Our Five Best Guesses as to Who’s Behind the Mysterious Monoliths

5

Elon Musk

The monoliths are moderately alarming, extremely confusing, derivative and meaningless as a joke, so they’ve got all the hallmarks of a classic Musk stunt. This would require him to wait at least four years for the joke to pay off, however, and he’s simply not that patient.

4

Stanley Kubrick

You know who did have the patience for this kind of thing? The man behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, which features a monolith on which these ones are obviously modeled. Sure, he’s been dead for 25 years, but would you be at all surprised to find out he set up some kind of system before his death for terrorizing the public from beyond the grave?

3

QAnon

This is clearly a conspiracy of some sort, so the foremost global conspiracy theorists are natural suspects. Maybe Q finally had enough of 4chan and decided to start communicating via monolith. The fact that a group representing QAnon positioned themselves in opposition to the monoliths in 2020 throws a bit of a wrench into the suggestion, but that would just make it even funnier.

2

Aliens

Of course, one of the most satisfying explanations would be that it really is aliens. They saw 2001, loved it, got super into it, then watched Eyes Wide Shut and thought, “Space lord, they really do need our help.” That or Arthur C. Clarke knew something we didn’t. Either way, it would vindicate a whole lot of UFO enthusiasts, and let’s be honest, they could use the win.

1

No One

Hear us out: It’s not like monoliths grow organically in the desert or whatever, but it seems pretty likely, given their spread, that there’s no one person behind them. One random sci-fi fan with too much time on their hands thought it would be fun, another guy saw it and thought, “Nice, I’mma do that, too,” and now there’s just a bunch of guys, connected by nothing more than the human desire to confuse. It’s that connection, the continuous one-upmanship, that elevates it from a dumb billionaire prank to something pretty beautiful, when you think about it. 

Maybe the aliens were inside us all along.