Six days apart and both because of Covid-19. France’s most famous twin brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff, known for hosting the TV show Time X In the 1980s, they have died less than a week apart at age 72 from the coronavirus, according to those close to them. According to the statement issued then by his agent, Grichka died on December 28 after several days in a coma, while Igor did so this past Monday, January 3, as reported by a family lawyer, who did not want to report directly of the causes of the death of both brothers.

According to the French newspaper The world, Both Grichka and Igor were admitted on December 15 to the intensive care unit of the Parisian hospital Georges-Pompidou, after contracting Covid-19. The same publication indicates that, according to the testimony of sources close to the twins, neither of them had been vaccinated against the disease, something to which the lawyer for both brothers, Edouard de Lamaze, did not want to answer, claiming that it is “ lawyer, not doctor ”, although in an interview with the RTL station he did confirm that the death was caused by the coronavirus. For his part, Luc Ferry, professor of philosophy and former Minister of Education, a friend of both brothers, assured the newspaper The Parisian that the Bogdanoffs were not vaccinated and that, although none publicly mobilized against the administration of the vaccines, “they were anti-vaccines with themselves.”

“When I found out that Grichka was dead, I was sure that Igor would also die very soon. They were so close … Obviously, Igor must have felt Grichka’s death ”, said the brothers’ former editor, Gérard de Cortanze in The Parisian, where he also assures that both “spoke with one voice” and that he never knew “who wrote what.”

Although the Bogdanoff brothers, descendants of the Austrian aristocracy, were identified by the general public as scientific popularizers – they were both PhDs in Physics and Mathematics – some of the topics addressed in their programs caused controversy among the scientific community. In the program Time X, broadcast for almost a decade on the TF1 network, they stood out for the use of special effects and silver suits that they wore for nine seasons before numerous guests such as the composer Jean-Michel Jarre, the cartoonist Jean-Claude Mézières or the writer Frédéric Beigbeder, who made his first television appearance there at age 13. In space, Igor and Grichka displayed objects at the forefront of technology such as translation machines or a astrocomputadora, a machine to guess the birth chart from the date of birth.

It was precisely when the broadcast of that program ceased that the first controversies arrived. In 1991, the launch of his book God and science enraged Vietnamese astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan, who claimed there were passages taken from one of her works. Already in the 2000s, the Bogdanoff brothers returned to television with two slots for France 2, X-rays Y Close to the future, which were criticized by the scientific community. Attacks in which they accused the researchers of being unable to accept a different point of view.

Despite the appearance of their faces, both Igor and Grichka repeatedly denied suffering from any disease that explained their appearance or having undergone cosmetic surgery. “We are experimenters,” Grichka said on one occasion about the transformation that his foreheads and cheekbones have undergone since the 1990s. “There are a number of little protocols in the experiment. These are very advanced technologies, it is the reason why the mystery remains over time ”, he added then.

Little by little his appearances were reduced more and more, but according to The Parisian, the brothers had a new project in their hands: the sequel to their greatest literary success, God and science, for which they planned to involve Pope Francis, with whom they planned to meet in the coming months. His manuscript was well advanced. They had been working on it for years. Grichka started a part and Igor finished it. I myself delivered a letter and the first book, God and science, in Italian, to the Pope in Rome in 2018 ″, has revealed his agent, Damien Nougarede, who assures that this meeting with the Pope would take place in 2022.