The Guidestones mystery got some press today in the New York Times!

The article discusses the prolific commandments scrolled on the massive monument and all of the unknowns surrounding its conception.

The Guidestones New York Times article stated that “Only one man is said to know the identity of the benefactor who went by the name of R. C. Christian when he visited this East Georgia city in 1979 and paid for the display, supposedly on behalf of a group of others living outside Georgia.”

“I made an oath to that man, and I can’t break that,” said Wyatt Martin, 82, the retired banker who helped broker the arrangement for the monument, which is 19 feet tall and resembles Stonehenge. “No one will ever know.”

The article goes on to discuss the theories surrounding the Guidesstones’ existence, and the future of the monument.

“But nearly everyone here has a theory about the artifact, built during the cold war and said to be, at least in part, a guide for civilization’s future in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Its edicts include a call to “unite humanity with a living new language” and a recommendation to keep the planet’s population below 500 million. (The Census Bureau estimates the world’s population is 7.1 billion.)”

but if one man here gets his way, that lasting debate could become a spigot of cash for a county of nearly 20,000 people, where unemployment approaches 12 percent and the median household income stands below $33,000.

“My long-term goal is to build some sort of festival around it, something that would be a weeklong thing that could be held in two or three different spots around Elberton that could really draw in crowds and help the local economy,” said Mart Clamp, a local businessman who helped his father engrave the Guidestones. “There’s a big push right now for the wholesomeness of how small towns operate. People are drawn to that.”

Clearly the mystery of the Stonehenge-like structure is still buzzing through the American psyche, and with its Georgian neighbours wanting to try and capitalize on its existence, it looks like the Guidestones will be around for a long while.

To read more of the Guidesontes New York Times article click here

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(Transcript from Jay’s Vlog )

“Hey It’s Jay Ferguson down at the Guidestones studio. I just wanted to talk a little bit about what’s going on here right now. We are getting close to a final draft on the Season Two script and it’s actually been a pretty difficult process, probably more difficult than I was expecting, in many ways. What’s happening in terms of the scripts for Season Two? Really you’d have to go back to Season One and look and what happened there.

In Season One we built a story and an idea that was really about creating something specifically to go online. What we’ve learned is that while we’ve been extremely successful online with that process or with that model it’s been very hard to monetize it. Without being able to monetize the content, we can’t make it.

Interestingly enough the money and being able to finance the show is actually effecting how we’re writing the Second Season. It’s really important for anyone who is trying to write something in some kind of a pure-play, pure “out of your heart” process, which is what Season One was, to realize that it’s actually very difficult to do that in reality.

Season Two has to be a hybrid. We are still building something for the internet but we’re also building something that can be re-purposed. That’s what we’re discovering now. We have to re-purpose our content because you can’t monetize it online. We’re looking at building something that can be then transformed into a different format and then go onto TV or become a feature film. iThentic is doing that with a lot of other projects right now and we’re doing that with Guidestones as well. I think that that’s one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned.

The script itself is coming along nicely. I’m really excited about it and I’m very excited about having the opportunity to have longer episodes because we can really “dig in” and get really involved. There are multi story lines in the script as well so we’re not just following the two protagonists as we did in the first season. We have some new bad guys and there’s going to be some action and adventure. It’s all very exciting. But as I mentioned it’s a very different format.

Probably the hardest thing I’m finding,  and I think Jeremy (Diamond) my co-writer would agree with me, is that we have to be thinking from four different angles. We can’t just build an arc for a seven minute episode. We have to be building an arc for a half hour episode as well and having to build an arc for the overall story.

It takes time and it’s hard. As you can tell I’m unshaven and unkempt and looking basically terrible because… it’s a grind. We started working on the writing almost a year ago now. We are coming close to the end of it and frankly all I want to do right now is get into production. I want to start shooting some of this stuff.

We appreciate your patience. We will be having updates on a much more regular basis now. Thanks for watching and I can’t wait to talk with you more.”

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The International Academy of Television Arts & Science presents the international Emmy to Guidestones for the Best Digital Program – Fiction, today in Cannes, France. The International Emmys are a membership based organization comprised of leading media and entertainment figures from around the world. 

Written and directed by Jay Ferguson and produced by iThentic, Guidestones, follows journalism students Sandy (Supinder Wraich) and Trevor (Dan Fox) as they plunge into a world of mystery. Inspired by true events, Sandy and Trevor uncover the clues that lead to the discovery of a global conspiracy surrounding the Georgia Guidestones, a real-life monument nestled in rural Georgia, inscribed with directions for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse.

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The journey to creating Guidestones goes back 6 years for me.

I was drinking coffee with my friend Patricio Davilla complaining about the difficulties of trying to get any film project distributed in this country (a favourite activity of all independent filmmakers in Canada: caffeine and complaining) and he said to me “Why don’t you produce content for the internet? You can bypass the broadcasters and go directly to your audience”.

Now you need to remember this was six years ago. YouTube was roughly one year old, online video was not particularly sophisticated, and computers were… well, let’s just say they were slow-ish, smartphones were not that smart, and neither was most of the content… football in the groin.

As an independent filmmaker I was much more sophisticated than Dayillia’s suggestion; so naturally I strongly rejected the idea.

A bit of time passed and still nobody was picking up my features, or anything else for that matter, and a thought kept lingering as rejection persisted; the idea of creating content and being my own distributor.

I wanted to take control of my own destiny.

So, without admitting it to anyone, I let the concept occupy a large portion of my brain and thought it over and over… and over… If the content was serialized with cliffhangers, maybe there could be something there.

My father used to tell me about going to the movie theater and watching the old serials; he loved them and he kept coming back. Everybody did.

But seriously, that was all handle bar mustaches and archetypes. Is that really what I wanted to do? Spend my time figuring out unique ways to tie maidens in distress to railway tracks?

This is not what makes an honorable career in the film industry. (Yes I know… oxymoron)

I started to dabble. I wrote a proposal, I raised a little capital, and I tried my hand at a couple of short form content experiments called TRUE FICTION and TEN TO GO. Suddenly three years later, my dabbling had turned into a full-fledged obsession to become an on-line content producer.

Of course I want this job because it pays no money and exacts no respect from anybody…

This is a volunteer proposition that nobody wants or needs, with long hours and a lot of people politely pretending to listen to you, who are impatient to get back to making some real money in the real world.

Well, for some reason I slogged on, going to various interactive conferences across the country, pushing my concept of serialized content, supported by TRUE FICTION and TEN TO GO (both great ideas, and I believe, very well executed and entertaining).

However, in the end these properties were really just short versions of television shows. I tried to raise money to make more… I tried for a couple of years with little success.

By now it’s summer 2008 and two things are happening:

First, people keep asking me what my plan is to monetize the content…to which my answers are; through “sponsorship”, and “t-shirt sales” and the content is going to be “so good people will pay for it!”, yadda yadda yadda.

Second, we are quickly heading into the fall of 2008…when a certain World Economic Collapse occurs… Here I am knocking on doors looking for money for a high risk venture. Well timing is everything, because as I was getting (politely) laughed out of board rooms across the country and then suddenly I happened across a single meeting that would end up changing the course of my career…and I do believe now, my life.

Tags: conspiracies, conspiracy, conspiracy theories, conspiracy theory, Da Vinci Code, daughter, davinci code, decoded, disasters, drama, ga, ga guidestones, georgia guidestones, guidestones, hard, illuminati, interactive series, interview, looking back, looking forward, love, mystery, natural disasters, new media, new world order, Prologue, sandy, secret societies, suhaag, supinder wraich, thriller, transmedia, web series, webseries, wraich, x-files, xfiles
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I’ve decided to start a Blog.

I have to be honest. I really can’t imagine that anybody would have any interest in hearing what I have to say. BS. right? False modesty.. Then why put this down on the page?

BECAUSE I AM A GENIUS AND I WANT BOTH OF YOU TO KNOW THAT!

The fact is I am writing this to myself. It’s a kind of journal for four reasons.

1. It helps me to organize my thoughts when I externalize them, which then helps me organize my life.
2. My life seems to move so fast these days; this provides a nice quiet moment for me to reflect.
3. When I wonder what the hell I did for all those years making that crazy project, I can look back and rediscover.
4. I now have a three and a half year old daughter whom I love dearly. Later on in life if she ever wonders what Daddy was doing every day when he went off to that weird place called work, she can come back to this lonely record of accounts and discover on her own terms.

So why not keep it private?

BECAUSE I AM AN EGOMANIAC AND I AM IN LOVE WITH THE SOUND OF MY OWN FINGERS TAPPING.

Actually the real reason is that if it’s public my mom can read it and she will think that her son has some sort of legitimate job. It will certainly make up for the lack of salary I’ve been taking home for twenty years.

The reason I want to start a blog particularly about Guidestones, at this particular time, is two fold.

1. To look back.
2. To look forward.

We are in a transitional place with Guidestones. We have just finished production (after 3 years) and are now going into marketing and distribution…which I’m sure will take up another number of years. (Please do not tell this to my wife RE: the aforementioned lack of salary.)

We are calling Guidestones an interactive thriller which I believe is accurate. I do have to say however, that once you get past the easy to read, simplified, tag line, it goes much deeper than that. I can attest to this as it took 50 of us, over a 3-year period to make the thing functional… Guidestones is an online dramatic series that runs 50 episodes over the course of 6 cities, 3 countries, 2 continents, 45 websites, and 120 minutes of supplemental media.

Anybody can sign up for free and experience it by entering their email address on this site (www.Guidestones.org)

Some day my daughter will be able to go on the journey as well and what I am going to attempt to describe to her (in this very public forum) is not only how I did it…but why.

JDF – March 22, 2012

Tags: conspiracies, conspiracy, conspiracy theories, conspiracy theory, Da Vinci Code, daughter, davinci code, decoded, disasters, drama, ga, ga guidestones, georgia guidestones, guidestones, hard, illuminati, interactive series, interview, looking back, looking forward, love, mystery, natural disasters, new media, new world order, Prologue, sandy, secret societies, suhaag, supinder wraich, thriller, transmedia, web series, webseries, wraich, x-files, xfiles
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