Days after the discovery and swift disappearance of two shining metal monoliths half a world apart, another towering structure has popped up and then quickly vanished, this time from the pinnacle of a trail in California.
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After photos were posted on social media, the tall, silver metallic structure drew hikers to the top of the Pine Mountain trail in an Atascadero park, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The three-sided, three-metre-tall, 90kg monolith was similar to two others discovered recently in the Utah desert and in Romania. Like those structures, the origin of the California edifice is also unknown.
But by Thursday, the California monolith had vanished, apparently torn down by a group of young men who travelled five hours from farther south to remove it, the city of Atascadero said in a Facebook post.
Video posted online showed a group of young men wearing night-vision goggles toppling what appears to be the monolith before dawn while chanting "Christ is king" and "America First."
One man also is heard saying to the camera: "We don't want illegal aliens from Mexico or outer space."
The men replaced the structure with a wooden cross, which also disappeared. All that was left on Thursday of the monolith were few pieces of supporting rebar.
Police were reviewing the video.
Another monolith spotted two weeks ago in Utah's otherworldly red-rock country became a beacon of fascination around the world as it evoked the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and drew hundreds of people to the remote spot.
A structure that appeared last week in Romania is also gone.
Australian Associated Press