Elberton, Georgia — It was a cold morning in the Granite Capital of the World, and the case of the exploding monument was still unsolved. The criminal investigation had resulted in few answers and no arrests. Wayne Mullenix seemed to know more than he was letting on.

“Everybody will tell you that it’s been a hush-hush deal,” he said as we rode in his large white pickup truck toward the place where the stones once stood.

The Georgia Guidestones were always mysterious, and strangely magnetic, drawing tourists and miscreants alike during their 42-year lifespan. Mullenix thought of them fondly, because he laid their foundation and once owned the red clay on which they were placed. He helped build the Guidestones on behalf of an enigmatic stranger whose real name he never knew.

Before dawn on July 6, 2022, an explosion shook the walls at the Mullenix house, almost half a mile up the highway. The Guidestones were badly damaged, and would later be demolished. Mullenix took it personally.

“Well,” he said, “I was disappointed to think that somebody would go to the extreme to destroy something that has not hurt anybody one way or the other for 42 years. I mean, it’s been here. Why would you want it to be destroyed?”

Mullenix held the steering wheel in his weathered hands and drove north toward Guidestones Road. He’d agreed to show me around as I examined the two intertwined mysteries of the Guidestones: who built them, and who blew them up.

But as I learned, one of those mysteries was not really a mystery anymore. And its revelation would put the story of the Guidestones in a harsh new light.

They were a hush-hush deal since the beginning, because the man who commissioned them used a false name, and this secrecy caused suspicion. There was also a certain hubris about him. This man said he was a Christian — in fact, the fake last name he used was Christian — which meant he would have known the Old Testament story about Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. The sacred words on those stone tablets were said to be inscribed by the finger of God.

In spite of this knowledge, or perhaps inspired by it, the mystery man would endeavor to write 10 new guidelines for all humankind. And have them inscribed in stone. In eight languages. On vertical slabs of Pyramid Blue granite in a field outside Elberton.

The first of these new principles, unveiled on a spring day in 1980 before Wayne Mullenix and various other local dignitaries, instructed the reader to “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

The global population was then about 4.5 billion. Following the stranger’s first proposal would have required a population reduction of almost 90 percent.

As I looked into the backstory of the Guidestones’ pseudonymous creator, known as Robert Christian or R.C. Christian, I learned that he’d published a book in 1986 under his fictitious name. This book, “Common Sense Renewed,” was said to explain his plan for humanity. The book was rare and elusive. No copies were available on Amazon, nor at any of my local libraries. I saw it listed in the holdings of Ave Maria University in Florida and searched for it there. Neither I nor a librarian could find the book in the stacks. Later, a supervisor called me to say it had disappeared.

I kept looking until I found another copy listed in the online catalogue of an obvious place: the public library in Elberton. It wasn’t on the shelf there either, but when I asked a librarian, she retrieved it from a room behind the desk. The book had a hard gray-blue cover, with the title and author’s name in gold lettering. I opened it and began to read.

“I am the originator of the Georgia Guidestones and the sole author of its inscriptions,” Christian wrote. “I have had the assistance of a number of other American citizens in bringing the monument into being. We have no mysterious purpose or ulterior motives. We seek common sense pathways to a peaceful world, without bias for particular creeds or philosophies. Yet our message is in some areas controversial. I have chosen to remain anonymous in order to avoid debate and contention. Our guides must stand on their own merits.”

The 10 guidelines included a call for a “world court” to resolve “external disputes,” and a “living, new language” to “unite humanity.” Christian laid out other plans that limited individual rights. Potential voters should be subjected to testing on economics and history, he wrote, and they should have to show “evidence of economic productivity.” Healthcare should not be seen as unlimited, and some people should get preferential treatment.

“It will be necessary for well informed citizens to work with knowledgeable physicians in establishing guidelines that will make possible a reasonable allocation or ‘rationing’ of the care we can collectively afford,” he wrote, “favoring those individuals whose continuing lives are most valuable to society at large.”

This theme of valuing some lives more than others continued as Christian explored one of his favorite topics: reducing the global population.

“We establish social environments in which many talented and productive individuals are constrained to limit their reproduction,” Christian wrote, “while at the same time we provide subsidies that encourage childbearing by the indigent, the lazy, the irresponsible and the inadequate.”

Christian hoped for drastic changes on this front. “It is vitally important that each national government have a considered ‘Population Policy,’” he wrote. “…A few generations of single child families will make possible dramatic improvements of living standards in even the most impoverished countries.”

In Christian’s view, only one notable country had already begun to address the problem: “No major power except China has indicated an awareness of the problems of overpopulation.”

It’s not clear precisely what Christian knew or believed about China’s one-child policy when he wrote the book. More details would emerge after the policy ended in 2015. In 2019, Chinese-American filmmaker Nanfu Wang released “One Child Nation,” a documentary film about life in China under the one-child policy. Wang returned to her hometown in Jiangxi Province to interview people there.

“Sterilization takes 10 minutes,” Huaru Yuan, the midwife who delivered Wang as a baby, said in the film. “On my operating table, I’d do over 20 a day. In those days, women were abducted by government officials, tied up, and dragged to us like pigs.”

Some babies were thrown away like trash. Some were taken by human traffickers. Parents left some in marketplaces, hoping they’d be rescued by strangers. Nanfu Wang’s mother told of helping her younger brother get rid of his daughter so he’d have permission to try for a son.

“We couldn’t discard the baby in broad daylight, so we carried her in a basket, climbed over mountains when it was still dark out,” Zaodi Wang said. “We put $20 in her clothes and left her on the meat counter in the market. For two days and two nights, she was there. No one wanted her….She eventually died.”

Elberton is in the rural South, about 100 miles east-northeast of Atlanta, in the multi-state cultural region that is sometimes called the Bible Belt. Given this setting, I had certain preconceived notions about how local officials might view the messages of Robert Christian and the Georgia Guidestones. Those notions turned out to be wrong.

I asked Elbert County Commission Chairman Lee Vaughn what he thought about the directive to keep the global population under 500 million.

“I don’t have a problem with it,” he said. “I didn’t read into that and think genocide.”

As I sat in Wayne Mullenix’s truck near the empty and unadorned field that once held the Guidestones, I asked him the same question. Did he agree with their first guideline?

“Knowing what I know today, I think that was a good message,” he said. “We got too many people in this world right now.”

Later, after reading Robert Christian’s book, I asked Mullenix about some of its passages. I read him the part about “childbearing by the indigent, the lazy, the irresponsible and the inadequate.” The part about how every government should have a population policy. The part about how China was addressing overpopulation. The part about how living standards in poor countries could be raised by a few generations of single-child families.

Mullenix did not object to any of that.

“Well, I mean, that makes sense to me,” he said. “I mean, I’ve got one child.”

Other people did object to the message of the Guidestones. And the monument had been under attack for years, whether for ideological reasons or the primitive desire to break stuff. It was such a magnet for vandalism and other criminal activity that local authorities installed surveillance cameras whose footage could be monitored from the dispatch center. Sheriff’s reports described a series of incidents.

In 2013, a caretaker reported that “someone wrote with a black marker on the Georgia Guidestones” and “it looked like someone tried to dig around the base of another column.”

In 2016, a deputy found the Guidestones defaced with spray paint. Alongside a vulgar message were the words “YOU WON’T WIN.”

In 2021, a deputy found people shooting a rap video at the Guidestones. They had doused the stones with fake blood.

On May 1, 2022, Kandiss Taylor, an educator and Republican gubernatorial candidate from Appling County, stood on the debate stage with Governor Brian Kemp and said, “This governor failed us in Georgia.” The next day she posted a link on Facebook to a campaign video about her proposed EXECUTIVE ORDER #10.

The video featured ominous music and drone footage of the Guidestones. Taylor drew a connection between Covid-19 vaccines and the inscription calling for the global population to be kept under 500 million. She compared abortion to human sacrifice associated with the worship of demons. She said it was a “war between good and evil.” This was her proposed executive order: DEMOLISH THE GEORGIA GUIDESTONES.

Sixty-five days later, in the darkness outside Elberton, there was an explosion.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation released surveillance video that showed what it said was “an unknown person leaving an explosive device at the Georgia Guidestones.” This clip had no visible timestamp, unlike the two other clips released after the incident, and the figure was so small and grainy that identification seemed unlikely. Another clip showed the blast knocking down one of the columns and propelling shards of granite across the field. A third clip showed a silver car apparently leaving the scene.

The explosion did not bring down all the Guidestones. But the authorities finished the job. A GBI statement said its officials “made the call to demolish the entire structure since someone destroyed one of the five vertical slabs that held the structure up. This weakened structure created an unsafe environment for investigators to search.”

Since then, new information has been scarce. The GBI declined to release any documents to me or make investigators available for interviews. A spokesperson did not answer my questions on the case, including what kind of explosive was used and why the clip of the “unknown person” did not show a timestamp. Lee Vaughn, the county commission chairman, told me the GBI’s investigation had lost momentum.

“I really think it’s a religious zealot,” he said. “We had that lady running for governor, I can’t remember her name, that said they were of Satan and had to come down.”

Wayne Mullenix also wondered aloud about Kandiss Taylor, the woman who pledged to demolish the Guidestones. She’d gotten barely 3 percent of the vote in the primary election, so she did not become governor, but her name surfaced again after the explosion, when she was the victim of a swatting incident.

On July 11, 2022, local authorities received a call that seemed to originate from Taylor’s home in Baxley, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta. Someone told a dispatcher that “a female has shot a male subject 5 times in the chest and that she was saying that she was going to kill herself,” according to a sheriff’s report. At least four law-enforcement officials approached the Taylor house. Eventually Taylor opened the door to the deputies, who checked the house and found that no one had been shot. The call had been a malicious hoax. The case was turned over to the GBI, which has yet to arrest anyone.

Taylor did not agree to an interview with me, but she did answer some of my text messages. When I asked about the Guidestones, she wrote,

“I’m glad that satanic monument is gone.”

When I asked if she’d been questioned by the GBI, she didn’t reply. And when I asked if she was involved in destroying the Guidestones, or knew who was, she wrote:

“Mr. Lake, an act of God took those cursed Guidestones down, and if you cared more about actual journalism rather than harassing me, you would be out there investigating the maniac who erected that genocidal monument overnight in the first place.”

Taylor has been quoted repeating a claim from a YouTube video that lightning caused the explosion. I ran this claim past three experts.

Research scientist Christopher Sterpka of the Georgia Tech Research Institute watched the video on the lightning theory and then wrote back to me, “Just from a cursory glance at the low-res video, there are hints of a lightning event. There is a slight blue ‘glow’ at the same time as the brightness surge of the lamp in the background in two of the frames … corresponding to the start of the explosion.”

But Sterpka could find no record that lightning had struck at that time and location. Thus, he told me, “It’s not really enough to say this was a lightning strike.”

Steve Wistar, a senior forensic meteorologist for AccuWeather, said he doubted the lightning theory because he could find no evidence of a strike at that place and time. Nor could Chris Vagasky, lightning data specialist with the National Lightning Safety Council.

“The National Lightning Detection Network detected no lightning within 27 miles of the monument any time between 3 am and 5 am on July 6, 2022,” he wrote. “So while lightning can cause damage to granite and rock monoliths, it did not do so in this case.”

In the truck with Wayne Mullenix, I asked if he’d heard any theories about the explosion.

“There’s some things that I just can’t repeat,” he said. “And, and, I can’t — those things, I won’t tell you or anybody.”

I’d come to town looking for clues to two mysteries. Who blew up the Guidestones? It seemed that one would remain unsolved for now. But as for who built them, well, that was another story.

As we sat in his truck near Guidestones Road, I asked Wayne Mullenix if he knew who Robert Christian really was.

“No,” he said. “I never asked. It wasn’t anything I wanted to know.”

At least one local man knew. A banker named Wyatt Martin needed to know Mr. Christian’s real identity to manage the financial transactions for the building of the Guidestones. He promised never to disclose Christian’s real name.

“When I’m dead and gone,” he said in 2010, “nobody will ever know who put it there.”

Martin died in 2021 at age 91. But late in his life, he may have accidentally revealed the truth about Robert Christian.

About three decades after the Guidestones were unveiled, a documentary film crew visited Elberton. Their film, “Dark Clouds Over Elberton,” was released in 2015. It has drawn almost no news coverage. I searched its title in the Nexis and Newspapers.com databases. Both searches returned zero results.

But this little-known film contains major revelations.

The filmmakers went to see Wyatt Martin, keeper of the secret, to see what he might tell them. Martin had a trove of documents related to Robert Christian and the Guidestones. He said Christian had asked him to destroy them, but he kept them, thinking he might someday write a book. Now he was getting old, and it was too late to write a book, but the documents were still there, in an old computer case in his shed.

“Would you be willing to show it to us?” asked the director, Christian J. Pinto.

“No,” Martin said, smiling. “I—”

“You don’t have to open it,” Pinto said. “Would you be willing to just show us the case?”

After some further persuasion, Martin went to a shelf, got a key, and walked outside. The filmmakers followed, camera rolling. Producer J. Michael Bennett later recalled this moment in an interview with me. He thought they might be about to find something big. Martin unlocked the door to the shed.

“It’s heavy,” he said to Bennett, who was on his knees, re-arranging items and looking for the old computer case.

“I love history,” Bennett said, “and this is a part of history.”

Bennett pulled out the old brown case and brought it into the light. When he asked Martin if perhaps it belonged in a museum, Martin said no, he wouldn’t give it to a museum, because then he might reveal Robert Christian’s secret identity.

“I might have his address and name in there,” Martin said. “Probably do.”

The negotiation continued. Bennett gently pushed the boundaries, and Martin jovially pushed back. From behind the camera, Pinto asked if they could open the case. Martin gave in.

“You might turn that case down,” he said, instructing Bennett to set the case on its side. “If it’ll still open.”

Bennett undid the two latches and opened the case, revealing a rumpled stack of papers and envelopes.

“That is a letter right there from Mr. R.C. Christian,” Martin said. He held it up for the camera, showing that it was addressed to him. There was no return address. Intentionally or not, his thumb covered the postmark.

Martin took out the letter and began to read.

“See, he says, ‘I believe that the message of the Guidestones will not receive adequate attention until the problems of human overpopulation become more critical. In the meantime, there is little more that we two can do to spread their message. Hopefully, the monument will endure long enough to help direct attention to the core issues.”

Martin showed the letter to the camera. It was dated July 14, 1998.

“I am old enough (78) to remembers the days of the ‘Dust Bowl,’” Robert Christian wrote. He mentioned that he’d recently had open-heart surgery. He had recovered well, he wrote, but added, “I am reminded of my own mortality.”

As the conversation continued, Martin let down his guard a little more. Bennett picked up a letter from Christian and showed it to the camera. This time the postmark was visible. It said Fort Dodge, Iowa.

The camera scanned over the papers. It caught another envelope, from another letter addressed to Martin. This one did have a visible return address.

Here are three reasons to believe that the man who commissioned the Georgia Guidestones was Herbert H. Kersten, a physician from Fort Dodge, Iowa:

“Most important of all, America should now begin to direct the attention of the world to solving the fundamental problem which threatens to engulf all humanity in social and economic catastrophe,” Herbert H. Kersten, M.D. wrote in a letter published by the Des Moines Register on January 25, 1981, less than a year after the Guidestones were unveiled. “I refer to the uncontrolled reproduction of our species, which has already caused human numbers to far exceed the level which our planet can support in decency.”

“Rational planning of human reproduction is becoming increasingly essential,” Kersten wrote in a letter the Register published in 1990.

“Contrary to widespread opinion,” Kersten wrote in a 1996 letter to the editor, “our nation is now overpopulated.”

When the filmmakers visited Fort Dodge, the story took a darker turn.

Digging further into the doctor’s background, they interviewed local historian Roger Natte and William Sayles Doan, an art patron and author who said he knew Kersten. Doan, who died in 2015, said Kersten used to brag about his friendship with William Shockley, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor who later became a notorious eugenicist.

“I mean, he did not make it a secret,” Doan said in the film, referring to Kersten’s connection with Shockley. “He was proud of it.”

Shockley showed an interest in reducing the numbers of people he considered unworthy. He argued that Black people were “genetically inferior” to White people, according to his 1989 New York Times obituary, and he proposed paying women with low IQs to be sterilized.

In 1992, when David Duke ran for president, Kersten put in a good word for him — even though Duke was an infamous Klansman and neo-Nazi.

“David Duke voices many beliefs held by reasonable Americans,” Kersten wrote in a letter published by the Des Moines Register.

If Kersten knew Shockley — a claim from Doan that I was unable to independently confirm — it wouldn’t be surprising that he supported Duke. One of Duke’s books, “My Awakening,” is dedicated to “my friend, William Shockley,” who “crusaded for our heritage.”

Whether or not he was actually Herbert Kersten, the man known as Robert Christian compared humanity to a “fleet of overcrowded lifeboats.” He wrote that distribution of medical care should tilt toward “favoring those individuals whose continuing lives are most valuable to society at large.” He was the one who envisioned a better world, a more rational world, a world in which four billion unwanted people have simply disappeared.

Did the producers of “Dark Clouds Over Elberton” unmask the man behind the Georgia Guidestones? Producer J. Michael Bennett told me he was not aware of any serious challenge to the film’s accuracy. Herbert Kersten died in 2005, and it wasn’t certain that he agreed with Shockley on race and eugenics or whether he changed any of his views later in life. I reached out to Kersten’s children, hoping for insight, but managed to speak with only one: former Iowa State Senator James Kersten. In a brief phone conversation, I asked Kersten about his father’s possible connection to the Georgia Guidestones.

“No, I’m not familiar with that,” Kersten said.

I asked if he had seen the film “Dark Clouds Over Elberton.”

“No, I don’t listen to a lot of that crap,” he said. “So I really don’t have anything to say, so thank you.”

In interviews with me, Elberton’s leaders were not eager to grapple with what the filmmakers found. They did not know Herbert Kersten.

Mayor Daniel Graves first said he’d never watched “Dark Clouds Over Elberton,” and then said he’d seen part of it, and then dismissed it as some “hogwash thing.” Finally, he said the views of such people as Shockley and Duke “have absolutely no place in our community.”

Lee Vaughn, chairman of the Elbert County Commission, said he had watched the film.

“I think it’s just sensationalism,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.

When I asked if the filmmakers found the truth, he said, “Maybe.”

Wayne Mullenix was interviewed for the film, and said he had watched it. When I asked if he thought its conclusions were accurate, he said, “I don’t know. And it didn’t bother me one way or the other.”

It was obviously unpleasant to imagine that the Granite Capital’s most famous granite monument was commissioned by someone who bragged about his friend the eugenicist and wrote favorably about a Klansman and neo-Nazi. As I finished writing this story, I called Lee Vaughn again and put the question to him explicitly: If these allegations are true, does it change how you feel about the Georgia Guidestones?

“I certainly hope that’s not true,” he said. “But if it is, then I’m glad they’re gone.”