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? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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