Trust, but verify

--President Ronald Reagan

Доверяй, но проверяй

When something emotional starts going viral on social media, I like to say something along the lines of "Yeah, right." A lifetime distrust of social media has made me very cognizant and well prepared for the world of fake news I live in. Recently on Reddit, while going to school at Utah State, a monolith was found in a state canyon by Utah Department of Wildlife Services (DWS) flying a Utah Department of Public Safety Helicopter. (UT DPS).

Reddit lit up with a subreddit or subforum called r/findthemonolith.

I watched it. But here's the thing. No matter how well someone does an analysis, someone must always do a follow up verification. Which I did.

I knew three things based off the original KSL (local TV station, and newsite) article.

  1. They were flying a helicopter in Southern Utah

  2. They were looking doing counts of Desert Sheep.

  3. They found it in a canyon

This is a Desert Sheep (look for blue areas on the coming map)

This is a bighorn sheep (look for the light green areas on the map)

One user on Reddit, used the flight path of the DWS helicopter to narrow down the likely locations of the specified canyon.

Another then used the description of the canyon, the predetermined flight path, and Google Earth past imagery to find the location of the monolith. It's a bare silver sliver on the canyon, that is not visible prior to 2016, indicating that it was placed there after that photography. (BearF****er, 2020)

Awesome job guys! Everyone told this one Reddit user that he should go work for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. And he should! He can find difficult to find things on a map. But the one thing they didn't think to do was to verify the possibility of the information being true. This is where I come in.

I remembered that DWS was counting Desert Sheep. I did take the coordinates of the monolith provided, and I verified the silver sliver not being there before 2016. The important question being, that everyone forgot to ask, was


Is this location actually within the distribution of desert bighorn sheep in Southern Utah?

The crowdsourcing was great! The use of open-source intelligence (OSINT) and geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) was amazing. But in the intelligence gathering world there is always a verification step, or two or three, or five thousand before intelligence is acted upon. So I used a bit of OSINT and GEOINT to figure out if this question could be answered.

I went to the Utah Division of Wildlife Services and the Utah ARGC and found shapefiles for both Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep and Desert Bighorn distribution in Utah. I colored the Bighorn territory shapefile green, and the Desert Bighorn territory shapefile blue. I then took the coordinates, and created a pin where the monolith was supposed to be. Folks, this is all in ArcGIS Pro.

And the answer is yes, the monolith is absolutely within the distribution of desert sheep. The DWS story checks out, the Reddit story checks out, and yes you must double check and verify your results a couple different ways before you get ahead of yourself.