Normally, a conspiracy theory has a fairly predictable MO: you take something normal and natural, and you decide it’s actually the work of unknown shady characters, possibly with the help of the government.

The latest one, though, appears to have turned that on its head. The destruction of the Georgia Guidestones this week – an incident that was caught on camera and the end of which was carried out by local authorities – is apparently a cover-up job. 

Ignore the fact that there's video evidence of a human carrying out the attack. With just a little video editing, it's clear to see who the real vandal was. It was God.

The Georgia Guidestones, sometimes known as the “American Stonehenge,” first appeared in rural northeast Georgia in 1980, and have drawn tourists to the area ever since. The six 19-foot (5.8 meter) tall granite slabs that formed the monument were covered in mysterious messages and impressively well-aligned to various astronomical features – one hole in the stones even allowed sunlight to indicate which day of the year it was, for example.

What makes this even more curious is that nobody really who commissioned the Guidestones, or why. According to local lore, they were installed at the behest of one “Robert C Christian,” who in turn represented a “small group of loyal Americans” interested in creating something very specific: a monument that could act as a compass, a calendar, and a clock, with instructions in eight languages providing vaguely new-age, vaguely eugenicist guides for building and maintaining society.

The longstanding explanation for the stones, therefore, was that they were intended to act as a foundational document for the survivors of some apocalyptic event. What that event may be, we don’t know – but whoever commissioned the monument did require that it be capable of withstanding the most catastrophic events, so presumably they thought it would be pretty bad.

Unfortunately, the builders seem to have failed on that last instruction: the first stone was destroyed by a bomb early Wednesday morning, and the rest were dismantled shortly after by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation authorities “for safety reasons.”

“Surveillance video […] shows an unknown person leaving an explosive device at the Georgia Guidestones,” the GBI tweeted Thursday evening. 

“The video is unclear, but agents are still actively working to identify the person leaving the scene after the explosion.”

However, for some netizens – among them, local far-right gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor, who campaigned on the slogan “Jesus Guns Babies” and a promise to “stand up to the Luciferian Cabal” before losing the race by over 70 percentage points – the destruction of the stones was the work not of humans, but of a god.

“God is God all by Himself. He can do ANYTHING He wants to do. That includes striking down Satanic Guidestones,” she tweeted Wednesday. Destroying the monument had been one of the key policy promises of her campaign, echoing far-right and conservative conspiracy theories that the stones are a hub of devil-worship or a tool of the “New World Order.”

“Some people didn’t like the wording that was on it,” Christopher Kubas, executive vice-president of the Elberton Granite Association told The Guardian. 

“But there were a lot of people that enjoyed the monument, and were able to look past the wording and see it for what it was: as a really immense granite structure,” Kubas said, “and basically as a work of art.”

Despite Taylor’s strength of feeling on the matter, there are a few reasons to doubt that the stones were struck down from on high – not least of which is the fact that, again, there’s video evidence of a very human-looking suspect running to and from the installation before the first explosion. On top of that, the suspect was seen escaping in a gray sedan, which is a marked step down from the traditional burning bush. 

That’s probably why the GBI is appealing to the public for information on the incident, rather than casing local churches. Even Taylor seems to have accepted that a more worldly explanation may be possible, having reportedly since released a video repudiating vandalism and saying that “anyone who goes on private or public property to destroy anything illegally should be arrested.”

On that, at least, she agrees with the local investigators. “Whatever your personal opinion on the Guidestones is, this attack is bad for our community,” wrote the Elbert County Chamber of Commerce in a Facebook post published Wednesday. “We hope that whomever [sic] is responsible is apprehended and brought to justice.”