Early last month I received some inside word that big news was going to be coming out about discoveries at the Giza pyramids in Egypt, and in mid-March (coincidentally, just days before I was due to visit the pyramids on a holiday) that news dropped in the form of a press conference in Italy. At the media event, researchers affiliated with the University of Pisa claimed to have found clear evidence for huge man-made structures beneath the pyramids, and even a ‘city’ more than a kilometre underground, using a satellite-based scanning technology known as ‘Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography’ (SAR).

This news went viral rather quickly, no doubt helped by a mention on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. And, from what I’ve seen in recent days, there’s a huge amount of interest in the discovery from the general public – there are quite a few YouTube commentaries digging into the claim, that have hundreds of thousands of views already (and no shortage of excited comments beneath them).

Long-time readers of the Grail will know that we’ve covered the ongoing hunt for ‘secret chambers’ at the pyramids since way back in the previous millennium – from the first forays into the ‘Lost Tomb of Osiris’ through to the more recent discoveries in the Great Pyramid by the ScanPyramids mission (heck, I even helped German robotics engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink create a website with his Great Pyramid shaft data back in the day). So I definitely had to check this latest instalment out.

And my summary so far is: it’s unbelievable. But I don’t mean that in the positive sense…I literally don’t believe it.

First and foremost, my bullshit meter just goes off the chart with the size of the structures that the researchers claim to have discovered, and I would hope every other person would react the same: they say that their SAR scan shows 8 separate hollow tube-like structures beneath the pyramid of Khafre (the middle of the three, that still has some casing stones at the top) – each of them 10-12 metres in diameter – that go down 648 metres underground. Each of them is surrounded by a ‘spiral staircase’. Then they reach two ‘boxes’ or chambers, each of which have dimensions of 80 metres per side. Then, another 600 metres further down beneath the ‘boxes’ “there is a ‘real city'”.

3D model of structures allegedly discovered beneath the Khafre pyramid

I feel like people often don’t really pay attention to the details in extraordinary claims, they just rush to accept them because they’re so exciting – so don’t just pass over those numbers, really think about them: a tubular structure with a vertical height of 648 metres would be in the top 3 tallest buildings in the world (or perhaps more pertinently, makes them about 5 times the height of the pyramid itself – much different to the 3D model presented above)…and there are 8 of these tubes beneath the Khafre pyramid alone? And each of them has a spiral staircase-like structure for that entire 648 metres? Then beneath those tube structures, there are chambers that are 80 metres in each dimension? That’s a room with dimensions in each direction that roughly correspond to the length of an NFL playing field. Then, another 600 metres down, we’ve got a ‘city’?

But wait you say – we shouldn’t pre-judge things based on incredulity factor, we should just follow the data to wherever it leads. The problem here is, the researchers haven’t released a paper yet that other researchers who understand this technology can analyse and either debate or agree with them. They’ve just gone straight to a press conference (done in Italian no less, which makes things even more difficult for most of us), and then presented scan images that quite honestly don’t seem to clearly show any of what they claim.

But apparently there’s no need for other researchers. At the press conference, the researchers noted (according to auto-translate):

This research does not have to be proven; we don’t have to wait for other types of work or other scientists who can declare it true, because they are photographs: I photograph the Tower of Pisa and it is not that I need 500 other people to photograph the Tower of Pisa to say ‘There is a Tower of Pisa’. This research already as it is, foresees that this data is real, but what does that mean?

It means that someone built something at 1200m depth… History seems to me to have to be rewritten.

Here’s the hour-long March 15 press conference for those who want to check it out (note that you can get a half-decent translation by clicking on subtitles, choosing Italian, and then going back to subtitles and then choosing an auto-translation to your preferred language) (Update: they’ve removed the ability to embed the video on websites, so here’s the link to the YouTube video…kind of a weird thing to do if you’re trying to get word out ):

There are some things in this press conference that rang further alarm bells for me.

First, right at the beginning, the opening graphic, which featured an AI-created image of a ‘Stargate’-like structure, and the press conference title “Giza: The Pyramids and the Temporal Gateway”, seemed awfully New Age in vibe (and I wasn’t exactly sure what the ‘temporal gateway’ in the title even referred to…did they genuinely mean a Stargate with the chosen image?):

Then, during the event, one of the researchers continually referred to the scan technology as being able to look through the granite blocks of the pyramid as if they were made of glass – but the pyramid is mostly made of limestone blocks, with only a small percentage being granite. This seemed a rather large oversight for a scientist, so I thought maybe it was just the auto-translate getting it wrong – but when I later read a previous paper by the same scientists that scanned the Great Pyramid, I saw that they made the same mistake on multiple occasions (e.g. “the infrastructure is built with blocks of granite, weighing approximately 2.5t each”).

Another passage that I found bizarre was when one of the researchers explained that the tube-like structures apparently supported the weight of the pyramid:

Some of these structures serve to support the pyramid, because we have done static calculations and we have seen that the Khafre pyramid weighs a lot, and to hold it up you need a base and because otherwise it would go down into the sand…the builders have evidently foreseen that you can’t build a pyramid on the sand…it is necessary to build pillars that somehow reach the granite at the bottom.

The pyramids of Giza are in fact not built on sand, they are built directly on the bedrock base of the Giza plateau. But even if Khafre’s pyramid was built on soft sand, how would structures carved out of the rock beneath the pyramid in any way support it? (And let’s not even start with the fact that nearly all of these structures would be underwater, as the water table sits not far beneath the bedrock of the Giza plateau – note how MrBeast and friends had to swim through the ‘Lost Tomb of Osiris’ recently).

In the press conference they also mentioned that they had used AI to double-check their results, and it had confirmed their conclusions. It wasn’t until I watched (some of) a second, four-hour press conference that I realised they perhaps weren’t meaning they used AI to check calculations, but instead appeared to be talking about getting AI to do its own mock-up image of the tube-like structures:

At this point I was finding it more and more difficult to take these researchers seriously. Then the ‘consulting Egyptologist’ chimed in:

In consideration of the association of this discovery with the city of Amenti, [the elements we have discovered] seem to be consistent with some descriptions that we find in the Emerald Tablets, where there are precise references to these wells that go deep, that were built – in the verse, it speaks of the ‘children of light – we do not know who they are but the data remains objective that these wells go deep, as well as the boxes.

For those who don’t know the reference, he appears to be referring here not to an ancient Egyptian source, but instead to the Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean – an occult text allegedly ‘found’ within the Great Pyramid in the 20th century by one Maurice Doreal, founder of the neo-Theosophical group The Brotherhood of the White Temple (I use the word ‘allegedly’ here with very little confidence). It’s very much a ‘New Age’ source, not a historical document. The Emerald Tablets feature a chapter on the Halls of Amenti which he seems to be referencing here:

Deep in the Earth’s heart lie the Halls of Amenti, far beneath the islands of sunken Atlantis, Halls of the Dead and halls of the living, bathed in the fire of the infinite ALL. Far in a past time, lost in the space-time, the Children of Light looked down on the world. See the children of men in their bondage, bound by the force that came from beyond. Knew they that only by freedom from bondage could man ever rise from the Earth to the Sun. Down they descended and created bodies, taking the semblance of men as their own. The masters of everything said after their forming: “We are they who were formed from the space-dust, partaking of life from the infinite ALL; living in the world as children of men, like and yet unlike the children of men.”

Then for a dwelling place, far beneath the earth crust, blasted great spaces they by their power, spaces apart from the children of men.

Between the ridiculous dimensions of the structures, the researchers being seemingly ignorant of basic knowledge about the Giza pyramids, and the New Age beliefs that were apparently informing this project, I hope you can see why there are very good reasons to be skeptical of this ‘discovery’ at this point.

However, I remain open to further evidence that might provide better support for their claims. These are not random researchers – they have university credentials – so I’d hope there’s at least a bit of substance to their work. Perhaps they have discovered some chambers, just not as grandiose and mythical as the press conference claims: it’s more than possible, as there’s been ongoing discoveries at the Giza plateau over time, and it is well known that there are natural cave systems running under the ground there that might have been modified by humans at some point.

But for now, my opinion is that people really need to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism, and should probably not get too excited about this one.