July 6 (Reuters) – A strange granite monument that some called “America’s Stonehenge” but a conservative politician denounced as “satanic” was torn down by authorities in rural Georgia on Wednesday, hours after it was badly damaged in a bombing by vandals.
Investigators from several law enforcement agencies converged on the site 100 miles (161 km) east of Atlanta, looking for clues about the pre-dawn explosion that blew apart part of the 42-year-old monument, called the Georgia Guidestones.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) later posted on its official Twitter feed a video clip of the blast captured by a surveillance camera and separate footage of a car driving away from the scene.
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It said the rest of the structure was deliberately demolished later in the day “for safety reasons”, with a photo showing the entire monument reduced to rubble. The initial damage was attributed to “unknown persons” who “detonated an explosive device” at the site.
Before it was vandalized, the 19-foot monument consisted of a single upright slab in the center of four larger slabs arranged around it, with a large rectangular finial placed on top of the others.
The collection of gray monoliths was erected in 1980 in the middle of a large field near the town of Elberton, Georgia, off Highway 77, and is listed as a tourist attraction by the state’s tourism website and the Elbert County Chamber of Commerce.
The plates were engraved with an enigmatic message in 12 languages calling for the preservation of humanity by limiting the world’s population to less than half a billion people to live “in eternal balance with nature,” according to official translations of the text.
The guide stones also functioned as an astronomical calendar, arranged to allow sunlight to shine through a narrow opening in the structure at noon each day to illuminate the engraved dates.
But the monument has drawn occasional controversy from some who have linked its message to far-right conspiracies or religious blasphemy.
Prominent among them was former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Candace Taylor, a third-place finisher in the May 24 Republican primary, who made removing the monument part of her campaign platform, a position parodied by TV comedian John Oliver.
Following news of the Guidestones bombing on Wednesday, Taylor suggested on Twitter that the monument’s demise was an act of divine intervention.
“God is God in himself. He can do ANYTHING he wants. This includes the removal of satanic guiding stones,” she tweeted.
Taylor later posted a video insisting that he would never support vandalism and that “anyone who goes onto private or public property to destroy something illegally should be arrested.”
No law enforcement officials have suggested that Candace was involved in the Guidestones bombing.
The exact origins of the ill-fated roadside attraction remain unclear. It was built by a local granite finishing company at the behest of a mysterious benefactor who commissioned the work under the pseudonym Robert S. Christian.
The Elberton Granite Association, which has maintained and preserved the stones, has put the cost of replacing them at hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to local media.
According to official descriptions, the monument became known as the American Stonehenge. But the site paled in age and grandeur to the original Stonehenge, a prehistoric landmark in Wiltshire, England, believed to date back as far as 3000 BC.
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Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Neil Fullick
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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