In June 1979, a well-dressed stranger walked into a granite company in Elberton, Georgia and said he represented a small group who wanted to build a monument, paid for entirely in cash, and gave his name only as R.C. Christian, which everyone involved understood was not real. He never gave his actual identity to anyone, not even the bank that handled the payment, and nobody in Elberton ever learned who he really was.
The monument went up in 1980, four massive granite slabs nearly twenty feet tall, inscribed in eight languages with ten guiding principles for humanity, and it became a local landmark and a target for conspiracy theorists in roughly equal measure. Some read the inscriptions as a blueprint for population control, and threats against the stones followed for decades.
At around four in the morning on July 6, 2022, an explosion tore through one of the panels. Georgia Bureau of Investigation footage showed a vehicle leaving the scene minutes before the blast, but no suspect has ever been named. Officials demolished what remained of the damaged structure that same day, citing safety concerns, ending the monument’s forty-two-year run in a single morning.
Is it possible the identity of R.C. Christian and the identity of the person who blew up his monument turn out to be the only two mysteries in Elberton that never get solved.
Message, or a monument someone decided did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Scans of Gunung Padang in Indonesia show hidden chambers deep inside the hill, and one team dated its oldest layers to 25,000 years ago. The study was retracted in 2024. The chambers have never been opened. Natural hill, or the oldest pyramid on Earth?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
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