Antennas Keep Showing Up In Salt Lake City, But It's Owners Remain Anonymous [Photos]

Mysterious objects keep getting discovered in Salt Lake City. After the monolith in 2020, it is the weird antennas that started showing up in the hills of Utah in 2022.

All the antennas discovered so far have a solar panel and a locked black box. The latest antenna, found at 7,000 feet, was removed Wednesday. The mystery appearances have been going on for the past year.

"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."

Antennas have also been found in areas managed by the Forest Service and the University of Utah, though the latter reportedly has no part in its installation.

"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," the university said in a statement cited by IFLScience.

"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," the statement further read.

At this point, rather than a mystery, the antennas have become a nuisance for the authorities to take down every time one pops up. "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," Fonarow added.

Theories abound on what is the real purpose of these antennas, but the real reason eludes authorities as of now. "We just don't know enough at this point to speculate what they are," Fonarow told local news outlet KSL-5.

Moreover, taking down these antennas requires a lot of effort and hours on part of the authorities.

As for the person or persons who erected the antennas, it would have been "a good workout to lug the equipment up to those remote areas, but it's something that someone who's in good shape could have easily done," community outreach manager Luke Allen told Gizmodo and added that the cost of the equipment remains unclear.