From 1980 to 2022, the Georgia Guidestones stood high on a rural hillside in Elbert County, Georgia. Its origins are unclear. What we do know is that the mysterious granite monument consisted of six huge slabs, with one central pillar surrounded by four stones and a capstone on top.
Often referred to as “America’s Stonehenge,” it was more than 19 feet tall and weighed 240,000 pounds.
The stone slabs were inscribed with 10 guidelines in eight different modern languages. A shorter message was written in four ancient languages.
The inscriptions offered advice on topics such as environmental sustainability, population control, and social harmony, sparking a number of conspiracy theories. The Guidestones were destroyed in July 2022 due to an act of vandalism.
The Georgia Guidestones were erected in 1980, thanks to a man who went by the pseudonym Robert Christian. When he met with the Elberton Granite Finishing Company in Elbert County in 1979, he claimed that he represented an anonymous group of loyal Americans who had secretly been planning to build a stone monument for 20 years.
The company was shocked by the size of the monument that Christian wanted to construct. Christian explained that he needed such massive stones so the structure could hold up when the end of the world came.
He believed that human civilization was on the brink of collapse, and his monument would provide instructions for the people still remaining after the global catastrophe. It was also meant to function as a compass, a clock, and a calendar.
In the end, the project cost over $100,000 to complete. The local banker that Christian worked with tried to get him to provide his real name for the transaction, but Christian had the banker sign a non-disclosure agreement.
He also made the banker promise to destroy all the paperwork when the project was done. He even sent money from several banks from all over the country, so his origins couldn’t be traced. After the monument’s construction started, Christian disappeared and was never seen again.
He communicated only through mail, and his letters never came from the same place twice. By March 1980, the Georgia Guidestones were finally finished. As per Christian’s wishes, they were engraved with a list of 10 rules for humans in a post-apocalyptic world to follow. They were written in English, Chinese, Spanish, Swahili, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Russian.
Some of the most notable rules included keeping the human population under 500,000,000 to stay in tune with nature, protecting people with fair laws/courts, establishing a world court to resolve external disputes, balancing personal rights with social duties, and leaving room for nature.
Aside from these instructions, there were astronomical specifications that included a hole through which the North Star would always be visible at night, a slot that lined up with the rising sun on equinoxes and solstices, and a pinhole in the capstone that allowed the light to shine through at noon in such a way that showed what day of the year it was.
Some believe that Robert Christian was a religious fanatic or a part of the New World Order, a conspiracy theory that claims an elite force of agents is working behind the scenes to implement a worldwide totalitarian government.
Robert Christian’s name has appeared as the author of a book called Common Sense Renewed. The book included Christian’s guidelines and ideas for politics, healthcare, and population control policies. However, the book did not offer any hints as to his identity.
In 2015, a film crew for a documentary about the Georgia Guidestones got their hands on the documents that the banker was supposed to destroy. He never did, though. The film crew found that many of Christian’s letters came from Fort Dodge, Iowa.
After doing some more digging, they concluded that Robert Christian was really Herbert H. Kersten, a physician who wrote letters to newspapers that closely resembled the writings in the book. He died in 2005, and his family denied that he was ever involved with the Georgia Guidestones.
In July 2022, the Georgia Guidestones were destroyed by an explosion. Later, workers had to take the monument apart because it was unstable. The culprits were never caught. The remaining pieces of the Georgia Guidestones are being kept on display at the Elberton Granite Museum.
