The Russian Screws: The Mystery Continues (Part two of two)

It’s been nagging at me since I posted the counterpart to this post less than eight hours ago, that I may have dismissed the issue of the Russian Screws with a might too much haste and enthusiasm.

After intensive search online, through Russian language websites, search engines and wiki pages, I am, maddeningly, no closer to an answer.  While it seems that others, though only a few, have come to the same conclusion that I did in what I’ll now call part one of this two part saga, all attempts to verify the information contained in Hartwig Hausdorf’s book Wenn Goetter Gott Spielen have hit dead ends.

It turns out though, that Hausdorf misreported or mistranslated the original Russian in his source material.  The research organization he identified as ZNIGRI or the Central Scientific Research Institute for Geology and Prospecting for Precious and Non-ferrous Metals, is actually TsNIGRI, or The Federal State Unitary Enterprise – Central Research Geological Exploration Institute of Nonferrous and Precious Metals[1], which operates under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation.

This organization is responsible for “…the forecast, the search for, evaluation, exploration, advanced technology exploration, processing and analysis of ores diamonds, gold, silver, platinum, copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, monitoring of mineral resources, geological and economic evaluation deposits of mineral raw materials situation.”[2]

So, at least that part of Hausdorf’s story seems to be legitimate, if not confusing and difficult to verify.

TsNIGRI oversees or controls two journals, National Geology, which was founded in 1933 and is a scientific or industry periodical that publishes articles and commentary on the theoretical aspects of geology, and Ores & Metals, which was founded in 1992 for the “rapid dissemination of information and the creation of an information base for fundamental research in the field of ore deposits and their geological structure and mineral resources.”

Unfortunately, while these journals are archived online through the Russian language E-Library, a searchable database of literally millions of Russian scientific publications and individual articles, I can find no mention of the Narandan Spiral Artefacts (or Narandan Metal Fasteners, as a Russian language wikipedia.org entry calls them, or even through any other variation of the several names that have come up in this research) through either of the mentioned publications, or any other.

Hausdorf mentions two researchers by name in his book, as originally cited in part one from Arthur Neuman’s Rense.com article, a Dr. Valerii Ouvarov and Scientific Assistant Mme. Dr. E. W. Matveyeva.

Matveyeva apparently is, or was, a researcher with TsNIGRI, but all searches for him or her return results directly related to Hausdorf’s book and claims.  The same problem occurs with Ouvarov, with the exception of some obscure references to a UFO Report DVD, apparently developed by him or her.  There is also a book written by a Russian UFOlogist named Mr. Valery Uvarov titled The Pyramids.  If this is the person in question, it adds no credibility to Hausdorf’s claim.  The problem is exacerbated of course, by the apparent misspellings or transliterations of both names, alternately given as Jelena Matveev and Valery Ouvarov or Uvarov.[3]  Making the search quite difficult.

As mentioned in part one, the rivers cited, in the Ural Mountains where the supposed artefacts were found, were also not found in any listings of waterways in the area.  However, after adjusting for Hausdorf’s apparent difficulty with translating either from Russian to German, or from German to English, a spelling variation of one of the rivers returned a result for Kožim.[4]  Which is a tributary of Kosjun of the Komi Republic in Russia.  The other rivers, Narada (or Naradan) and Balbanyu are still unaccounted for, though again, this may be due to incorrect spellings.

So, all in all, it seems clear that Hausdorf’s claim that “critics will find it very difficult to accuse [him] of pseudo-documentation or embarrassing behavior” is patently wrong.  If he were trying to make this issue impossible to research, he could scarcely have done a better job.  It could be said though, that it’s not entirely his fault.

In the end, we’re left with the same problems as were mentioned in part one; none of his story can be verified.  It’s interesting to note that the Wikipedia entry for the Naradan Metal Fasteners, as mentioned above, lists Hausdorf’s book as well as two further websites – mystae.com and ufoligie.net, both of which are no longer operating – as the only sources for the entire entry.  Of further interest though, is that the only website listed on that entry that is still in operation (listed as an external link, not a source) displays a verbatim abstract of Hausdorf’s book, precisely as it appears on Rense.com.  From the dates of the web pages, it seems clear that Arthur Neuman did some copy/pasting from that earlier accounting.  And those of you who are paying attention, will find the same broken URL identified in part one listed near the very top of the page.

Well now, we’ve come full circle.  Yet we still don’t have any answers.  Are the Narada or Naradan Spirals real?  Are they 20,000 years old?  Were they examined scientifically by a Russian Federal agency, or by some crackpot UFOlogist?  Did Hausdorf make the whole thing up?  It seems obvious that something was found, there are pictures after all.  But a recurring anecdote keeps resurfacing with every dead end, and that is that there is or was some manufacturing or industrial factory located near to or upstream from the excavation area in question.  The suggestion, though completely unqualified as far as I can tell, is that these so-called artefacts are nothing more than metal wastes from some manufacturing process, carelessly dumped into the wilderness of the Ural mountains.

I can no more tell you that these things are discarded tips from mechanical pens, than I can say they’re proof of ancient alien contact.  What you can take away from all this though, is that there is no part of this story that is certain, not my view or Hausdorf’s, or any of the people who seem to have plagiarised his work.  It seems we have a genuine mystery on our hands, but I still think it’s unlikely that aliens are involved.