Residents baffled by mystery appearance of googly-eyed rocks

Some small, wide-eyed visitors have recently appeared in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Small rocks with glued-on googly eyes have been spotted around the city in the last few weeks. The mystery rocks are located around the downtown area. They’ve been noticed by residents and are the source of much intrigue, probably because no one seems to know who made them or left them around the city.



“I’m not sure how they got there. I’ve been wondering myself,” said Mary Weaver. “We’ve been seeing them around the parks and they’re not always in full view, sometimes they’re hiding.” Some of the rocks are sitting in large groups in plain sight, but some are by themselves or in pairs, perched on business window sills or partially hidden by plants. Brian Baier noticed a pair of googly-eyed rocks sitting on a stone pillar outside the Chester Fritz Library. Baier has run into the mysterious rocks downtown as well, much to the delight of his young daughters.





“Most recently, I had my two girls, we were walking around downtown and we went to the Arbor Park where there’s a whole gaggle? I don’t know, what do you call a group of bug-eyed rocks?” he asked. “There’s a lot of them there. We kept finding them everywhere we looked.” Baier said even his daughters wanted to know the origin of the rocks. “Yeah, my girls were quite excited about it, and of course they asked why they were there, and I said, ‘I think someone’s just enjoying making people ask why they’re here,’” Baier said.



Will Martin was also excited by the rocks’ appearance. “They’re cool,” he said. “It’s a nifty little thing. Who is responsible for the googly rocks? One of the great mysteries of Grand Forks.” Wherever they came from, the presence of the googly-eyed rocks in unexpected locations has charmed people, like Kathy Holle of New Salem. “Yes, they did brighten our day,” she said. “We were in Grand Forks to visit our son and his wife last weekend and stopped at a pocket park downtown when we started noticing them. It certainly made us smile. And look around for more. We, too, are curious.”