Unearthed

In the town of Visoko, Bosnia-Herzegovina there has been a startling, recent discovery. An archeologist named Semir Osmanagic, thinks he has found pyramids! Not just one, but at least two. The largest is one third larger that the Great Pyramid of Giza. At first glance they look like mountains...green and covered...but take a minute and you notice they are perfectly formed pyramid shapes. No pyramids are known in Europe, and there is no evidence any ancient civilization there ever attempted to build one.

But Osmanagic, a Bosnian archaeologist who now lives in Houston, has spent the last 15 years studying the pyramids of Latin America. He suspects there is one in his Balkan homeland. He learned about them in April 2005 from Senad Hodovic, director of a museum devoted to the history of Visoko. On a recent visit, Hodovic asked Osmanagic did he want to see "our pyramid shaped hill". When the pair climbed the hill, the sweeping view revealed a second, smaller pyramid-shaped hill. It reminded Osmanagic of pairs of pyramids he has seen in Latin America that together create a gateway into a valley.

Anomalies include some hard to dismiss items. For one, the four perfectly shaped slopes point exactly towards the four cardinal directions. Additionally, NASA satellite photography shows the pyramids give off a thermal signature consistent with man-made objects versus natural objects. And finally there are huge evenly thick blocks of cement-like material consistent with the material found in Egypt found just below the surface. These blocks are even "glued" together in an unknown manner that is the same as Giza.

This, of course, has set off a wave of optimism and hope in Bosnia. It is estimated up to 10,000 people a day come to visit this possibility. What is stunning is how something so big, so grand and so spectacular could have remained undiscovered all these years. Literally a town is built at its base, and people have been living in the shadow of this discovery for many generations. But maybe this discovery was revealed at just the right time. A Bosnian friend told me, "I think this is what we get as a country for all the horror we have faced. God gave us something very good because we also got something very bad. We are lucky it was discovered when it was. If revealed before or during the war they would certainly have been destroyed."

Time, of course, will tell. But for Bosnia and its people I hope they are real. The country needs some good news, some mystery, some symbol of great hope and possibility. I remain moved by this larger metaphor both for Bosnia and for my own life, and am left thinking about the great undiscovered realms that exist for us all…and that they may be right next to us, just below the surface.