It has been shown in this article how the "international team" mentioned by the Foundation has soon been revealed an almost empty claim, even if Mr. Osmanagic supporters continue on a regular basis to announce (en) (see the news of the 8th of June 2006) the arrival of scientists from every country (Egypt, India, Pakistan, Mexico...), and even if some names are still appearing on the Foundation website when their owners have clearly made known that they do not have anything in common with the project.

Who are the foreign scientists who actually work in Visoko ? I have already mentioned two of them here : Dario Andretta, who, after a little stay on the site, left promising that he would soon send Italian scientists (but which ones ? not the scientists from his own university, that doesn’t employ lots of archaeologists or geologists...) ; and Aly Abd Barakat, the Egyptian geologist, who left for Egypt after a stay of more than 5 weeks in Visoko, and has confirmed before he left his first and very speedy (en) conclusions :

"For me, as a scientist and geologist, there’s still no doubt that this is man-made. I think that humans cut, polished, reshaped and formed stone blocks, bringing them here and adding them to the existing hill in order to give the shape of a pyramid to the hill." [1](source in English (en) and in Bosnian (bs))

Mr. Barakat’s presence on the site was one of the favourite arguments of the pyramid supporters : how could one imagine that a "reknown" geologist, an "expert", what is more Egyptian, could have spent five weeks on an inexistent pyramid ? Of course, there have been in the past at least one moment when Mr. Barakat let his imagination run a little bit too fast, and identified quite ordinary fossils (en) (pdf file, the interesting article is beginning on page 10) with the remains of Cambyses’ lost army (en). But the fact that Mr. Barakat’s work in Visoko appeared to be supported by the Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass was a guaranty : it was often said that Mr. Barakat was sent by Dr Hawass (for instance Mr. Osmanagic in a radio show : "He is a Doctor in Geology, his name is Ali Barakat, and he was personally chosen by Dr Zahi Hawass"), or at the least with his agreement (that’s for instance what Mario Gerussi from the Foundation implies here (bs) : "The Foundation addressed a request to the Egyptian Embassy, and they sent Ali. Beforehand Zahi Hawass, number one in Egypt for pyramids, was consulted"), and that he would send his scientific report to Dr Hawass.

Unfortunately for the credibility of Mr. Barakat as well as of the Foundation, Mark Rose, head redactor of Archaeology magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America, had the strange idea to search for a confirmation of these claims, and he contacted directly Dr Hawass ; the answer is perfectly clear (en) (you can download here (en) the complete answer by Dr Hawass in a pdf file) :

"[...] Apart from its general outline, this hill bears absolutely no resemblance to the Egyptian pyramids. Mr. Barakat, the Egyptian geologist working with Mr. Osmanagic, knows nothing about Egyptian pyramids. He was not sent by the SCA, and we do not support or concur with his statements. [...] Mr. Osmanic’s theories are purely hallucinations on his part, with no scientific backing." [2]