I don't really have any active plans to go to Utah right now but this is the sort of creepy thing that more or less guarantees I'll never go:

Strange antennas have appeared in the foothills around Salt Lake City and authorities have no idea what they are or who put them up.

As first reported by KSLTV 5 in Utah, people first began noticing the antennas a year ago. They're simple machines made up of a LoRa fiberglass antenna, a locked battery pack, and a solar panel to power it. The Salt Lake City public lands department has been pulling them down as they find them, and told KSLTV that there have been as many as a dozen.

"As many as a dozen" of these things:

Officials really are putting in a lot of work to take these things down:

As an aside, wow, Utah really kind of looks like a Yukon tundra, doesn't it? How is that located in the continental United States? But I digress.

So what the heck are these things? There are a few working theories:

The router made Fonarow initially think the thing was a cell phone booster, he said. Another leading theory online is that the antennas are part of a cryptocurrency mining operation. Helium is a type of cryptocurrency that uses antennas to create a long-range, wide-area network. Instead of proof-of-work releasing token rewards, Helium relies on what it calls proof-of-coverage. The wider the network, the more Helium you're mining. Helium mining requires the exact kind of antenna shown in the photos of the devices recovered by Salt Lake City authorities. There are plenty of articles online instructing people how to create solar-powered rigs for Helium miners to deploy in rural areas, and Helium miners are fond of bragging about the elevation of their antennas.

Sounds compelling...except, as one user pointed out, Helium crypto is on a major downward slide, meaning anyone putting those devices up is probably losing a lot of money on the deal.

Lastly, there's always the possibility...