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INVESTIGATIVE FILES Still the largest country in the world, Russia retains over 76 percent of the area of the former USSR, which collapsed in 1991. The collapse, along with the suspension of activities of the Communist Party, increased glasnost ("openness") in the new federal republic. With personal freedoms, however, has come a rise in pseudoscientific and magical expression.
I became increasingly aware of this through the visits of Russian notables to the Center for Inquiry-- International: Valerii Kuvakin (professor of philosophy at Moscow State University), Edward Kruglyakov (a distinguished physicist at Novosibirsk, Siberia), and Yuri Chornyi (Scientific Secretary, Institute for Scientific Information, Russian Academy of Sciences). Subsequently I was one of several CSICOP speakers at an international congress, "Science, Antiscience, and the Paranormal," held in Moscow (October 3-5, 2001) and cosponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences. [Several articles from that conference appear in this issue.Editor.] There I learned more about the newfound glasnost toward all things mysterious. I stayed on for several more days in order to investigate some of these.
Pyramid Power
Pyramids are springing up across the Russian landscape. These are a modern expression of a craze fostered by Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, one that involved "the secrets of the pyramids." Citing the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt-"one of the seven wonders of the world and one of the strangest works of architecture in existence"-the authors touted claims that small cardboard models of the Cheops pyramid could preserve food (especially "mummify meat"), relieve headaches, sharpen razor blades, and possibly perform other wonders (Ostrander and Schroeder 1970, 366-376).
The specific claims came from a Czechoslovakian radio engineer, Karel Drbal, who obtained Czech patent 91304 for the Cheops Pyramid RazorBlade Sharpener. It supposedly generated some unknown and mysterious "energy." Unfortunately, subsequent tests of the claims failed to substantiate them. Pyramids preserved organic matter no better than did containers of other shapes; nor did placing razor blades in pyramids restore their sharpness, despite the subjective judgments of people fooled by their own expectations (Hines 1988).
Nevertheless, boosted by claims that pyramid power was unleashed "behind the iron curtain," the pyramid craze flourished in the United States. One company marketed a kit with eight wooden sticks that, glued in place, formed a pyramidal...