beginning with the letter "A", and the birth of a daughter at 44 from a surrogate mother. In 2004, the illusionist Yuri Gorny, in an interview with the magazine Science and Life, said that the famous journalist and diplomat AE Bovin, who visited Vanga, noted that she "absolutely did not guess anything in his past, or in the present, or, as it soon turned out, in the near future". Gorny himself recalled that he offered his acquaintance a well-known journalist, whose last name he did not name "for reasons that will become clear a little later" to check the perspicacity of Vanga and her possible informants. To do this, he suggested to the journalist, whom the hospitable hosts, who helped him arrange a meeting with Vanga, invited to the sauna, "before visiting the bath, seal a part of the scrotum with a plaster. He recommended that he not answer questions, if any. Just make it clear that he does not want to talk about this topic". When a meeting with Vanga took place a week later, she, as Gorny notes, "described quite accurately what happened to my acquaintance in the past, which, however, is not very surprising: he is a famous person, she would have been able to learn about his life in a week and an ordinary astrologer". Regarding Vanga's prediction of the future, according to Gorny, the following happened: The attitude of the special services of Bulgaria and the USSR Retired KGB Lieutenant General Oleg Leonov sent Soviet psychic Vladimir Safonov to Bulgaria several times to study Vanga, who, as Leonov believed, "was more adept than a Bulgarian healer in his abilities." Retired KGB Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Sergienko noted that "she was often mistaken, but it was not customary to disclose it," since "people of the highest flight were sent to Vanga," and therefore she was "a way of obtaining information" for the KGB. Sergienko expressed the opinion that "it cannot be said that Vanga worked for the KGB, but her assistants cooperated with us," because with their help "our agents received the necessary information." And for this, special services "in every possible way contributed to the formation of legends about miraculous healers on a mass scale." Sergienko said that he knows "a Bulgarian journalist who was targeted by the special services to promote the popularity of Vanga," and he launched the legend about the healer, which the