After driving along a flat plain two hundred kilometers southeast of the Arabian city of Tabuk, in the middle of the Tayama oasis, you can see the famous megalith of Al-Naslaa.
The towering huge sandstone rock is vertically divided in half almost in the middle, while the halves have not fallen on different sides and did not come together over the millennia, but stubbornly stand upright. Each of them rests on a massive "leg" without touching the main part of the ground surface. A relatively thin split line along the entire length is unchanged, and creates a realistic illusion that unknown engineers have worked on the block with the most accurate laser tool.
Back side view.
The multi-ton artifact was first encountered by amazed Europeans in 1883. Before Charles Hoover, no one from the Western world had climbed into this area of the Nefud Desert, and the Arabs did not say much about the unique rock.
The luminaries of science explain the phenomenon from Al-Naslaa as usual by natural factors, they say, the crack started due to the tension between the halves of the boulder after the natural displacement in height of one of the supports.
There are weak points in this plausible theory. Rarely do monoliths crack along such a straight line, and in the case of Al-Naslaa, the split is surprisingly perpendicular to the rock layers, which is visually noticeable even to an inexperienced tourist. An interesting nuance - the cut halves after separation stopped moving, despite the relatively fragile structure of the base.
Promotional video:
The idea with alien lasers also does not find confirmation during visual inspection; no traces of molten rock were noticed along the edges of a flat crack. If they cut Al-Naslaa, it was more likely with the most ancient tools without high-temperature technologies.
The value of the megalith for the ancient civilization is confirmed by the presence of petroglyphs on its surface, whether they were applied before sawing or in later times is a mystery.
Perhaps some kind of cataclysm prevented the already divided Al-Naslaa from making blocks, sending giant bricks further to the next grandiose Egyptian construction site. As a result, modern explorers of ancient megaliths received yet another ingenious riddle, and tourists - the most excellent reason to visit the desert corner of Arabia in the vicinity of ancient Tabuk.