June 2025
Satellite radar scans of the Giza plateau in Egypt have revealed spectacular structures beneath the pyramids that, if confirmed, could shatter the textbook narrative of the rise of civilisation.
The new findings have stirred excitement and enthusiasm in the community of independent archaeology and elicited news media coverage. Mainstream academia has been critical or stayed silent.
In March, Italian research team Filippo Biondi, Corrado Malanga and Armando Mei presented stunning results of satellite-based scans underneath the Khafre pyramid, which is the middle pyramid at Giza. They say the most spectacular discovery was eight enormous symmetrical shafts or pillars going 648 meters straight down into two huge cubical structures.
The team said they are extending their scanning project to the entire Giza plateau. In a presentation in mid-June, Filippo Biondi disclosed new radar scans showing the same kind of manmade-looking structures underneath the third and smallest of the Giza pyramids, Menkaure.
“We firmly believe that the Giza structures are interconnected, reinforcing our view that the pyramids are merely the tip of the iceberg of a colossal underground infrastructural complex”, Biondi said in an interview with Daily Mail.
The scans were captured by combining synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with analysis of tiny vibrations from naturally occurring seismic movements. SAR has never been used in this way before, which critics are quick to note.
Could the detected structures be natural cavities, albeit large and strangely symmetrical? Fissures and caverns are a common feature in limestone bedrock, which is what the Giza plateau is primarily made of. This is what some skeptics think. Egypt’s former minister of antiquities Zahi Hawass dismisses the Khafre findings.
The team has received some criticism for interpreting the scan results in an overly fanciful way. The raw data images look vague to a layman’s eye., but the shapes are undoubtedly intriguingly straight and symmetrical.
Interestingly, Zahi Hawass recently revealed that the Egyptian authorities have granted approval for the exploration of a void in the Great Pyramid that was discovered with a different kind of scanning technique only a few years ago. The project is to begin early next year.
Hawass thinks the void might be the burial chamber of pharaoh Khufu, under whose reign the Great Pyramid was erected, according to the standard version of history. However, no mummy has ever been found in any of the Giza pyramids, which has led independent researchers to launch various theories of what they might have been used for, including harnessing earth’s energy and enabling spiritual ascension.
The Khafre scan project has yet to be peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal. Biondi’s and Malanga’s first SAR scanning project, in which they detected undiscovered internal structures in the Great Pyramid, resulted in a paper published in Remote Sensing in 2022.
If the SAR scans show what the Italian researchers believe they do, the implications are huge. The discovery would seem to confirm certain elements of ancient Egyptian mythology, like the Halls of Amenti, “the otherworldly destination of the deceased, following their passing through a cavelike realm known as the duat”, as independent researcher and author Andrew Collins describes it.
Origins of civilisations…TBD?
The study of the origins of civilisation is closely related to the understanding of the origins of our species and may reveal greater understanding of what a human is.
If these kinds of ancient advanced structures exist, it indicates that humans were highly developed long before textbooks say civilisation started, and that this sophisticated human society at some point must have collapsed. What we think of as the start of civilisation in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago would then have been a restart.
According to independent archaeologists and other researchers, this collapse happened during the Younger Dryas period, a brief (in geological terms) era of extreme climatic shifts 11,600 to 12,800 years ago.
Some even theorize that this was the latest in a series of collapses, which opens the door to even more mind boggling interpretations of ancient cuneiform texts, which speak of the existence tens of thousands of years ago of highly evolved nonhuman creator beings (perhaps the template for the later Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Norse pantheons).
The research team intends to seek permission to drill on the Giza plateau to investigate what the radar scans revealed.
Anders Bolling
