According to HistoryLink.org, a mysterious metallic monolith discovered at Magnuson Park on Jan. 1, 2001, quickly became one of Seattle’s strangest public art moments — and vanished just as unexpectedly.
Early that New Year’s Day morning, visitors to Magnuson Park noticed a tall, oblong metallic object standing atop Kite Hill.
The structure measured roughly three feet wide and nine feet tall and appeared to be hollow.
There was no indication of who built it — or, as some joked at the time, what planet it might have come from.
The park sits on the former Sand Point Naval Air Station in northeast Seattle, and witnesses said the object bore a strong resemblance to the alien monolith featured in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Once word spread through news reports and radio broadcasts, crowds flocked to the park to see it for themselves.
Many visitors gently touched the monolith, some hoping the experience might raise their consciousness or provide a moment of reflection.
Despite the lack of permits to install such a structure, park officials said their main concern was public safety.
Staff pushed against the object and found it solid and stable, deciding to let it remain in place while they looked into its origins.
The monolith did not stay long.
Sometime during the early morning hours of Jan. 3, the structure disappeared.
In its place was a hole containing a concrete footing that had anchored the object.
A single red rose, its stem snapped in two, was left behind.
The next morning, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — dubbed the monolith the “2001 Space Oddity” — reported that a similar object had appeared on Duck Island at Green Lake.
Around the same time, artist and Blue Moon Tavern regular Caleb Schaber said he and a group of anonymous collaborators known as “Some People” had built the original monolith and several smaller versions placed around Seattle.
Schaber said his group was not responsible for moving the monolith from Magnuson Park.
Schaber died in 2009. He was 36.
Park manager C. David Hughbanks later arranged for the artwork to be returned to Sand Point, at least temporarily.
The mystery continued a few days later.
During the night of Jan. 6–7, someone installed a rocket-like aviation fuel tank nose-down at the monolith’s original location on Kite Hill, adding another unexplained chapter to the story.
Twenty-five years later, the brief appearance and disappearance of the Magnuson Park monolith remains one of Seattle’s most curious New Year’s Day surprises.
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