Transcription
Last week, we saw some crazy news about a big underground structure that's supposedly underneath the Egyptian pyramids. What's new, and what are we to make of this?
The recent news is about the three great pyramids in Giza, in Egypt. On March 15th, a group of three researchers held a press conference in Italy in which they revealed a stunning discovery. They say that they've used a new method of tomography—more about that in a minute—from this they constructed 3D models which reveal new internal artificial structures. And not only this, they also found something underground. Their images, they claim, clearly reveal that structures exist beneath the plateau, extending below the pyramids for approximately 2 km beneath ground level. These structures form a vast area of non-natural constructions following complex geometries. Concretely, they say that the structures are eight cylinders surrounded by something resembling spiral staircases. These structures, quote, "descend to a depth of 648 m, merging into two large cubic structures measuring approximately 80 m per side," end quote. Big if true.
So I've had a look. Unfortunately, there's no technical paper yet, but going by the press release and the earlier papers of the authors, I have a pretty good idea what this is about. Two of these researchers already published a paper in 2022 in which they introduced a new method to analyze structures in the pyramids. They call it synthetic aperture radar Doppler tomography, which is quite a mouthful, but don't despair; it's not as difficult as it seems.
First of all, synthetic aperture radar is a widely used technique to track ground movements. Typically, it's done by satellite, though it could also be done by drone or aircraft. You ping a radar across some terrain and track what comes back. You do this again at some other time, calculate an interference pattern between the two results, and that tells you how much the ground has moved. The radar typically uses wavelengths in the range of 10 GHz or so, so that's millimeter waves. These are quite easily blocked by big layers of rock, which is why you have no cell phone signal in the subway.
So how do they want to see inside the pyramids and even under them? Here is where things become interesting. They say that they can use the radar images to check vibrations of the surfaces of the pyramids and of the ground, and that these surface vibrations encode what structures there are inside. Tomography means that you can look inside. The reason they call it Doppler tomography is that the vibrations cause a Doppler shift in the frequencies; so that's how they extract them. Technically, this is correct; you can, in principle, reconstruct the inside of an object from its surface vibrations. Indeed, this is used a lot by geophysicists to map out, for example, magma chambers underneath volcanoes. So you see, both the radar method and the tomography are quite standard methods; it's the combination that's new.
In their earlier paper from 2022 that was published in a peer-reviewed journal, they said they'd use that to find structures inside the pyramids. The problem with this paper is that there is no discernable relation between the tomography images and the structures that they supposedly identified. I mean, look at this image: on the right is their measurement; on the left, you see overlaid the chamber we know is there. Alas, their signal is elsewhere. They seem to have randomly identified some structures in their tomography images and ignored others. Of course, I'm not the first to notice this; the 2022 paper was widely criticized and mostly ignored for this reason. They had no explanation for how they identified structures from their images.
So what's new in 2025 is that they say they let AI do the job. So they didn't identify the structures; a computer did it. How do I know this? Well, for one thing, they said this in the press conference, but also one of the authors wrote a paper about this two years ago. Now look, I'm not a geophysicist, but I find this idea extremely implausible. Reconstructing what goes on inside an object from its surface vibrations is also how remote psychoanalysis on social media works—or, for the most part, doesn't work. In both cases, the major problem is that you need to have measurable vibrations in the first place. Volcanologists do this with seismic waves, which they track by sensors on the surface. Seismic waves typically have wavelengths in the range of 50 or 100 m. The magma chambers that they map with this method are in that range too—maybe 100 m near the surface or kilometers deeper underground. While there are always some seismic waves that'll also shake the pyramids a tiny little bit, they're in the wrong wavelength range to identify small structures, and they don't measure in that range. In any case, they write in their paper that the frequency range they look at for the Doppler shift is something like 12 kHz, which in the stones of the pyramid corresponds to a wavelength of about 24 cm. There's no plausible source for these vibrations, which makes it unlikely that they have a signal to begin with. Also, let's do a sanity check: if this method actually worked, why isn't anyone else using it?
Finally, the idea that the Egyptians would base a structure as heavy as the pyramids on something resembling pillars seems completely crazy to me.
Let me also add some words on the two guys who've led these studies. Filippo Beyonde previously worked at the Department of Electronic Engineering in Glasgow, but no longer works there. He's applied for a patent for the technology. The other author is Corrado Malanga, who, according to his own website, was a university researcher at the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry of the University of Pisa. He also has a theory of global alien interference that explains alien abductions as follows, quote, "the abductee in the bottom right part is programmed using an alien active memory, and in the meantime they momentarily take out his soul component, the little red ball," end quote.
In summary, the story gets a nine out of 10 on my meter. I'm not giving a 10 out of 10 because maybe this Doppler method isn't entirely crazy and just needs more work, but I'm pretty sure what they measure is just noise. If I'm wrong and there are eight pillars underneath the pyramids, it's probably a strategy plan of the European Union.
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