Alexandr Korol

St. Petersburg — not in 2010, but later, maybe in 2019 — when I had returned to St. Petersburg from Los Angeles. I wanted to remember everything. I walked through various museums and, of course, I was also revisiting all the power spots, remembering the map, and looking at it all with new, more mature eyes — seeing things I might not have noticed before. And on the map, one of the points landed right in the Neva River. One of the power spots was located right in the Neva. And I just wanted to check — maybe there really is something there. Maybe I’d feel something. So I took a sightseeing boat with my team — though they were involved in completely different work, not expedition-related. I just brought them along in the boat. And we even briefly told the captain, the one steering the boat, that there was a possibility something might be there. And indeed, we were moving along and checking with the echo sounder, and we saw how suddenly the depth, which had been six meters, dropped to five, four, three, two, one — just like that. And then the depth returned again. And this was right in the center of the Neva River, in a specific spot. And that confirmed it: right at the point I had marked on the map — just intuitively — it all matched. Later, I became convinced that there was physically something there. Naturally, at first, people tend to have a defensive mental reaction. The guy operating the sightseeing boat said, “It’s probably an underwater fountain installation,” because once a year, during the “Scarlet Sails” event in St. Petersburg, they install this metal structure in the water for the show. But then we pulled up all the photos of the celebration and the fountain locations, and we saw that this was an entirely different place — far from that area. It had nothing to do with the fountains. And of course, the boat operator — who had worked there for years — was shocked. He had never noticed that the depth changed like that in this particular zone and wondered what this place really was, what that point meant. But what was the lesson in that story? It was that one of my team members — someone more prone to weakness, temptation, greed, vanity, envy and so on — a typical, let’s say, ordinary person just starting out on their life path — he was practically ready to dive in. That’s always been his reaction to everything: to dig everything up, pull everything out, climb in wherever he can. And every time someone was with me — like the guys who were with me in 2010, although they were more well-mannered and noble — everyone always takes things too literally and physically, always wanting to take something. And people