Mr. Osmanagic’s Foundation had announced, at the end of July 2007, a visit to Visoko of Russian geophysicists, Professors Khavroshkin and Tsyplakov (news in English (en) and in Bosnian (bs)). Three months later, on the 16th of November, the Foundation website claims (bs) that "the Russian Academicians confirm the existence of the pyramids", and that they will, along with Semir Osmanagic himself, present their works during the 33th International Geological Congress (en) in Oslo in August 2008. The Foundation article offers a short text in Russian, that seems to be the abstract of the Russian geophysicists’ lecture for this Congress. Is it really, at last, the "scientific validation", often claimed but never made, of Mr. Osmanagic’s hypothesis? Without prejudging the content of Pr. Khavroshkin’s presentation during the Congress, one may still doubt it...

Let’s first correct some usual approximations and over-statements from the Foundation:

– If Pr. Khavroshkin and Pr. Tsyplakov do exist, and work (ru) in the Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth (ru), which is itself linked with the Russian Academy of Sciences (ru), it is very unprobable that these two scientists, contrary to what the Foundation website regularly claims, could be "Academician" and members of this prestigious Academy. Their names do not appear on the list of present and past full members (ru), nor on the one of corresponding members; and that is not really surprising, when one knows that there are less than 500 members in the Russian Academy, all elected by the other members on the basis of the importance of their scientific contribution.

– Professor Khavroshkin’s participation is actually mentioned on the Oslo Congress programme (you can download here (en) the last version, updated 30th October 2007 [1]), but not Professor Tsyplakov’s participation, nor Mr. Osmanagic’s one. The programme mentions a contribution on "Geophysical and geochemical archaeology" by Pr. Khavroshkin, but the Bosnian "pyramids" are not mentioned, and there is today no abstract available on the Congress website (en) (see the post scriptum for more recent information).

– The Russian text (bs) published by the Foundation has been translated in a quite strange way. Stultitia (bs) must have had quite a lot of fun, pointing to the modifications of the original text (in yellow, the "forgotten" parts of the original text, in red the parts added by the translator); for instance, the sentence "the seismics of all pyramidal formations show a few particularities which partially correspond to those of the Egyptian pyramids" is translated as "the seismics of the Bosnian pyramidal constructions confirm the existence of the same characteristics as in Egyptian pyramids"; "S. Osmanagic’s article" has become "Semir Osmanagic’s scientific report"; when, for Pr. Khavroshkin, some peculiarities of the seismic analysis "show the possibility of the existence of underground cavities", the translator deems that the same peculiarities show the possibility of "the existence of continuous cavities/tunnels in the pyramids"... The most surprising is the presence of a "conclusion" that does not exist in the original text: "Natural hills do not have such frequency characteristics of seismic noise. The energetic vibrations at 13 Hz measured on the pyramid of the Dragon are of unknown origin." (Prirodna brda nemaju ovakve frekvencijske karakteristike seizmičkog šuma. Energetske vibracije od 13 Hz izmjerene na piramidi Zmaja imaju nepoznato porijeklo)...

So, in this short text, the Russian geophysicists do not "confirm" at all Mr. Osmanagic’s hypothesis, they just note a few characteristics of the seismics of pyramidal formations, even if their visit had an extraordinary impact on the imagination of some of Mr. Osmanagic’s friends; that’s how a woman named Jadranka Bencic (bs) becomes enthousiastic about the "frequency of the pyramid of Love", compared with a gigantic "drum" emitting "alpha waves" which can fill us with optimism and "positive energy"; again, the man named Hrvoje Zujic, who used to see in the pyramids "radiators", is now seeing them (bs) as "gigantic oscillators", aimed at "stimulating the right brain" so as to "promote meditation"...

However, one could wonder about what interested Pr. Khavroshkin and his colleague in the study of the Bosnian "pyramids", and before that of the Egyptian ones (see here (en) a list of contributions he made during a Conference of Applied Geophysics in Italy in 2004). Pr. Khavroshkin is a specialist in terrestrial - and, as it seems, lunar - seismics, a branch of seismology (en); he is particularly interested in the study of the seismic noise (all the perturbations of a seismic signal, that may be of natural or artificial origin) and, according to some of the articles he published, in the part (very difficult to detect) of this noise that could be of extraterrestrial or even extrasolar origin, for instance the influence of far-away pulsars (en) (see for example here (en)). If he is interested in the pyramidal forms, it is, as far as I understand it, for their "amplification" effect of this noise (see here (en)) which seems to be quite independant of the nature of the pyramidal form: "geophysical, natural and artificial concentrators of vibrations in form of pyramid". It seems to me probable, from these texts, that Pr. Khavroshkin came in Bosnia in search of one of these "concentrators of vibrations", and that he checked that the pyramidal hills in Visoko actually had, at least partially, the requested characteristics.

So it appears, at first look, that Pr. Khavroshkin and his colleague are scientists whose research domain has no links with Mr. Osmanagic’s pseudo-archaeology. I was however able to make a few curious observations, that could lead to think that maybe this Russian scientist did not come in Bosnia totally by accident, and that there are more similarities between him and Mr. Osmanagic than one could have imagined. First, I note that it is impossible to find in any scientific magazine his articles about the Egyptian pyramids, even if their were actually presented in the international Conference mentioned above. Nowhere, not in a single bibliography, can one find a reference to a publication of these texts, and the single website that contains the whole text (rather than the abstract published on the Italian conference website) is a Russian website called "Laboratory of Alternative History" (see here (ru) "Geophysical fields and signals of some Egyptian pyramids" and there (ru) "Seismic-physical structural model of Egyptian pyramids"). I guess that Mr. Osmanagic, author of the "ambitious cycle" called "Alternative history (bs)", will not feel out of his element...

On the other side, Pr. Khavroshkin has long been interested in lunar seismicity, with the same project: to try and detect spatial influences, see this list of publications (en). For instance he shows here (en) the possibility that lunar seismicity is influenced by gas/dust streams emanating from binary stars near the solar system. He then deduces, if this hypothesis were confirmed, that every object of our solar system must have received, along its revolutions around the galactic center, some particles from every part of the galaxy; so that, he writes, life on Earth could have originated from the galaxy (the title of this article is "Genesis of Life"). If the hypothesis of an extraterrestrial origin of life, by way of a "contamination" by complex organic molecules, such as it has been explored by numerous scientists, is not surprising, the Professor’s last sentence may give rise to doubt about what he really means: "We must attach modern data of archaeology to confirm these results". Unless there is here a language difficulty, and he actually meant "paleontology", I cannot fathom how archaeology could answer the question of the origin of life; however, this link between Pr. Khavroshkin’s ideas on the origin of life, and archaeology - and the Bosnian pyramids - exists, for he himself had mentioned, in a correspondence with a Bosnian geodesist (see here) unfortunately suppressed today from the latter’s blog, the fact that he hoped in Visoko to confirm Arrhenius (en)’ hypothesis (Arrhenius was among the first to propose the hypothesis better known nowadays as panspermia (en)). One could find in this correspondence these sentences: "All the more that the Arrhenius’s hypothesis about life genesis probably right so the life appeared on the Earth few times possibly so the general tasks for archeology must change"; and "Sorry you have not understanding about modern development of the Arrhenius’s hypothesis so we can not discus it in future. This hypothesis as a clue develops in few country and I do`t understand why we must discriminate Bosnia". What is the link between so-called pyramids, even 12000 years old, and the origin of life on Earth? I dare hope that Pr. Khavroshkin doesn’t agree with Mr. Osmanagic’s views about the Atlanteans’s ancestors coming from the Pleiades...

Lastly, one of the most recent articles by Pr. Khavroshkin, published in 2006 with the title "The Interstellar Gas-Dust Streams as the Instrument of Exobiology (en)", shows that the Russian geophysicist is tending to a curious mixing of science and religion, or rather to a use of science as tool and pretext for proselytism. Indeed, in this article he states again his theory of an extraterrestrial origin of life, and extends it to the idea of a "universal
galactic gene" and of a "designer" responsible for this genome; here is his conclusion: "The universal model of the gene logically contacts the concept of a prediction and designer, hence, the model of occurrence of life and the Creator is logically more proved". Despite his insistance on logic, it seems that Pr. Khavroshkin is here leaving the domain of science, and is nearing the concept of intelligent design (en)...

Birds of a feather flock together? Finally, between the Russian scientist who wish to prove the existence of a Creator by the way of seismology, and the Bosnian-American businessman who believes he discovered pyramids constructed by Atlanteans with extra-terrestrial ancestors, convergence is maybe more important than divergence...