Ah Utah, the state famous for its beautiful mountains, incredible landscapes, and its use as a dump for mysterious objects with no clear backstory.
In 2020, there was the monolith. Though the best guess is that it was an art piece left in around 2016, it largely still remains a mystery. Now we have a new, higher-tech mystery going on: over the last year, person or persons unknown have been bolting antennas to the hills of Salt Lake City.
The latest of the antennas was removed from the foothills by officials on Wednesday. The antennas, which have been found around the hills over the past year, all come attached to a solar panel and a locked battery box. In recent months, activity seems to have ramped up. The latest was found at 2,100 meters (7,000 feet).
“These towers have been bolted into different peaks and summits and ridges around the foothills,” Salt Lake City's recreational trails manager Tyler Fonarow told KSLTV, “and it started with one or two, and now it might be as much as a dozen.”
Further antennas have been found on lands managed by the Forest Service and The University of Utah, though the University denied involvement in their erection.
“Since Salt Lake City leaders alerted the University of Utah to the unauthorized solar panel towers in the foothills northeast of the Avenues neighborhood, University of Utah representatives have been actively coordinating with City Public Lands officials to determine whether any member of our campus community is connected to the towers," they said in a statement to KSLTV.
"As far as we know, the tower located on university property is not owned or operated by the university. We appreciate Salt Lake City’s collaboration and dedicated efforts to identify the owners.”
Suggestions for the purposes of the antennas range from them being number stations (a strange and unlikely explanation) to the much more mundane answer that they could be used to relay signals, or that they are used for cryptocurrency mining.
A photo shows that the latest antenna recovered is in the 900 megahertz range, which is about the range used by the Helium Blockchain. Helium is a wireless network that relies on people to build the infrastructure through placing equipment, rewarding them with cryptocurrency for doing so.
Officials are appealing for information on who is placing the devices and why, though they make clear no public damage has been caused.
“As long as it’s not dangerous, we really don’t care,” Fonarow told Vice. “We just want people to stop doing it so we can get back to taking care of our lands."
"If someone wanted to put an antenna in the exact same location for scientific purposes, we’d probably allow it.”
