Lori Falce: Monolith is 2020 puzzle we needed

I love a puzzle.

Give me a stack of crosswords and a pen and I can entertain myself for hours. I am the reason they put those little peg brain-teasers on the table at Cracker Barrel. I have spent more than 30 years turning an unsolved murder over and over in my head like a Rubik’s Cube.

So I will admit that when a shiny spike of metal showed up last month incongruously in the desert in Utah, my first thought was intrigue. When it disappeared? Excitement. This was a magnificent mystery waiting to be picked apart.

But then a similar structure popped up in Romania. And disappeared.

Now a third has appeared at the top of a trail in Atascadero, Calif., halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

What seemed like crop circles in an Iowa field or the Nazca Lines in Peru, Stonehenge or the stone heads of Easter Island is still puzzling. The puzzle is just becoming a little less what and how and a little more who and why.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was a bit unnerved. I watch a lot of science fiction. Unexplained phenomena that pop up unexpectedly in locations around the world tend to be a regular occurrence in that genre. They just usually come right before the aliens take over the planet or blow up the landmarks.

That is not to say that I think we are being set up for giant robots or lizard people disguised as humans to threaten our very existence. I don’t. Well, not much.

What I do think is that this is a year that has been dominated by a different kind of puzzle in the coronavirus pandemic. That isn’t something most people can help brainstorm as ribonucleic acids and spike proteins aren’t that well understood.

The pandemic is also too polarized, too political. It isn’t a thrilling riddle to be solved but a war to be waged either against the disease itself or between believers and opponents.

I don’t know where the silvery obelisks originate or who is placing them. I do feel as though the why of them is the puzzle. A distraction. A knot to be unraveled at a time when the whole world needs to concentrate on something that isn’t positivity rates and death tolls.

The monoliths have appeared and disappeared in areas that aren’t heavily trafficked but are definitely socially distant. It could all be a larger-than-life version of “Elf on a Shelf,” designed to captivate our attention as the 2020 calendar comes to a close.

Of course, I could be wrong.

It could be aliens.