It's hard for me to imagine anyplace in the United States more shrouded in mystery and controversy than the Georgia Guidestones, starting with the question of who it was that even masterminded their construction. To hear that we don't even know who had the thing constructed might put images in your head of it being hundreds or thousands of years old, but here comes your first twist. The Georgia Guidestones were built in 1979 and unveiled in 1980, well within just my own lifetime. We even know who physically built it, that was the Elberton Granite Finishing company out of Elbert County Georgia. But with that statement you are now fully up to speed on how this thing got here, for nobody knows who it was that hired Elberton Granite to build it. And don't bother knocking on their door, they don't have any more of an idea than the rest of us. Money and very specific instructions were given to them through a series of third party transactions, and like any good business they honored their customer's wishes and built the structure accordingly.
Let me start at the beginning. In 1979 a man under the admitted alias of Robert C. Christian walked into the Elbert Granite company and said he wanted to hire them to construct a monument, featuring several massive stones that would stand as tablets and have messages carved into them. Each stone would be much larger than anything the company had dealt with in its history, and in addition there were several astronomical requirements for how the stones needed to be arranged. To top off all this craziness, the man wanted to do this as the anonymous representative of "a small group of loyal Americans". The owner of the granite company was later quoted as saying that he thought he had a real kook on his hands, so to get rid of him he quoted a price many times higher than any job he'd ever done, then shooed him off to his banker to work out payment. The man left, and the owner figured that was the last he'd see of him, but a week later news came from the bank that a $10,000 deposit had arrived for the job. Kook or not, at this point the man was a paying customer so it became business as usual for the granite company, and off to work they went.
Requiring more than just the usual stonework they were accustomed to, Elberton Granite enlisted the help of an expert from the local university for the astronomical requirements of the Guidestones, which included a sight hole for viewing the North Star, a sun-slit through the top stone that at noontime would shine on whichever day of the year it was, and some always popular solstice tracking holes bored through the giant slabs. But while these were a few of the fun features of the stones, the monument also came with some less whimsical aspects. Below is the first of the Guidestone's 10 "commandments", carved into the tablets in 8 different languages. Although some of these commandments preach the type of stuff most of us can get behind, such as Prize Truth-Beauty-Love, this first one downright scares the heck out of people.
Maintain Humanity Under 500,000,000
In Perpetual Balance With Nature
Maintain the population of Earth at a half-billion people. Here's some quick math to let you know how you'd fare under this particular rule. Siri tells me that our 2017 global population is just a tick over 7.5 billion people. To reduce the world's population to 500 million as instructed, only 1 person out of every 15 would be allowed to continue living, the other 14 would be eliminated. Of course these are just some silly words carved into a rock, but not to everybody there are, and there you have the Illuminati portion of the conspiracy. Many people believe this secret society not only controls the strings of the world's most powerful governments, but is actively pursuing ways of reducing our global population. Poisonous chemtrails, HAARP weather control, tainted fluoride in our water - if you ever need a reminder of just how sane your own life is, grab a couple beers and spend the night on YouTube looking up the terms "population control" and "new world order". Just don't blame me if life suddenly feels very boring afterward.
The flip side of this argument is that the 500 million rule is directed toward a society that has devastated itself by nuclear war, and done this paring down of humanity already. This is a fairly popular theory among those who've studied the Guidestones, as not only were they constructed during the height of the Cold War, but several other commandments seem fitting for a post-apocalyptic world as well. Ignoring the fact that I have no idea how to angle my pictures to avoid shadows, here is the English version of the Guidestone's 10 rules for society:
So if all this took place in the years 1979 and 1980, what in the past 37 years has been learned about the Guidestones and who built them? Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your preference of these things) not much. Not a single claim from the group of "loyal Americans" has been made during this time. And the mysterious Robert C. Christian, representative of the group and negotiator of the deal? Only one man in the world is confirmed to know Christian's true identity, and he's not spilling the beans. Wyatt Martin is the banker Elberton Granite originally pawned the "kook" off to, and as part of establishing the account that payments would flush through, Martin insisted on knowing Christian's real name. Christian obliged, but only under the condition the banker sign a non-disclosure agreement, something that Martin did and remained true to this day on. The two actually became friends of a sort, or pen pals, and for years corresponded through good old fashioned letters. Ever the mysterious, Martin claims that no two letters from Christian were ever mailed from the same location. Then in 2001 Christian went silent, and being that he was older than the banker, Martin speculates that this is when Christian passed away.
I made my journey to the Georgia Guidestones in the midst of a business trip to South Carolina, in which I was able to squeeze in an extra day of flying in order to make the drive over. Fortunately for me I was travelling with someone as imaginative as I am, who saw no issues with spending 5 hours cooped up in a car in order to spend 15 minutes looking at a monument. And to say it was worth such a long car ride is an understatement. The details of that ride have long since faded, but the memory of standing at the base of the Guidestones and absorbing all the secrecy, controversy, and intrigue that has surrounded them all these years? That's something that will stay with me as long as I still have wits enough to appreciate all the mysterious things our world has to offer.
Links:
Location of Georgia Guidestones on Google Maps
No comments:
Post a Comment