As if 2020 couldn’t get any more bizarre, a mysterious Space Odyssey-style metal monolith has been discovered in a remote area of the Utah desert.

While state workers were counting bighorn sheep from a helicopter, they spotted something out of place – a 12 feet tall metal monolith that had been installed in a secluded area of rock.

The Utah Department of Public Safety said the object was found in a “very remote” area of the desert, deliberately withholding its location to prevent people from attempting to visit.

“It is illegal to install structures or art without authorization on federally managed public lands, no matter what planet you’re from,” said the department’s statement.

Andrew Adams @AndrewAdamsKSL

The @UtahDPS helicopter was assisting the @UtahDWR in counting bighorn sheep in remote southern Utah Wednesday when the crew encountered something entirely 'out of this world'...

@KSL5TV #KSLTV #Utah

“That’s been about the strangest thing that I’ve come across out there in all my years of flying,” helicopter pilot Bret Hutchings told Salt Lake City broadcaster KSL-TV.

Who Does This Kind of Stuff?' Mystery Metal Monolith Discovered in Utah Desert.

“One of the biologists is the one who spotted it and we just happened to fly directly over the top of it,” Hutchings added. “He was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, turn around, turn around!’ And I was like, ‘What.’ And he’s like, ‘There’s this thing back there — we’ve got to go look at it!’ We were thinking, is this something NASA stuck up there or something? Are they bouncing satellites off it?”

Respondents immediately drew comparisons to the mysterious monolith featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The monolith in the movie is a black stone tablet first discovered by a group of apes who then begin to evolve by learning to use tools. Another monolith is then found on the moon which points to a third one near Jupiter.

Although ostensibly linked to advances in human consciousness and evolution, the real meaning of Kubrick’s monolith has been debated for decades, with one of the more interesting explanations being that it represents a movie screen, a metaphor for Kubrick trying to signal that the space race of the 1960’s wasn’t real.