Ignaty Leshchiner, a researcher and lecturer at the Harvard University, was found alive after spending five days in a forest near Moscow, Moscow Region police reported.

      The 28-year-old man was found in the Golygino village, when residents alerted police about a suspicious person seen in the area. Police officers arrested the man and then recognized him to be the missing scientist, who was already believed to be dead.

      “According to preliminary information, the young man spent five days wandering in a forest,” the spokesman said. “No crime was committed against him, he simply lost his way.” According to Ignaty's mother, her son sometimes liked going for a walk to the woods in order to muse upon something. For all these five day Ignaty was probably eating only grass and other pasture, so he was found very weak and in unstable mental condition.

      Police started searching for Leshchiner on Monday, following a request from his mother. She said that her son went missing on Friday evening, when he left the town of Sergiyev Posad in the Moscow Region, but did not arrive at his destination.

      His Volvo S60 car was found parked on the roadside of a highway linking Sergiyev Posad and Moscow. No signs of struggle or hold-up were found.

      Ignaty Leshchiner was born in Moscow, graduated from the Moscow State University, then continued his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). In the past few years he was working at the Harvard University, making researches in the area of molecular biology and genetics. The most time of the year he lives with his family in Boston but always visits his mother in Moscow for summer.