Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
– Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Program

It’s a beautiful, warm, November Saturday in Georgia and the defaced granite monument looms above Mart Clamp while he uses a stonemason’s hammer and chisel to patiently chip away at the stubborn polyurethane splattered across the Swahili lettering his father sandblasted into the hard rock thirty years ago. Inexplicably, branchy tufts of hay rain down in slow motion from high up in the blue skies overhead like a vast army of eight-inch pagan fairies who are too tired to keep afloat in the still air. Children nearby playfully roll the hay from heaven into a wispy ball about four feet across.

A large man with broad, square shoulders and a crushing handshake, Mart Clamp was born to work stone. Quick to smile with a youthful face, Clamp is a friendly man whom children instinctively like. “I don’t understand why people would do something like this,” Clamp remarks as he cleaves off a piece of polyurethane taking along with it a thin sliver of underlying granite. “Up until the last year or two, the worst thing they’d do is smear chicken blood everywhere.”

It’s all more than a little surreal.

Crowded next to the South Carolina border in northeast Georgia, Elberton, aptly the county seat of Elbert County, is the self proclaimed “Granite Capital of the World.” Home to at least 42 active quarries, chances are good that regardless of where you live in the United States there’s a chunk of Elbert County nearby. For the last century, buildings, monuments, countertops and, of course, gravestones have been built and laid all over the world using Elberton granite.

Elbert County is so rich in the durable igneous stone that practically everything there is built of granite. Homes, road signs, banks, the community center, the county jail and even the grossly oversized, 20,000 seat Blue Devils high school football stadium are all constructed out of the 400-million year old, sparkling rock, a combination of gray feldspar, quartz and mica. Unsurprisingly, little Elberton, with a population under 5,000, probably has the highest concentration of monuments in the world.Elbert County is also the home to thousands of stoneworkers: explosive experts, stone cutters, sand blasters and heavy equipment operators specializing in handling huge blocks of granite. Almost exclusively male, these stoneworking men combine to form the backbone of the Elbert County economy. For the most part, these men are the hardworking, salt of the earth types that have come to symbolize classic Americana. But it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Elbert County is also home to a thriving community of Freemasons. After all, at least one major branch of modern Masonry got its start among the stonemasons of England, Scotland and Ireland in the late 16th Century.“I know nearly all of the men who worked on this monument and nearly all of them were good Christians and good Masons,” Clamp maintained. “I know that none of them would have worked on the Guidestones if they believed that there was anything evil or untoward about them.”But that is not quite accurate. Nearly thirty years previously to the day, Mart Clamp’s father, Charlie Clamp, was sandblasting over 4,000 4-inch letters into the eight faces of the four Guidestones. Forebodingly, as he carved the words “to an age of reason” into the Pyramid Blue granite capstone, Charlie Clamp says he heard “strange music and disjointed voices.”The Elberton Granite Museum attendant, a warm, amiable man in his sixties, also revealed that the Guidestones have been a persistent source of controversy with the local churches. “The churches in this area have never been too happy about it,” he said in a perfect, melodious Georgia accent. In a Los Angeles Times article, the man who constructed the monument, Joe Fendley, remarked that he “got a lot of poison calls and poison letters” over the Guidestones. “I’ve heard preachers say it’s evil,” confided Hudson Cone of the Elberton Granite Association in that same article.In his interview with us for this article, retired banker Wyatt C. Martin, the one man who knows the true, secret identity of the initiator of the Georgia Guidestones, lamented about all of the attention he has gotten over the years from witches, pagans and “nutcases.” Mr. Martin, a devout Christian man who is now nearly 80-years old, nevertheless remains proud of his contributions to the Guidestones.Gary Jones, publisher of the Elberton Star newspaper, probably best summarized local feelings when he told us, “None of the churches around here ever liked the monument much, but the Guidestones literally put Elberton on the map, so people in Elberton are pretty protective of them.”After a recent spate of increasingly severe vandalism, Elbert County was protective enough to put up two wireless surveillance cameras, even though the cameras remained unpowered during our recent visit to the monument.Our investigation in Elbert County led to the discovery of an apparent, ongoing attempt to topple the English language Guidestone. We passed on photographic evidence to Jones showing that a
large notch was recently cut from the top of that Guidestone near the support pin attaching that stone to the capstone.Anger directed against the monument has only grown more intense over the years. Many believe the Georgia Guidestones advocate – if not outright promise – genocide at an almost unimaginable scale, promote eugenics and hint towards a New World Order global government where personal rights are only granted through service to a tyrannical world state. Some even claim the Guidestones are the product of a Satanic cult.Interestingly, we have found evidence that a date is encoded in the Guidestones – a date that is only a few days away – and an event planned for this date may very well lend credence to the very darkest of sinister theories.What is the truth about this modern, mini-Stonehenge? Do the Guidestones contain secret messages? Who is behind this enigmatic granite edifice? What’s going to happen on January 4th, 2010, a date that appears to be deliberately hidden in the design of the monument? Can we decode the Georgia Guidestones?