HistoricalChristian.Faith

Do satellite-radar scans reveal a buried city and a twin Sphinx beneath Giza?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: unsupported — for the flagship claim, a kilometres-deep engineered complex read out of "SAR tomography" beneath Khafre's pyramid: the imaging method is not validated for the depths asserted, the 2025 claims were never peer-reviewed, and no drilling or geophysics has ground-truthed a single feature. The companion "second Sphinx" sub-claim rates a notch higher at weak — a not-absurd hypothesis with no material trace. Advanced by Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga (the "Khafre Project")

Related arguments: out-of-place artifacts (dates under skepticism) — see also whether the same team's peer-reviewed method can bear the interior reconstruction of the Great Pyramid (its sibling — same method, the reviewed shallow-interior version) · whether this reconstruction's witnesses are securely dated · the Great Sphinx's water erosion · the Osireion at Abydos · Liangzhu's jades and the technology they required · predynastic Egypt's hard-stone vases · the age of the Kailasa temple at Ellora · the "lathe-turned" pillars of the medieval Deccan · the epics' vimanas and divine weapons · the Ta Prohm "stegosaurus" carving · Angkor's engineering and the antiquity of the Khmer capital · Sacsayhuamán's polygonal walls

The other artifacts on this shelf are real objects with real dating disputes; this one is a claim about an image. In March 2025 a short video and a press conference announced that radar processing had found, hundreds of metres under the Giza plateau, a lost world — shafts, chambers, a whole subterranean city, and (in a later instalment) a buried twin of the Sphinx. It travelled the internet as the discovery of the age. It belongs here not because the antiquity claim is strong but because the shelf's method demands that a sensational claim be examined rather than mocked: steelman it at its strongest, name the technique it rests on, and ask whether that technique can actually bear the weight put on it. The honest answer turns on method, not on personalities — and the method is where it fails.

The claim

There are two layers here, and they must be kept apart. The peer-reviewed layer is modest and honest about its own limits:

… due to the poor penetrating action of electromagnetic waves inside solid bodies, the capability to observe inside distributed targets is precluded. … [We propose] an imaging method based on the analysis of micro-movements on the Khnum-Khufu Pyramid, which are usually generated by background seismic waves … Khnum-Khufu becomes transparent like a crystal when observed in the micro-movement domain.

— Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga, "Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography Reveals Details of Undiscovered High-Resolution Internal Structure of the Great Pyramid of Giza," in the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing (2022). Note what this abstract does and does not say: it studies the Great Pyramid (Khufu), it concedes that radar cannot penetrate solid rock, and it names no shafts, no city, and no depth — its method is an indirect reading of tiny vibrations. ¹

The viral layer is a different thing, announced three years later at an Italian press conference (March 2025) and never submitted to peer review. Applied now to the second pyramid, Khafre's, "SAR tomography" was said to reveal: five identical structures near the base; eight vertical cylindrical wells, hollow and wrapped in descending spiral paths, in two north–south rows; the cylinders plunging to about 648 metres, where they merge into two cubic chambers some 80 metres on a side; and a complex extending perhaps two kilometres down and spanning all three Giza pyramids, with a deeper anomaly read as a sarcophagus. Malanga wrapped the find in myth — the "Halls of Amenti," the fabled "Hall of Records" of a lost civilization.²

Who advances it

The work is a two-man core with a small team around it. Filippo Biondi is a radar engineer (University of Strathclyde); Corrado Malanga is a retired organic chemist (University of Pisa) known separately as a writer on UFOs and alien abduction — context that bears on how the mythic overlay ("Halls of Amenti") is weighted, though it is the method, not the biography, that is rated here. The 2025 rollout added the explorer-author Armando Mei and a communications lead, Nicole Ciccolo, and was staged as a livestreamed announcement rather than a paper. That framing matters: the 2022 article passed peer review and claimed little; the 2025 claims that circulated as "the discovery" did neither.³

The evidence for

Steelmanned, the case is not nothing. Synthetic-aperture radar is a genuine, powerful remote-sensing tool, and Biondi's 2022 method — reading the micro-vibrations a structure returns rather than trying to shine radar through it — is a real and ingenious idea that cleared peer review for the Great Pyramid. Giza's plateau is demonstrably not solid and undisturbed below: it holds tombs, tunnels, and natural cavities, the Sphinx sits in a quarried enclosure, and legitimate subsurface work (seismic, muon imaging, resistivity, ground-penetrating radar) has repeatedly found real voids — ScanPyramids located a roughly thirty-metre corridor-shaped "Big Void" high inside Khufu in 2017. So the bare proposition that something engineered or hollow lies unmapped beneath the plateau is not on its face absurd, and a specialist who rejects the city is careful to leave that door open: Lawrence Conyers, a ground-penetrating-radar archaeologist, notes that pyramids elsewhere were raised over pre-existing caves and shafts, and does not rule out small such features at Giza.⁴

Adversarial assessment

The method cannot bear the claim. This is the decisive point, and it is a point about physics, not authority. Radar attenuates fast in rock; the wavelengths used reach centimetres to a few metres into limestone, and even low-frequency ground-penetrating radar built for depth reaches only tens of metres. To image discrete engineered chambers at 648 metres — let alone two kilometres — is orders of magnitude beyond what the signal physically permits. The satellite archaeologist Sarah Parcak put it flatly: "SAR data can't see through rock, period"; other specialists note that synthetic-aperture radar detects at most about two metres underground in these conditions, and Conyers called the underground-city reading "a huge exaggeration," radar waves attenuating long before such depths. The 2022 paper itself concedes the penetration problem; the 2025 claims quietly discard that limit without a validated method to replace it. When the tool cannot reach the depth, features "found" at that depth are processing artifacts, not structures.⁵

No review, no ground-truth, and a telling image. The 2025 claims were never peer-reviewed and were not published in a journal — they were announced. No borehole, no drilling, no independent geophysical survey has confirmed a single one of the alleged deep features; the fact-checking site Snopes found "no credible evidence" for the discovery, and the widely shared cross-section of the "structures" was flagged by an image-analysis tool as almost certainly AI-generated. The contrast with legitimate Giza subsurface work is sharp: the ScanPyramids void was cross-checked and its scale is metres, and real plateau anomalies have been confirmed by excavation and drilling. An extraordinary imaging claim needs a validated method and ground-truth; this one has neither.⁶

The official response — weighed for content, not authority. Egyptian authorities rejected the claim outright: Zahi Hawass called it "completely false" and "fake news," noting that no radar work was permitted at the pyramid and that Khafre's base was cut directly from bedrock with "no columns beneath"; Hussein Abdel-Basir of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina placed it "within the realm of exaggeration and deception." These are worth citing, but the argument does not rest on them — symmetry of skepticism forbids unseating or defending a claim by officialdom alone. The refutation that carries weight is the physics above; the official dismissal merely converges with it.⁷

The second Sphinx. The companion claim — that a mirror-image twin of the Great Sphinx lies buried under a mound opposite it — is older than the radar work and must be graded on its own. Its serious form is a real symmetry argument: mirrored pairing is a genuine convention of Egyptian sacred layout, the plateau is not fully excavated, and the Egyptologist Bassam el-Shammaa (following an earlier suggestion by the official Reda Abdel Halim) reads the Dream Stele of Thutmose IV, which pictures two sphinx figures, as recording two statues. In 2026 Biondi added a radar-and-symmetry case, hedging it himself at about "80 percent" confidence. But the supports do not hold. The stele's text does not mention a second Sphinx, and its paired imagery is the standard mirrored convention, not a literal inventory; Hawass, rebutting the reading, calls the Great Sphinx "unique in Egypt and the world" and the area already extensively excavated without trace of a twin. A fact-check of the 2026 revival rated it false: no excavation, no peer-reviewed study, no material evidence. The hypothesis is not absurd — which is why it rates weak rather than unsupported — but a plausibility argument is not a find.⁸

Assessment

Unsupported for the flagship claim, weak for its companion — and the split is worth stating precisely, because it is not a wave-off. The 2022 Remote Sensing paper is a real, peer-reviewed piece of work that says something careful and small. What went viral in 2025 is a different object: an unreviewed, un-ground-truthed reading that pushes an imaging technique hundreds of metres past what its own physics allows, produces a lost city and a "Hall of Records" that no drill has ever touched, and circulated behind an image that appears to be AI-generated. Grant every good-faith opening — that Giza's subsurface is genuinely incompletely mapped, that real voids do exist, that a specialist leaves room for small unfound features — and none of it reaches the claim, because none of it validates a method for imaging at that depth or supplies a single confirmed structure. The second-Sphinx sub-claim is the more careful of the two and rates a notch higher: a coherent symmetry hypothesis about an incompletely excavated plateau, resting on a stele reading the text does not support and producing, so far, no material trace. What would change either verdict is the same thing in both cases and is entirely ordinary: a validated geophysical method independently applied, and a borehole. Until then this is the shelf's clearest example of possibility mistaken for proof.

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