Many things in this world, the saying goes, are part art and part science.

It turns out, though, that the gigantic statue that mysteriously popped up on the southwest edge of Fort Wayne is not really art, but mostly science.

Late last month, we wrote about the statue, which is 8 feet tall and is partly hidden behind a hillock on Lower Huntington Road. The sculpture, made of cast concrete and covered in a blue tarp, appeared to resemble the statues found on Easter Island.

Who made the statue and why was a mystery.

It turns out the statue is a reproduction of the Easter Island statues, called a moai, some of which were more than 30 feet tall.

The reproduction on Lower Huntington, across the road and a little bit west of Orchard Ridge Country Club, weighs 14,000 pounds. It was built by Bob Stark, not an artist but a local engineer/publisher/retiree who became intrigued by the Easter Island statues nearly 30 years ago.

Easter Island has 887 moai. About a third stand planted upright around the island. Nearly half remain in the quarry where they were carved, and a few lie around the island, still in transit between the quarry and their intended destinations.

One of the many mysteries surrounding these statues is how the people of Easter Island transported them around the island and managed to erect them.

That – how gigantic moai could be moved – is a question that Stark was hoping to answer when he started making his 7-ton statue this summer.

Stark first got involved with moai when he took an anthropology course in the 1980s while an engineer at a power plant in Wyoming. He and his professor, who had written a book on Easter Island, put their heads together and started trying to figure out how people with few tools could have moved such large, heavy objects.

Their collaboration didn’t last long. Stark moved back to Fort Wayne in 1989, but he never quit asking himself the question.

Last weekend, Stark finally came up with a possible answer.

Stark designed a system of wooden rails and rollers, trying to show that something as massive as his moai could be moved while standing upright using only people power.

The system uses three pairs of rails so that as the statue passes over one rail it can be moved to the front of the statue, giving it more rail to pass over.

The system, Stark said, helps level the terrain and uses relatively little material.

So, did it work?

“It went perfect, just as I designed it,” Stark said.

Stark actually recruited 15 people, including friends and family members, to do the work, but he quickly found that a single man could actually move the statue a few inches at a time using a lever.

In practice, Stark’s crew of 15 people, some pushing and some pulling on ropes, managed to move the statue 10 feet in about 45 minutes.

Researchers have been trying for decades to figure out how the statues were moved, experimenting with different concepts, but movable rails are a new concept, Stark said.

Is this really how the Easter Islanders moved their statues?

One can never tell, but “it’s one way they could have used. It worked nice,” Stark said.

Stark’s next project is to take a giant red concrete disc and put it on top of the statue. It is a red cap that some of the Easter Island statutes have.

When he’s done, though, what will happen to the statue?

Let’s just say for the next couple of hundred years, it won’t be going anywhere. After all, it weighs 14,000 pounds.