Chapter 1: What mysterious monument is the focus of this episode?
Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This week on the show, I'll be speaking to Tyler McBrien, a journalist who recently dedicated himself to uncovering a mystery surrounding a 19-foot tall granite monument that was built in rural Georgia. This monument was built by an unknown person, and it's inscribed with instructions on how to rebuild a post-apocalyptic society.
And these instructions are inscribed in eight languages. People sometimes refer to this monument as Georgia's Stonehenge. It's this set of absolutely massive granite blocks sticking out of the ground. And if the existence and the origin of this monument isn't strange enough, somebody recently blew it up.
Tyler investigated all of that in his new podcast series titled Who Blew Up the Georgia Guidestones. I've been wanting to have him on the show ever since I heard that he was trying to solve this case. So this is my conversation with Tyler McBrien, and you're listening to Otherworld. Okay, everybody, welcome to Otherworld.
Joining me today, Tyler McBrien, journalist and host of the new podcast, Who Blew Up? The Guidestones. Welcome, Tyler.
Chapter 2: Who is R.C. Christian and what role did he play in the Guidestones' creation?
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
It's an honor to be here. I'm excited to have you. I just listened to the first episode of your series, and I'm really hooked. I wish you sent me more than just a rough cut of episode one.
Yeah, the first one's free. We're just giving you a taste. But no, I mean, it's weird that we're recording right now before it comes out at all. So I'm kind of like, as the release date approaches, I'm getting more and more nervous about just the reception. But I'm excited. I think there's some crazy twists and turns in it.
Yes. Crazy twists and turns, I imagine. And it's also something that is very otherworld adjacent.
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Chapter 3: What conspiracy theories surround the Georgia Guidestones?
I guess it's not explicitly paranormal, but it's mysterious. And there's a lot going on in this story. I guess we should just dive into it. First, can you just explain to me what the Georgia Guidestones are? And then we'll talk about how you got into this project in the first place.
Yes. So the Georgia Guidestones were a monument in rural Georgia, so northeast Georgia. Were, yes. Key detail. Past tense. Exactly. Sorry, that was the first spoiler already. Someone blew them up. But flashback to 1979, rural Georgia, this town called Elberton, Georgia, which is the self-proclaimed granite capital of the world. A mysterious man shows up.
Chapter 4: How did the Guidestones become a target for destruction?
He goes by a pseudonym, R.C. Christian. He has very meticulous designs to build a massive granite monument. And this monument is 20 feet tall, six massive granite slabs, weighing 250,000 pounds, something like that, with strange inscriptions that he wanted sandblasted onto the side after it's cordoned and everything. But he has a lot of conditions, one being that his identity is never revealed.
He only revealed it to... the president of the granite company that was building it, and then the money man. He basically, that was the only way that they would fund this. But other than that, he kept his identity completely secret. It went up in 1980 in Elberton. I think it was just because it's just so hard to transport that huge amount of granite.
And then it sat there until 2022, always attracting conspiracy theories about UFOs, about lizard people, like whatever the conspiracy theory du jour was.
Yeah.
You could hang it on the Guidestones. Until 2022, when someone in the middle of the night on July 6th blew them up with some explosives.
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Chapter 5: What were the circumstances leading to the Guidestones' bombing?
And to this day, it remains a mystery of who blew them up. And so that's kind of what we were trying to tell. This double mystery of who built them and then who blew them up.
These are giant, giant slabs. I mean, it looks like Stonehenge.
Yeah, and it's funny, the RC Christian, he wrote a lot. He wrote a book to kind of explain what was behind these, and he took direct inspiration from Stonehenge, but the flaw that he saw in Stonehenge was that they didn't have any words on them, so no one knows what they meant, and so that they are always shrouded in secrecy.
So he wanted to go through great pains to write everything on the Guidestones, and I should probably say... They are essentially meant to guide humanity after some sort of apocalyptic event wipes the slate clean. So in the 80s, this was, I think, top of mind. This was like nuclear apocalypse with the Soviets, for example. He wrote a book.
He wrote On the Stones to make sure that people knew what they were about. And then people, you know, the irony is that people just took it wherever they wanted anyway. It's because they were vague enough and he was mysterious that they just made up their own stories about it.
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Chapter 6: Who are the potential suspects behind the Guidestones' destruction?
You simply give people more information to misinterpret.
Exactly, yeah. And by saying mysterious, he wanted to keep the attention away from him, but then it's kind of like a Streisand effect where he made himself mysterious, and then he attracts all the attention.
My first reaction to this is just like... You really don't hear about mysterious, esoteric structures getting built anymore. And that's very sad. And maybe it's the fault of our economy. I know. We used to be a country. We really did. And this is what they took from us.
I'm going to become one of those guys on Twitter that post stuff like that, but specifically about esoteric structures of the past.
Yeah, a return guy.
Yes, I did. I mean, I have an ongoing project related to the Integratron, which was built by George Van Tassel.
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Chapter 7: What are the significant commandments inscribed on the Guidestones?
The plans were given to him by an alien named Solgonda, who is credited on the official architectural historical papers. But yeah, you don't hear about that anymore. People don't have the money to build a mysterious esoteric structure.
But I mean, to be honest, that was one of the reasons he was, I mean, he had the money, which was remarkable. I think in today's terms, it was upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I mean, you joke, this is one of the reasons I was interested.
I saw it almost as like a piece of folk art where someone had just felt compelled to erect this massive monument at great expense, at great effort. There's elsewhere in North Georgia, there's this other guy, Howard Finster, who's a folk artist. He has this place called Paradise Garden. And he similarly saw a vision from God. For him, it was some paint on his thumb.
And the paint on his thumb, which was God, told him to paint sacred art. And so he just made this massive cathedral by hand and erected all these strange works of art. So that's one of the things that drew me in. I'm like, why would someone do this?
Chapter 8: What are the implications of the Guidestones' destruction for the local community?
Why would someone go through all of this to build a strange monument that everyone ends up hating? Anyway.
Yeah. You were kind of getting into this, but what originally drew you to this? How did you even hear about them?
I grew up in Georgia, in a suburb of Atlanta. Yeah, and so everyone kind of knows about it, for the most part. I mean, there's a lot of weird shit in North Georgia, and I've stumbled on even weirder shit on my many trips to Elberton and around, which we can get into also, but... They, yeah, they were just kind of a, you know, a fixture in the North Georgia weirdness.
And I actually never visited them. My sister initially told me about them and she had gone a few times and it's like a common thing to do to go there and visit. you know, at night and have a few drinks or do a photo shoot or do a music video or something. Probably a lot of rap videos were filmed there.
Yeah.
But I never went. It's kind of like, you know, New Yorkers never going to the Statue of Liberty or something. And also it's a granite monument. It seems so solid. And then, so the real reason I was then just like obsessed with it was when it blew up and I was like, realized I could never actually visit. And so maybe that's part of this obsession is this like sense of loss or something.
I'm a little surprised these were in Georgia. It seems like an unlikely home for such a place. I know Georgia is a diverse place with many different people living there, but I would not think it would be my first choice if I was going to put up some sort of spooky slab of stone guiding humanity for the apocalypse.
If anything, for just location, you know, the idea that civilization would be rebuilt from rural Georgia is interesting to me. I don't know if there was, and just the idea that the people of Georgia would react to this message, which we'll talk about soon, but they obviously did not react well. They did not like these stones.
This is a generally conservative section of the South, and I do not think they liked this man's message.
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