no written record, their meaning can be difficult to decipher. In more recent times, monoliths were made famous by the mysterious appearance of one in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it appears to represent the shift in humanity’s evolution to a more civilized phase.
What is fascinating is not that they have appeared but how they have spread so quickly in so many countries. It may be that their appearance is related to a challenging year that has been filled with lockdowns, economic hardship, disrupted routines, and fear. Perhaps it is a kind of collective mischief-making; the equivalent of an attack of global cabin fever in a world that is desperately seeking a distraction. It is like watching a good movie play out at a time when most of the world cannot even attend the cinema due to the threat of COVID-19 – an international "whodunnit" that offers a temporary reprieve from our troubles.
Monolith mania is a form of fad that has spread because of the shared meanings that people attach to it. Monoliths are wonderfully ambiguous symbols that mean many things to many people. Ultimately, they are a reflection on us at any given time – our hopes and dreams for the future. They are generic monuments – blank slates on which we get to project ourselves. As such, they are the equivalent of a collective Rorschach inkblot test. While they are generic, they are also highly personal. The current fad of erecting monoliths tells us more about us as humans than it does about any alien race. Monoliths are mirrors; social barometers of the state of society at any given time. For instance, some UFO enthusiasts have suggested that, like crop circles, they may be a message from a super-civilized species of extraterrestrials – saviors from the skies, who are signaling to humanity their imminent arrival.
Sometimes humans can be guilty of over-analyzing. The father of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, was renowned for his interpretation of various symbols, especially dreams. It has been widely reported that when asked about the significance of smoking a cigar, he responded by saying: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” This could be an appropriate quote for monolith mania but for one problem: There is no evidence that Freud ever said this, even though it has entered the popular lexicon. It is but one more example of the human propensity for perpetuating myths.
