Who blew up the Guidestones? AJC podcast investigates the mystery of Georgia’s storied landmark
The Georgia Guidestones came into the world in 1980 shrouded in mystery. Then, after someone blew up Elbert County’s enigmatic landmark in the early hours of July 6, 2022, they left just as mysteriously.
And as everyone knows, the only thing better than one mystery is two.
In “Who Blew Up the Guidestones?” a new six-part audio investigation from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Goat Rodeo out March 17, I take listeners with me on a journey to get to the bottom of those two mysteries. These open questions bookended the Guidestones’ tumultuous 42-year life: Who was driven to create such a massive monument, and who was driven to destroy it?
Like many people who grew up in the Atlanta suburbs or spent their summers at a camp in North Georgia, I have long been fascinated by the Guidestones. Made up of six slabs of solid granite, rising nearly 20 feet tall and weighing more than 200,000 pounds, the Guidestones were arranged like some kind of ancient megalith. But unlike Stonehenge, they included 10 inscriptions in eight languages meant to guide humanity after some inevitable calamity.
R.C. Christian, the Guidestones’ pseudonymous creator, intended to get ahead of any potential conspiracy theories about the monument’s true purpose by carving the set of directives directly onto the stones. But the odd commandments had the opposite effect. The first one in particular, “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature,” was a lightning rod from the start.
At first, conspiracy theories about the Guidestones were mostly contained to local lore in Elberton. But as these legends spread beyond Georgia, and even beyond the United States, people started to fling all kinds of wacky accusations at “America’s Stonehenge.” As the years went on, the Guidestones became blank slates onto which each generation could project their own anxieties: the Soviet threat and nuclear annihilation, the Satanic Panic, the New World Order, Q Anon.
Throughout it all, still they stood. Until they didn’t. At some point, conspiracy theories about the Guidestones took on a darker, more aggressive tone. This shift likely led to their demise, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.
“Who Blew Up the Guidestones?” is an attempt to answer the question posed by its title, but it is also a road trip through granite quarries and graveyards, one that takes listeners down dizzying rabbit holes and into some of the most fringe corners of the internet. Along the way, we dissect the pathologies that drive people both to erect great works of art and to destroy them. In a time when shared truths and a sense of reality can be hard to find, “Who Blew Up the Guidestones?” explores what makes conspiracy theories so irresistible and why they tend to consume everything around them once they take root.
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Follow Who Blew Up the Guidestones? now on Apple or Spotify.
