Ing. Pavel Pavel

"I have been contacted by an incredible number of people. I've had letters from people who invented it long before me, accusing me of stealing it from them. I said, 'Please, I didn't make it up. I only believed what Miloslav Stingl and Hayerdahl wrote, that the statues walked standing up with a swaying motion. Because I'm an engineer, I was able to calculate it, and because I had experience from the boating club and from sports, from skiing, from working with the collective, I was able to put together people who were interested, and we did it. And I became famous not because I invented it, but because I made the first attempt at a concrete moai statue and then I got permission to move a real moai statue on Easter Island. Which is no longer possible today under UNESCO protection and I was the last person to touch the statue. So that's where my, when you say, fame comes from. The fact that someone discovered it, it's in the books That's how the old craftsmen moved, by canting. You can't even patent this, it's a common practice. But to apply it to moai statues was innovative, incredible, daring. And it turned out well."

"After all, it was just a young Czechoslovakian jumping to the other side of the world, and into a rather interesting mystery. Many scholars who wrote and published about it inflated the mystery so beautifully that when it was discovered that there was a solution to how it went, it was a worldwide sensation. And even during that stay on Easter Island, journalists from major media, periodicals from all over the world circled around Heyerdahl from morning to night. For me it was doubly demanding on my psyche, because I was not built and prepared for that. Fortunately, it worked, the statue walked, nobody was hurt - neither the statue nor the natives. I was stressed out by the Minister of Culture of Chile, who said to me at some gala banquet where we were invited, 'What happens if the statue falls?' And I said, 'Well, if it falls, there's a risk of breaking its neck, because that's where the material is the weakest.' And he said, 'Well, if you break the statue, I'll have you shot.' Which in Pinochet's Chile wasn't such a joke. But everybody at the table was laughing. And I, to save it, I said, 'Well, if it breaks, I'll give you the one I have in Bohemia, mine.' And he said, 'We shoot fast.' So I was kind of mentally prepared that I had to try very hard to make it work."