WHILE THE MONEY the money flows into Visoko, the National Museum in Sarajevo languishes in disrepair and has to forgo heat in winter. There is not a single academic archaeology program in Bosnia, and there is just one prehistoric archaeologist, Zilka Kujundzic-Vejzagic.

Just a few miles from the pyramids, Kujundzic-Vejzagic is at work on a dig of her own in the tiny village of Okoliste. With funding from the German government, she is slowly uncovering what may be the biggest and best-preserved neolithic settlement ever discovered in Europe. Unlike the circus in Visoko, the project is proceeding at the rate of millimeters a day, without any fanfare.

When I call Kujundzic-Vejzagic for a comment about the pyramids, she says she's weary of the topic but understands why people want to believe. "Look, we're a small country that wants big things," she sighs. "This is a political project, not an archaeological project." She hands me over to her colleague Enver Imamovic, an archaeologist at the University of Sarajevo, who speaks more freely. "Osmanagic is a demagogue," he says. "He thinks he is the messiah for our people, that he will bring El Dorado. It's a tragedy, and it's impossible to stop him, because all levels of government support him."

Just about everyone in Visoko backs him, too, as I learn by asking around. An elderly woman I found sweeping the street in front of her house laughed at the very idea that the pyramids aren't real. But her answer betrayed a hint of doubt. "If they don't find the pyramid, we're going to make it during the night," she said. "But we're not even thinking about that. There are pyramids and there will be pyramids."

Another old woman came over to join the conversation, adding, "Semir is with us, and we are with him. When people talk about him, we should stand up out of respect." As she said this, she patted the top of her head.

This worshipful attitude is likely to spread in the near future. While the dig was on hold during the brutal Balkan winter, Osmanagic was visiting Easter Island, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, and other mystery spots with a film crew from Bosnia's Federal TV network. The resulting 12-part series, to air this summer, aims to put the Visoko pyramids in context. It's based on Osmanagic's recent book, Civilizations That Existed Before Official History Began. Meanwhile, Osmanagic says he plans to open tunnels inside the Pyramid of the Sun to tourists in mid-April.

Eventually, though, the Visoko carnival will reach its inexorable conclusion. Since there are no pyramids, the dig can only go so deep before this realization sinks in. Osmanagic will board a plane back to Houston. The residents of Visoko will put down their shovels and go back to their renovated homes. And Bosnia will know one more disappointment.

But perhaps another outcome is possible. On one of my last days in town, I'm at the Pyramid of the Sun listening to Osmanagic deliver his practiced spiel to a group of NATO officers. I zone out and start paying attention to a distant worker in overalls hacking away at the mountain and dumping the dirt into a wheelbarrow. He is carving out a rectangular niche where one of the terraces of the imaginary pyramid meets a wall.

Suddenly it dawns on me—and I'm shocked that it has taken me so long to figure this out—that Osmanagic is carving pyramids out of these pyramid-shaped hills. He's digging where he expects to find the pyramids, but if the hills are made up of layers of fractured sandstone, he could find evidence anywhere he digs.

Psychologists have a word for this: pareidolia. It's what happens when people see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich or Elvis in a sweat-stained T-shirt. We're all hardwired to find patterns in the static of everyday life. It's part of what makes us human. And, occasionally, this instinct gets carried to an absurd extreme.

The deeper Osmanagic digs and the more money is poured into the project and the more the mystique around the pyramids grows, the more everyone involved will be dependent on there actually being pyra-mids. There will be strong incentives not to dig too deep, to uncover just enough but not too much, to find but also not to find—to discover something suspended between fiction and reality.