According to foreign media reports, an unexplained mysterious "boulder" found by Utah Public Safety Department officials in the desert on Tuesday attracted the attention of netizens. After about 24 hours, people have more answers, thanks to amateur detectives online. Given the region's long history with Hollywood, it might be arguable that this "boulder" was either a movie prop or was placed there as a joke by the crew. Even so, some people are still holding out hopes that it may be alien.
Redditors on Tuesday tracked the flight trajectories of two Utah Public Safety Agency helicopters in Moab, registered as N352HP and N325SL, based on information provided by FlightAware. From there, others narrowed down the possible location of the "boulder" to somewhere near Canyonlands National Park and its confluence with the Colorado River.
After that, a Reddit user was able to find the "boulder" on Google Earth. The coordinates of this strange "boulder" are 38.343080°, -109.666190°, put it into Google Earth and you can see that it is just south of Dead Horse Point State Park, between the park and Needles Point. Others have used Google Earth's historical imagery data to narrow the area where "boulders" appeared to a time between August 2015 and October 2016. As one of the cyber detectives pointed out, the "boulder" is miles away from the nearest highway.
The "boulder" is also relatively close to Canyonlands National Park, the first clue based on helicopter flight records. It just so happens that Dead Horse Point and Canyonland have been filmed in many movies and TV series. Dead Horse Point was first filmed by HBO in 2016 for Westworld, the films Thelma & Louise (1991), Con Air (1997), Mission: Impossible II (2000), John Carter (2012), and Raiders of the Lost Ark 3: Holy Warriors. Filming locations for films and TV series such as (1989) and 127 Hours (2010).
Canyonlands National Park has also been used as a filming location for films and episodes such as "The End of the Wild Flower", "MacGyver" and "Touched by an Angel". Canyonland was also filmed in the visually stunning classics Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Baraka (1992). A number of classic Westerns were also filmed there, including Fort Apache (1948), Warlock (1959), Comancheros (1961), Rio Conchos (1964), and Gold of the Seven Saints (1961).
Although on par with the black boulders of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, given that the film was almost entirely produced in the UK, it is unlikely that any part of the film would have been filmed in Utah.
The Utah Department of Public Safety declined to share the specific location of the mysterious "boulder" because they feared that people who were out in search of metal objects might be trapped and need rescue.