The peculiar case of the enigmatic monolith is now making a lot of noise on international media.
The most recent structure that appeared on a Romanian hillside has vanished, Tuesday. Local media reported that the monolith was removed Sunday night, but nobody knows who took it. Locals in the area said they saw "strange lights," Fox News reported Wednesday.
No one knows where the shiny structure came from, or who placed it near the town of Piatra Neamt in Romania four days ago, but it appeared on the same day a similar monolith disappeared from a desert in Utah.
In an interview with Reuters, journalist Robert Iosub of the Ziar Piatra Neamt newspaper said the nine-foot-tall monolith "disappeared overnight as quietly as it was erected last week," All that remains now is just a tiny hole covered by rocky soil, he said.
Andrei Carabelea, the mayor of Piatra Neamt, welcomed the strange object's discovery with a comical Facebook comment Nov. 28: "My guess is that some naughty alien teenagers have left home with their parents' UFOs and started planting metal objects around the world -- first in Utah and then in Piatra Neamț. I'm honored they chose our city," USA Today quoted her as saying.
The identical pillars have some differences: the one in Romania is mostly formed by interlaced circles, while the Utah structure appeared glossy. Both looked similar to the imposing slab from the 1968 sci-fi flick "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Meanwhile, the monolith in Utah was removed by four men - not aliens -- as many around the world might have theorized.
Colorado photographer Ross Bernards told The New York Times that he saw the men dismantle the structure and loaded the pieces into a wheelbarrow. As they walked off, one of them said, "Leave no trace."
The San Juan county sheriff in Utah declined to conduct any probe, jokingly uploading to its website a "Most Wanted" poster with the face of extraterrestrial beings as the suspects. But the sheriff's office had a change of heart and said they will investigate with the Bureau of Land Management.
