Команда «Satellite» утверждает, что спиралеобразные колонны и кубические помещения находятся глубоко под плато Гизы. Бывший глава Управления по делам древностей Египта называет эти снимки подделкой. Один из научных журналов уже снял с публикации предыдущую работу этой команды, посвященную пирамидам ...
Сообщение Planet-Today.com. Перевод заголовка и краткого описания выполнен автоматически.
A satellite team says spiral pillars and cube rooms sit far under the Giza plateau. Egypt’s former antiquities chief calls the pictures made up. A journal has already pulled the team’s earlier pyramid paper. The ground itself has not been opened.
The pictures are sharp. The hole is not there. That is why the Giza radar story keeps coming back. In March 2025 an Italian-led group told a press briefing that satellite scans had found a huge built complex under the pyramid of Khafre. In January 2026 the lead signal engineer, Filippo Biondi, sat with Joe Rogan and said the pyramids were only the top of something much larger. On 10 August 2026 the journal that printed the team’s 2022 Great Pyramid paper took that paper down. No drone has gone down the claimed shafts. No core has come up. Readers are being asked to choose between a model on a screen and a dig that has not happened.
What the team says the scans show
The group is small. Filippo Biondi is a signal engineer who has worked on radar software, including work he has described as military. Corrado Malanga has been tied to the University of Pisa. Armando Mei presents himself as an independent writer on old sites. At a YouTube briefing on 22 and 23 March 2025 they said a changed form of satellite radar had picked out a platform under Khafre, eight upright shafts with spiral paths, and two cube rooms about 90 metres on a side. Reports of that briefing put the shafts near 648 metres down, with a water-like signal still deeper.
Later tellings grew, and they did not stay the same size. A write-up built from Biondi’s Rogan appearance, and carried by the Daily Mail, speaks of spiral pillars about 65 feet across, dropping close to 4,000 feet, and cube rooms about 260 feet long and wide under the three main pyramids and the Sphinx. Shafts near 2,000 feet, and side passages nine or ten feet high, are part of that account. On the Rogan show itself, clips that spread in 2026 had Biondi putting the drop near 600 metres and the rooms near 80 metres on a side. A real buried hall does not change length between a press table and a podcast. The shift is a fact about the claim, not a side note.
Biondi has also put an age on the complex: 18,000 to 20,000 years, tied to Zep Tepi, the old Egyptian phrase for the “First Time,” when the gods were said to set the world in order. He has pointed to salt left by old sea water as a hint of a flood that covered the work of a lost people. He has asked Egyptian officials for about $20 million, not for a new open dig, but to clear known blocked shafts and send machines down. “We want to use machines, not humans,” he has said. He has also said he held the results for months because he thought they might be noise, and that he went public only after the same shapes showed up on Italian Cosmo-SkyMed passes and on American Capella Space passes, and after a check against the known underground lab at Gran Sasso in Italy.
The method, said in plain words
This is the part most retellings skip, and it is the part that decides the rest. Ordinary satellite radar sends a pulse and times the echo from the ground. It is very good at the surface: ships, ice, a new road, a wet field. It is not a flashlight for caves. Rock eats the pulse. The band many of these satellites use dies in solid stone after a few centimetres. Biondi does not deny that. “We are not penetrating anything,” he has said. “We are just grabbing the entropy that is on the surface of the earth.” His pitch is different. He says the ground shakes by fractions of a millimetre, the satellite reads that shiver, and his software turns the shiver into a picture of what sits below. In short: a surface twitch, run backwards, becomes a room. A twitch can come from wind, heat, a truck, a loose block, the way the software was tuned, or from a real hollow. The picture is only as honest as that step. Biondi says the step held up on more than one satellite and on a known underground lab in Italy. Critics say a match on that lab does not license a city a kilometre under Giza.
Why a journal pulled the earlier paper
The newest hard item is not the podcast. It is a retraction. On 19 October 2022, Remote Sensing published Biondi and Malanga’s paper claiming the same style of reading could map unknown rooms inside Khufu’s pyramid. Public heat rose in March 2025, when the group applied the idea to Khafre and spoke of shafts hundreds of metres deep. Those later claims were a press briefing, not that 2022 article.
A reader wrote to the journal. On 10 August 2026 Remote Sensing retracted the paper. The notice, reported by Ahram Online and Newsweek, said the board had confirmed “serious methodological flaws and statistical errors” that undercut the conclusions. It did not name the reader, did not list each error, and did not accuse the authors of faking data. Biondi and Malanga disagreed. Their reasons were not printed. Retraction Watch noted the limit: the decision covers the 2022 Khufu paper, not a separate review of the 2025 briefing. The paper was still the published base the later pictures stood on. The base has been pulled. The later pictures have not been dug.
What the radar specialists say the physics allows
Lawrence Conyers, a radar specialist and professor emeritus at the University of Denver, told fact-checkers this satellite radar is not built to find structures hundreds of metres down. After the retraction he was blunter. A sensor can only measure what it sees. “I don’t care what magical properties you are using, it just doesn’t work,” he told Retraction Watch. Sarah Parcak, an Egyptologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said this kind of radar cannot see through rock, and that with enough tuning she could make satellite pictures look almost any way she wanted. She thinks the data were misread on purpose. That is her charge, not a court finding.
An independent note on Zenodo in April 2026, by Simone Pomposi, tried to rerun the 2022 method. Splitting one satellite pass gives a height resolution near 285 metres. The King’s Chamber sits about 43 metres up. A cell that tall cannot pick that room out. The note also says the pulse does not pass through solid rock past a few centimetres, so the deep claims fail twice: the picture is too coarse, and the pulse never went there. A sweep of the plateau against a nearby desert did not show a clean difference. A different, older method, using real repeat orbits, might see shallow structure within about 60 metres. That is not the method in the pulled paper. Biondi’s reply to AFP in April 2025 was: “The term impossible does not apply when objective evidence emerges.” He has welcomed other groups to copy the work. The public copy that exists is the Zenodo note, and it does not confirm the rooms.
What Zahi Hawass says, and what that does and does not settle
Zahi Hawass, the former Egyptian minister of antiquities, has rejected the scans in plain terms. To the Daily Mail he said this radar only reaches about 60 feet, and that the theory is completely wrong. In a 26 March 2025 statement he called talk of columns under Khafre fabrications. He told The National the technique was neither approved nor checked. He told TRT World that scientists he contacted saw no way for the method to show even 168 metres down, and that the base under the two largest pyramids is solid rock.
His denial is not a line-by-line audit of Biondi’s files. Hawass has also kept outside teams on a short leash at Giza. A closed door does not prove the room is empty, and it does not prove the room is there. AFP’s fact check in April 2025 put the mainstream line next to the claim: known underground work at Giza was cut or reused for burial, and there is no evidence of networks as deep as the ones named. AFP also noted that Biondi is no longer at the University of Strathclyde and runs a private radar firm, Harmonicsar. Mei’s background is political science and independent writing. None of that ends the argument. It tells a reader who is speaking.
The age is a story laid on the picture
Radar does not date a wall. A phase twitch has no calendar. The 18,000 to 20,000 year figure is a story Biondi attaches to the model, linked to Zep Tepi and to salt he reads as a flood mark. Zep Tepi is a real phrase in temple texts. It means the First Time, the age when order was set and later kings were meant to restore it. It is a religious idea, not a soil layer with a lab date. Salt on stone can mean sea water, groundwater, later visitors, or modern dust. It does not move the pyramids out of the Fourth Dynasty.
The ordinary account still has names, tools, and a river. Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure belong to the Fourth Dynasty, middle of the third millennium before the common era. Builders’ graffiti, the workers’ town, boat pits and the valley temple are the props of that account. A pollen study in PNAS argued that a Nile channel still ran close enough, in that reign, to carry stone. This site has covered that finding: why the builders picked the Giza plateau. No royal body has been found in the three pyramids. That gap is old, and it is often used as if it proved the buildings were not tombs. Absence of a body is not presence of a city a kilometre down. Tombs are robbed. The gap is real. It does not date a radar model to the ice age.
What is already under the plateau, and what is not
Giza is not a blank slab. The Osiris shaft, under the Khafre causeway, is a real cut. It drops through several levels to water, on the order of 30 metres, not a kilometre. It has been entered. The tomb fields, boat pits, and the known passages inside each pyramid are measured rooms, not model rooms.
In 2017 the ScanPyramids team reported a void above the Grand Gallery in Khufu’s pyramid, about 30 metres long, seen by particle detectors from three groups and printed in Nature. That find is inside the building, not under the plateau, and the team refused to call it a chamber. They called it a void, because they did not know what it was. That caution is the opposite of a press map with named cubes. A longer look at how measure and myth get mixed on this site is here: the Great Pyramid “hidden code” claim set against the tomb view.
Hawass himself has said that only about 30 percent of Egypt’s old monuments are open and that about 70 percent still lie in the ground. This site reported that line in 2018: most of Egypt’s monuments may still be buried. He meant a sarcophagus under a house, a tomb found by chance. He did not mean spiral pillars at 4,000 feet. The two ideas get welded together online. They are not the same idea. The Hall of Records under the Sphinx is a separate modern story, born in the readings of Edgar Cayce, not in a trench. A 1950 CIA photo list does contain the line “Temple under Sphinx; July ’50.” That line is a label on a negative, not a survey of a deep city. The file and its limit are set out here: the declassified Sphinx photo list. A caption is not a corridor.
The money offer, and the test that would end the fight
Biondi’s $20 million plan is the cleanest part of his case, because it can fail in public. Clear rubble in shafts that are already known. Send a machine. Film what is there. If the film shows a spiral pillar 65 feet wide at hundreds of metres, the critics have a new job. If it shows a choked passage and then bedrock, the model has a new job. Rogan’s line, that it is a kind of crime not to look, only holds for a look that can come back empty. Egyptian authorities have not opened the project. That refusal can be read two ways: the state will not spend stone on a method a journal has withdrawn, or a small circle still treats Giza as a closed house. Both can be true. Neither fills the shafts with cubes. A fair test is short. Publish the raw passes, not only the coloured slices. Let a second lab rerun them on Giza and on empty desert. Predict a known shallow cut, such as the Osiris shaft, at the right depth, before pointing at a kilometre-deep hall. Skip those steps and the picture stays a picture.
What the loud version leaves out
The version that travels fastest says a lost city has been found and the schools will not look. The other version says the file can be ignored. Both drop the middle, and the middle is where the documents sit.
The team did file a paper. The journal printed it, then pulled it four years later for method and statistics. The authors still stand by it. The deep Khafre map was a 2025 briefing, then a podcast, not a second accepted paper. The stated depth moved from about 648 metres, to about 600 metres, to nearly 4,000 feet, depending on the retelling. The age was never a measurement. Biondi never claimed the pulse passed through the rock. The step he offers instead has not survived the one independent rerun that has been posted. Known cuts at Giza are real and shallow. A void inside Khufu is real, found by a different tool, and printed as a “void” because the finders would not invent a use for it.
That is the unsaid part. Not a hidden order burying a city. Not a school that has checked every metre of limestone. A model that outran its method, a press cycle that treated the model as a dig, and blocked passages a machine could enter. Until that machine comes back with film, the underground city is a claim with a price tag, not a place on a map.
Sources
- Daily Mail: Giza pyramids hidden megastructure report (the write-up this piece answers)
- Daily Mail: Hawass on the Rogan claims
- AFP Fact Check, 23 April 2025
- The National, 23 March 2025
- TRT World: the Khafre Project controversy
- Ahram Online, 8 September 2026: retraction of the 2022 paper
- Newsweek, 7 September 2026
- Retraction Watch, 31 August 2026
- Pomposi, Zenodo, April 2026: independent rerun of the method
- Joe Rogan Experience #2443, Filippo Biondi, 23 January 2026
- New York Times on the 2017 ScanPyramids void (Nature)
- Planet Today: the 1950 Sphinx photo list
- Planet Today: Great Pyramid code claim against the tomb view
- Planet Today: Hawass on how much of Egypt is still buried
- Planet Today: why the plateau was chosen
Original source
This desk piece answers the report carried on the Daily Mail science pages, “Egypt’s Giza pyramids hidden megastructure,” at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15493033/Egypts-Giza-pyramids-hidden-megastructure.html, drawing on Filippo Biondi’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience (#2443, 23 January 2026) and on the March 2025 Khafre Project briefing. Analysis date: 8 October 2026.
Note for readers and fact-checkers
The underground complex described by Biondi, Malanga and Mei is an unverified interpretation of satellite radar processing. It is not a surveyed site. The related 2022 paper in Remote Sensing was retracted on 10 August 2026 for serious flaws in method and statistics; the authors disagree with that retraction. Zahi Hawass’s statements are denials by an interested official, not a line-by-line audit of the raw files. Depths quoted in secondary write-ups do not match across briefings. No claim here should be read as a finding that a deep city has been entered, dated, or ruled out by a dig. A machine in a known shaft would settle more than another coloured slice.
