Ep 1: The Granite Capital of the World

In the middle of a grassy field, a cow pasture really, are six huge gray slabs of solid

“granite, 19 feet tall, about the height of a two-story house, and they're arranged”

like a monument, an ancient monument, like Stonehenge. There are pine trees at the edges of the clearing, and occasional car passes, but other than that, it's pretty quiet out here, peaceful. There are words etched into the stones, in eight different languages. English, but also Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.

And a few feet away, there's a tablet, also granite, laying flat on the ground, sort of like a headstone that fell over. The tablet says these stones are a sort of astrological clock, and a compass, and at the center of the granite tablet, a message.

“Let these be guide stones to an age of reason.”

On closer look, those words and the stones are a set of directives, written like commandments, 10 guidelines for a new world, and the 10 guidelines on the stones, well, they're weird. Some people call these America's Stonehenge, but for the thousands of people who came from around the world to visit them every year, they were known as the Georgia Guide Stones. But if you wanted to visit this place in person today, read the messages on the stones

for yourself. You'd be standing in an empty field, because one night, a few years ago, in 2022. One blew them up. From the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I'm Tyler McBrion, and this is "Who blew up the Guide Stones?"

The Georgia Guide Stones may be America's answer to Stonehenge, and then there was the Georgia Guide Stones. Did you ever see the Georgia Guide Stones? Yeah, I had a vision of people, you know, the shut-around on their tail, was designed to guide mankind to a safer future.

This to us looks like a modern day, a 10-commandment.

It's basically preachers.

I would say communism. These are people who enjoy keeping secrets. It's not forget that crime was committed here, and somebody got away with it. Man walks in his office, says, "I want to buy a money box." "Whoever to deal with in these debates, just as because that's not how we do things

in our country, right?" Political nonsense, religious nuts.

“You know it's still under criminal investigation, right?”

Five hundred million people. They ought to tear that Satanic symbol down in Elpert and Georgia. Episode one, the granite capital of the world. I grew up outside of Atlanta, and like most Georgians, I'd heard about the guide stones growing up.

To me, they were another eclectic roadside oddity.

That's just kind of always been there.

We have many. There's Babyland General Hospital, a former clinic converted into this acid trip of a roadside landmark. For visitors can witness births of cabbage patch kids dolls, trust me, it's super weird. There's a big animatronic chicken called "What else?"

The big chicken that I would drive past almost every day. There's a historic landmark called Stone Mountain, the largest civil war memorial in the country, depicting three Confederate leaders on horseback. I mostly just remember the crazy laser shows that used to have.

I always meant to see the guide stones.

“They seemed like they would always be there, but now I never will.”

Maybe that's part of why I'm so obsessed. The guide stones always fascinated me because of what they reveal about other people. Some people are convinced that aliens built the guide stones as a kind of UFO landing pad. Others just know in their bones that the lizard people were behind it. For some evangelical Christians, they were the blasphemous creation of an evil satanic

Kabul. And for the old school believers in new world order conspiracies, the guide stones were clearly the dark hand of the deep state at work. How people felt about the guide stones and why was often a sign of the times, lots of different groups had beef with the guide stones.

But their followers never really did anything about it, beyond complain.

“Until something changed, in 2022, in a part of the country not really known for taking”

down monuments, no matter how controversial. Someone took this one down, and they didn't just take it down, they blew it up. When I heard news of the explosion, I couldn't believe it. The police announced an investigation, but it quickly faded, with no suspects and no answers. I can't explain it, but I felt this sense of loss, I needed closure.

I wanted to investigate who did this and why, but I couldn't do it alone. To do this, I needed a team of people who know Georgia inside and out. People who have been reporting on the guide stones since the very beginning. I needed the Atlanta Journal Constitution. If there was anyone who could help me tell this story, it's them.

And it's two stories, really, who was driven to create this immense monument, and who was driven to destroy it. To do that, I've got to introduce you to a man named Hudson Cone. I live in the, quote, "go to nature" of the guide, so I'll put it that way. What didn't mention much?

Hudson's been living in Elpertin, Georgia, the home of the guide stones. For over 50 years, he was there when they went up in 1980. There were rumors that it was a Martian construction, and at least two saucers had been singing out there, which has had ceremonies, it fell out on his seal. There was an archaea, a woman from the Koa, worked for the Coal of Engineers, and she

said that it was a center of her star-shaped underground chamber, ready to eat now. Hudson is as close to an oral historian of Elpertin as you can get. He worked at the Elpertin Granite Association, the EGA, for 33 years. For the roughly 20,000 people who live in Elpert County, there are a few that have the local lore down like Hudson.

He's played a big part in keeping the mistake of the guide stones alive. I became kind of the official guide to the guide stones when I was on staff at EGA, and I kind of fell in love with this thing, and I became kind of the, even after I retired, I would get two groups, a callway, and won't be able to make them out there and go over to the legend in the lore.

Like all good storytellers, Hudson isn't the type to let pesky little things like facts, getting the way of a good yarn. Well you know about the Granite Initiative.

“Uh, I'll joke about, I'll say, what kind of town is this?”

Trot loads of tomb stones going through town. Elpertin calls itself the Granite capital of the world, for good reason. The town sits on a massive granite deposit. Six million tons of it.

Enough beautiful blue gray speckled rock to fill a football stadium nearly 2 million times.

You can learn all of this at the Elpertin Granite Museum of course, which is not too far from the local high schools football stadium, a Roman style colosseum called the Granite Bowl. Some people in town call the elites who run things around here, the Granite Mafia. In the town's motto, rock solid.

There are so many quarries here that about 2/3 of all the monuments and memorials manufactured

Which means if you're walking through a cemetery in the United States, there's a strong

chance that the headstones are made of good old Elpertin Granite. In the story with so many mysteries, one thing that's not so mysterious is why you might come here to the Granite capital of the world to build a giant granite monument like the guidestones.

“You know the legend about how I got to put it up at all?”

Elpertin Granite finished in company was a member of our association. Joe Finnelli who became all mayor and very prominent politically. The legend has it, one day in 1979, the president of the Elpertin Granite finishing company, Joe H. Fennelli senior, is sitting in his office. When a man who calls himself R.C. Christian shows up, looking to build a monument.

Late one afternoon, a man walks in his office and said, "I'm not going to give him a real name,

but I'm a Christian." He says, "I want to buy a monument, which is a common accursed people passenger to town." He says, "What kind of monument?" He puts a shoe box on his chair.

R.C. Christian doesn't just want any run of the mill monument. He has a vision and a shoe box.

“He's brought a model to help show Joe Finnelli what he's trying to build.”

He opens up the shoe box, and places the model on Joe's desk. "Wood model, painted silver. He puts a wood model with a guy's shoulder up on his chair. And he says, "I want to put up a monument." And he told him the specs on the patient.

According to Hudson, R.C. Christian tells Joe, "It's not a monument in memory of one particular person. He says it's a monument to a certain kind of philosophy, a way of thinking. The man says he represents a group of people who have the same philosophy he does. And he says they want to remain anonymous."

He said, "There's going to be a monument to Phil Schoffker and co-sit the official land was that he represented a "group of mid-western conservative-minded financiers."

“He wouldn't put that up as a philosophy for mankind."”

Joe H. Finnelli Senior is intrigued, but monuments are expensive, and well, you don't just buy one off the shelf, at least not one like this. Then R.C. Christian shares more. More than just a shoebox model. He has detailed plans, designs for a monument that's unlike anything the granite men of

Albertan have ever heard of. The plans he's describing are for something massive.

The total cost was never made public, but estimates put the figure in the hundreds of thousands

of dollars, and R.C. Christian has the money to do it. The prospect of a huge granite monument peaks the interest of the business leaders in town. But fake names can't be on financial documents. And if R.C. Christian and the people he represents want to finance their mysterious project, someone would have to know his real identity.

A banker in town named Wyatt Martin agrees to manage the payment, if R.C. Christian tells him who he really is. And Mr. Martin says, "Well, I can't make a loan to anyone under the same name, George Alau." And Christian says, "I'll give you my real name if you swear to God that you'll never

reveal it." Joe Fennley was the owner of man that supposedly had met Christophe Sao's wife, Mark, and George, and Joe told me later a year, decades, and the fall of years, Mr. Christian had come back through here, checking on it several times. True or not?

I don't know. Was he low? Overseas? Barshen? Barshen?

Barshen? Barshen? So, with the plans made in the money sent, R.C. Christian leaves town, and the construction of the guide stones begins.

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Welcome to It's UATL. To an in every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. But the Georgia guides stones were unveiled on a sunny day in March of 1980. And their arrival was an event.

Hudson Cohen's memory of that day isn't perfect, but it's still pretty good.

A big event was the guide stones caught up. Say what a big crowd there are. My memories get bad. Several hundred people, including reporters from area TV and news outlets, we're here. Look, when I ordered the congressman, spoke and what Martin the man who arranged the

building along from the bank spoke, and of course, you'll finish. In other words, everyone was there. Albertan Granite Association Executive Vice President Bill Kelly served as the master of ceremonies. Joe H. Friendly Senior, a president of the Albertan Granite Finishing Company, set a few words.

When U.S. Congressman Doug Bernard, a Democrat from Augusta, told the crowd that the monument was to guide future generations. That it should make Americans try to ecologically preserve the environment. We must stress today the need for self-control, the self restraint, and yes, self-government, all of which I interpret in this Georgia guide stone.

When he said that, "Well, no one will agree with everything on them," quote, "These are definite guidelines which can be applied to life." They spoke and all, they had a big plastic sheet, black plastic sheet, and then after all the speaking decoded the unveilant, your curiosity, it was quite a curiosity. As the black sheets came off the stones, the crowds saw four giant granite slabs in a circle

around a central pillar, all held together with a capstone laying flat across the top. Those who walked up to the base of the monument could also see that they were messages carved into the face of the stones. And there's a message sand lasted in 12 languages, and letters two inches tall, the sponsors of the Mysterious Project are said to be in a anonymous group of out-of-state Americans

promoting the concept of the conservation of mankind, granite city bank president, why it weren't there?

“Now I can remember taking that rubber matlet and actually pounding the stencil down onto”

the stone, the blank stones. This is Mark Clamp. You can't remember the day of the unveiling, even though he was there with his father. Mark comes from a long line of monument carvers in Albertan, Georgia. The graded industries, there's a guy that goes around and puts the death date on a monument.

That guy was Mark's dad, who ran the family sand blasting business. I just remember riding around the countryside with my dad and my mom, and he was sand blasting

So I've been around it all my life.

“Mark can remember watching his dad sandblast all sorts of things into hard granite, but nothing”

sticks out as much as the Georgia guide stones. He and his father spent a lot of time with RC Christians and mysterious messages. This was all what we call rock pitch. It was rough, rough stone. So the complexities of blasting, three inch lettering, and rough stone is hard to explain.

It's very, very hard to do that. You can easily spend all day every day for at least a week pounding the stencil down just to get ready to be sandblasted. In that time period, we had plastic letters that you could put in a press and it would stamp that letter out, but that would have been only been there for the English side.

The other was all hand drawn, all hand drawn.

“As people circle the stones at the unveiling, they saw beautiful letters.”

I'll told it was more than 4,000 characters of engraved writing, but what probably really caught their attention is what those letters said, how strange the messages were. The god stones were an apocalyptic monument. Mart says they didn't think too deeply about what they'd carved on the stones.

It was a job, and like always, they engraved exactly what the customer asked them to.

But even if Martin is father, wanted to ask RC Christian, the man who'd commissioned them on the monument, what the messages on the guide stones really meant. They couldn't, no one could. All people had were the messages themselves. In the early days, the biggest problem facing the guide stones were the cows that would

defecate around them, or use them as scratching posts.

“So they put up a fence, and that seemed to work great.”

But over time, things started to happen around the stones, and two of them. Just like Hudson Cone came to be the unofficial folk historian of the guide stones. Art Clamp became their unofficial custodian. Probably now it'd probably been about 28 to 30 years of me going up there and cleaning stuff off the memorial.

But it used to be like chickens. They would cut chickens and smear chicken blood all over it, or, you know, some craze these something like that.

Oh my god, which is, I've never seen so many witches in my life would come into me as

to you. I'd be over there from two to five, and they have to know. What did they look like? People? People flocked to the guide stones for rituals, religious ceremonies, even parties, events of

all kinds. Mart Clamp would often clean up after these events of the guide stones, but Hudson Cone had a front row seat to how they started. He had an office at the Albertan Granite Association Museum, where all the visitors passing through town would come to ask about the guide stones.

I'll never get one afternoon, I was keeping the museum when I was one or time.

Well actually it was early spring, but it was still cold. And these two good-looking gals came in there, one on the Mexican, one on the French. They were all pairs. You don't know what are all pairs. They, uh, the French girl could speak any English.

They would go after, when it was late, early spring, and it was going to get dark soon. I said, well, you know, I'd tell you how to get out there, but it's going to be dark during the minutes. I said, I'll take you out there. And so, well, if it had been ugly, I wouldn't have had time, but anyway, I said y'all could

follow me and you'll vehicle. And when we got out there, the French girl, it was cold, made it unusual. She sat down on that cold stone and began to chant, some unknown. And then they began to, this girl in the Mexican girl, put her arm around each other and begin to circle.

And, you know, well, I hooked up with them too.

Vandalism was a constant problem.

“So the county set up a few surveillance cameras.”

And sure, Marc Clamp would clean off the occasional chicken guts. Hudson Cone would meet a Witcher 2, sometimes they'd both get a little creeped out. Neither Marc or Hudson thought too deeply about it. It was mostly fun, Kitchie. But Hudson says, not everyone in Albertin was as it used as he was, by the stones.

And the mystery behind what they stood for.

When that thing from the day it went up, it was never universally popular.

They were people in this community that they were against it.

“I was frightened a couple of times, one afternoon, I was Sunday, there was a big guy came in.”

I said he was a student at the Bible College in Tacoma. He came over to my daughter sitting in her desk and he started hitting the desk. That thing is evil. Yes sir, you right, I grew there, brother. Biggest he was in the state of mind he was in. They'd been around the corner of Brazil, but from day one.

A lot of people say that the wording on there is Satanic. You know, there was 50% of the town like that, 50% of the town didn't like it. There were a lot of preachers who spoke out against it. Just a lot of people thought it was eerie or creepy. It's peaceful out in the field where the guide stones were placed, and the stones themselves,

they are just granite in the middle of a cow pasture. But there's something we haven't really talked about yet. What is actually on these stones? What makes this thing so controversial?

The messages on the stones are basically the reason why I'm telling you this story in the first place.

So let me just tell you what they say. Some sound pretty innocent, being out of cancer on the earth, leave room for nature, simple message of conservation, balance personal rights with social duties, sound advice, truth, beauty, love, seeking harmony with the infinite. That one sounds a little woo-hoo.

There are ones about law and court systems, like avoid petty laws and useless officials. Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court, protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts, rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason, unite humanity with a living new language. But then toward the top of the 19-foot slabs, the commandments on the stones take on their

most controversial tone, guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity.

And then, commandment number one at the top, maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual

balance with nature. There are billions of people on the planet. How would we maintain humanity under 500 million?

“A purge who gets to live and who doesn't deserve to?”

That commandment was a lightning rod. It had people asking a lot of questions about the true intentions of our secretion. And what his philosophy really was. Were the guide stones a monument to ushering an age of reason or a shrine to evil intentions?

Did any of this have anything to do with their destruction?

I set out to get to the bottom of all of it. Not journey has been a ride. Through cults, quarries, profits, conspiracies, a political campaign. Those near the Georgia guide stones say that they heard a loud boon this morning.

“Now officials are working to figure out who did it?”

It might be unsolved because they chose that to solve it.

We never received any information after the initial investigation.

Simply a property crime, I guess, akin to the day. And a lot of explosives. That's this season on who blew up the guide stones? From the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

“Who blew up the guide stones is produced by the Atlanta Journal Constitution and goat”

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“The show was written and reported by me.”

With Megan Adalski, Ian N. Wright, and Charles Menchew. Samantha Stamler is head of audio. Megan Adalski is our series lead and Ian N. Wright is our senior producer. The show was produced by Kira Bodengoligorski, Keraschillan and Charles Menchew. With production support from Shane Backler, Samir Jafari, Allison Shine, Corley Barrow,

and Mariana Castro, original theme music by Polyglam, additional composition from Ian N. Wright, and Blue Dot Sessions. Phil Robibbarrow created the show's artwork. Special thanks to the AJC's Thomas Lake, Chris Joyner, and Charles Menchew. Be sure to listen and download the rest of the series and keep an eye out for more from

the AJC coming soon. Thank you for listening.