What’s All This About Hidden Megastructures Under the Great Pyramid?

Recently there has been a bit of a kerfuffle around ancient Egypt. Three new royal tombs have been uncovered in as many weeks, and that’s something of a big deal when the last one we found was Tutankhamun’s in 1922.

The latest news comes from a group of three researchers, Corrado Malanga, Armando Mei and Filippo Biondi. Using a novel approach involving tomography (the use of penetrating X-rays to analyze and reconstruct the interiors of solid objects) they have announced the discovery of unknown and enormous structures deep underneath the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Astonishing stuff, right? According to the team these structures disappear into the bowels of the Earth, extending some two kilometers below ground level. Centered around Khufu’s Great Pyramid, the largest of the three at Giza, these form something they describe as “a vast area of non-natural constructions following complex geometries.”

Elsewhere they refer at least eight vertical cylinders, staggeringly huge and in two groups of four with “spiral staircases” winding around the outside, rising from two “cubic structures” deep underground. If true this would be a staggering revelation: nothing remotely like this has ever been seen before.

But that is a pretty big “if” and it is fair to say that these claims do not stand up to much scrutiny. Firstly, nothing released by the team relating to these finds has been peer-reviewed. This comes from the “trust me bro” end of the research spectrum.

Not that this is necessarily a problem, and to be fair this new claim builds on peer-reviewed papers published by members of the team in the past which demonstrate how the ground-penetrating technology should work. Tomography is a pretty well-established technique already in use in several other fields, as well. This should all check out.

Nor have they just pointed their equipment at the ground and instantly found these vast, deep, artificial things. Back in 2022 Biondi and Malanga tested their approach by using it to look inside the Great Pyramid itself, and compare what their X-rays found against what we know to be inside.

They claimed it was a success, but looking at their results we are afraid that we don’t see it. Like the Second Amendment, it only shows what its advocates say it does if you leave part of it out. The team’s results seems to indicate large unknown voids inside the pyramid which we know aren’t there, and misses famous interior spaces that we know definitely are.

Nor did anyone offer an explanation for this conveniently selective vision. And if anything this new announcement has pulled things into even murkier waters. You see, in finding the new underground structures the team used the same approach as before, but employed AI to analyze the results. It is AI, not the researchers, that has found these things.

We are ATH are not big fans of AI, our tagline being For Humans By Humans and all that. There is no denying it has analytical uses, but in this case there is no way of testing its conclusions. It is just a big black box which is telling us it thinks there are megastructures, but which won’t tell us why.

This is not reassuring stuff. There are further worries when you check the academic pedigrees of the researchers who have made this announcement. Corrado Malanga has in the past espoused a theory of what he calls “Global Alien Interference” where parasitical aliens abduct humans to use their souls for battery power. Alarm bells are ringing.

Finally, there is no explanation at all from any source as to what these megastructures might be. They almost certainly cannot be man-made, there is no way we could have build such enormous structures so long ago.

So here we are again, talking about ancient aliens. Perhaps these guys are right, or perhaps they will use this publicity to secure the funding they will probably seek for follow-up research from investors who just want to believe. But it is fair to say that our conclusions are rather different, and until we see something peer-reviewed we’ll join the rest of the scientific community in rejecting this “discovery” as trash.

Header Image: What megastructures lie under the Great Pyramid of Giza? Feels like none, could it be none? Source: Unknown Author / CC BY-SA 2.5.