Ancient Mystery or Modern Hoax? Experts Debunk Giza Pyramid Claims

Ever since the pyramids of Egypt rose from the desert over 4,000 years ago, people have wondered how they were built—sparking centuries of speculation, fringe theories, and wild claims involving lost technologies and extraterrestrials.

That speculation got a modern boost last fall when a Chinese research team claimed to have used radar to detect plasma bubbles above the Great Pyramid of Giza. These reports reignited online theories and alternative histories.

Building on that momentum, a group known as the Khafre Project, led by Professor Corrado Malanga from Italy's University of Pisa and Researcher Filippo Biondi from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, attracted attention last week with its own dramatic claims of a vast network of underground structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre, reaching depths of up to 2,000 feet.

Accompanied by detailed graphics and viral videos, the group's assertions quickly spread across social media, breathing new life into old mysteries.

X lit up with speculation, including theories that the chambers amplified Earth’s low-frequency electromagnetic waves—possibly functioning as an ancient power plant. Some even suggested the find could rewrite our understanding of the pyramids.

“The images suggest a hidden world under the feet of the Great Pyramids: halls and shafts that have waited millennia to be found,” technologist Brian Roemmele wrote in a blog post. “Such a scenario has an almost storybook allure as if turning the page on a chapter that historians didn’t know existed.”

Debunking the myth

However, Egyptologist and historian Flora Anthony wasn’t buying into the hype.

“Something seemed off, so I looked up the original source, read through it, and realized the paper had nothing to do with the images or claims being shared in the media,” she told Decrypt. “Turns out, the article isn’t peer-reviewed. Someone familiar with the journal where the report was published said they publish quickly and aren’t established in the field—which matters since peer review is important.”

The pyramids on the Giza Plateau—built during Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty between 2600 B.C. and 2500 B.C.—were royal tombs for the pharaohs Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure.

The idea that extraterrestrials may have played a role in constructing the pyramids has long been a staple of fringe science and pop culture.

Proponents of this “Ancient Alien” theory point to the monuments’ precise alignment, massive scale, and engineering complexity as evidence that ancient civilizations couldn’t have built them alone.

"The people behind this aren’t scientists. One is a UFO researcher who believes aliens are interdimensional parasites that hijack human souls,” Anthony said. “The other writes conspiracy books about a lost, pre-dynastic Egyptian civilization and recently promoted a so-called 'harmonic investigation' of the Great Pyramid using a technology he claims to have patented.”

While their claims might sound impressive at first glance, there’s nothing solid underneath, Anthony added.

“None of it is peer-reviewed, credible, or based in real science,” she said. “It’s not science. It’s not history.”

Pseudoscience

Ancient Aliens theory, Anthony said, is rooted in pseudo-archaeology, eugenics, and historical racism, promoting the idea that African and Mesoamerican civilizations couldn’t have built monumental structures like the pyramids without help from extraterrestrials.

"These theories uphold white supremacy by pushing a false narrative of white superiority,” Anthony said. “No one questions how medieval European peasants—living in filth without basic sanitation—built intricate cathedrals. But when Africans or Mesoamericans build pyramids, suddenly it must be aliens.”

On March 16, The Khafre Project presented apparent evidence of five chambers and eight shafts, using annotated tomographic images and artist renderings to illustrate their findings.

Yet while social media continues to buzz with wild theories, Egyptologists, including Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, are unconvinced.

“It all sounds very improbable to me as most machinery cannot penetrate that deeply, and there is no data to evaluate this claim,” Ikram told Decrypt. “So far, it seems it is in the news, with no peer-reviewed paper or raw data to back this up. And the technology does not seem capable of what they claim.”

Ikram added that Egyptian authorities confirmed they had not granted the Khafre Project permission to conduct any work at the site.

Likewise, the fact-checking website Snopes investigated the Khafre Project’s claims and declared them false in a recent report.

“Despite the popularity of the claim, there is no evidence to support it,” the report said. “In addition, no credible news outlets or scientific publications have reported on this rumor.”

Digging to the truth

The idea of using radar technology to scan the pyramids is not new.

Radar technology has been used multiple times to scan the pyramids of Giza, most notably in 2016 as part of the ScanPyramids project, revealing hidden voids and structural anomalies within the ancient monuments.

In 2022, researchers Corrado Malanga and Filippo Biondi conducted a synthetic aperture radar scan on the Khufu Pyramid, which many suspect is the basis for the Khafre Project’s images.

According to Snopes, the Khafre Project’s research has not been peer-reviewed or corroborated by credible archaeologists, pointing to what the organization called “Malanga's well-documented interest in UFO and alien abduction research as well as Dunn's "power plant" theory.”

“Additionally, one of the most popular images being shared in support of the claim, depicting a cross-section of the pyramid and the alleged structures, was generated using artificial intelligence,” Snopes said. “Uploading the image to the AI-detection platform Hive Moderation resulted in a 99.9% chance the image was generated using AI.”

Ultimately, the story says more about our appetite for mystery than it does about any discovery beneath the pyramids.

Until actual evidence surfaces, the only thing buried beneath the Giza Plateau is the truth—and for now, it’s staying that way.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair