A huge city was found under the pyramid of Khafre with the help of two satellites
A sensational discovery by a group of Italian scientists was supposed to shake the world of Egyptology. They said that using satellite scanning and a “special algorithm” for studying other data, they had discovered a huge city under the Pyramid of Khafre, located at a depth of more than 600 meters. It would seem that all the dreams of fans of theories about the hidden secrets of Ancient Egypt have come true, and official science has something to think about. However, the scientific community treated the sensation, to put it mildly, with skepticism. Lenta.ru examines what was discovered under Giza and whether anything was found there at all.
Underground city allegedly found with the help of two satellites
On March 21, researchers from the University of Pisa, led by 74-year-old Corrado Malanga, announced that they had scanned the space beneath the Pyramid of Khafre using the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technique and discovered a “vast underground city” there.
According to the interpretation of the published images, eight vertical shafts equipped with spiral staircases descend from the base of the ancient tomb. At a depth of more than 600 meters, these shafts run into two square rooms with sides of 80 meters. There are also some structures underneath them, supposedly going down into the depths of more than a kilometer.
The images actually show some kind of cavities that look like vertical shafts. Malanga and his colleagues said the images were obtained using data from two satellites. Immediately after the press release on March 21, the Italian researchers burst out with bold assumptions.
Khafre’s Pyramid May Contain Undisclosed Secrets, Including the Legendary Hall of Knowledge
Corrado Malangafrom the research group’s press release
They also suggested that the mysterious underground city was built by some ancient civilization that preceded the Egyptians and existed 38 thousand years ago.
The scientific community was skeptical, to put it mildly, about the work of Malanga and his comrades. Scientists said that until an independent examination of the research is conducted, there is nothing to talk about. Revelations about the Hall of Knowledge and a mysterious civilization from the times when man had barely escaped from the cave, and put the discoverers of the “enormous underground city” on the same level with marginal pseudoscientists.
The leader of the research group turned out to be an avid ufologist
The seeds of many of the popular fantasy stories about the Egyptian pyramids were sown by the American astronomer and popular science fiction writer Garrett Service. In 1898, he was commissioned by a publisher to concoct the novel Edison’s Conquest of Mars, a loose continuation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds . According to the plot, scientists led by the famous inventor of the light bulb and phonograph Thomas Edison create “death rays” based on the remains of Martian technology, build spaceships, and strike back at the evil aliens.
In the process, it turns out that nine thousand years ago, Martians kidnapped and enslaved many inhabitants of India , and along the way built the pyramids and the Great Sphinx in Egypt. The Sphinx, by the way, was erected as a monument to the main Martian. Here, a whole range of tales are presented that will later be included in the arsenal of “seekers of the unknown”: aliens who built the pyramids, technologies inaccessible to modern man that were allegedly used in their construction, and so on.
In the late 1960s, this topic was taken to new heights by Erich von Däniken, a legend among mysticism enthusiasts. In his cult book, “Chariots of the Gods,” which does not stand up to any scientific criticism, he stated that neither the pyramids nor the beautiful cities and temples of Ancient Egypt could have been built without the use of “advanced alien technology.”
I claim that our distant ancestors in the distant past met aliens from space, although I do not know what this extraterrestrial intelligence was or what planet it came from. And yet I believe that these aliens destroyed part of the humanity that existed at that time and created a new, perhaps the first “homo sapiens”
Erich von Danikenfrom the book “Chariots of the Gods”
The Swiss’s work seemed to have burst a dam. Many authors rushed to prove the savagery and backwardness of the ancient Egyptians, flavoring this dubious work with their own deep illiteracy and unwillingness to inquire what Egyptologists had actually found.
74-year-old Malanga is one of this cohort. He is a true scientist and spent a long time at the University of Pisa doing research in organic chemistry. However, he has also been interested in ufology all his life. Malanga’s hobby was alien abductions, which he firmly believes in. The Italian believes that “they happen much more often than is commonly believed, because most victims do not remember them.” So the version about a mysterious civilization 38 thousand years old is not surprising.
The Hall of Knowledge appeared to a famous medium in a trance
Another bold assumption by Malanga and his comrades was the location in the “huge underground city” of the so-called Hall of Knowledge — the legendary library of the lost Atlantis . Scientists have not yet found any traces of the lost Atlantean civilization. The famous American medium Edgar Cayce was the first to talk about the Hall of Knowledge . He lived in the first half of the 20th century and was considered a clairvoyant and healer. Cayce wrote down his revelations in shorthand while in a trance, for which he received the nickname the Sleeping Prophet.
During one of these sessions in the 1930s, he gave out information about the Atlanteans who had survived the catastrophe and fled to Egypt, the Bahamas, and the Yucatan Peninsula . In Egypt, they built an underground vault where they hid their secret knowledge under the Great Sphinx. The medium did not say what happened to the lovers of the tropical climate.
I will believe in the existence of something when the totality of credible evidence indicates that it exists or has existed. This does not apply to the speculation about the Hall of Knowledge under the Giza plateau.
Roland EnmarchEgyptology lecturer at the University of Liverpool, speaking to the Daily Mail, March 24, 2025
However, Edgar Cayce is known for many of the most interesting predictions. For example, he promised that Adolf Hitler would unite Europe into a single democratic state, and in the 1960s, that same Atlantis would rise from the depths of the sea.
In addition, the theory about the Atlanteans fleeing to Egypt and other parts of the world does not belong to Casey. The first to speak about this in his book “Atlantis: The World Before the Flood” in 1870 was the American politician and esoteric writer Ignatius Donnelly. His fabrications were smashed to smithereens by his contemporaries. Casey, apparently, decided to resurrect and embellish Donnelly’s fantasies from 60 years ago. However, it is worth noting that he invented the Hall of Knowledge himself, so this is not exactly plagiarism.
In a word, Malanga and his team have most stupidly spoiled the information background of their supposed discovery, issuing a pile of stale anti-scientific theories that can only be taken seriously by stubborn ufologists, supporters of paleocontact and other lovers of stories about evil scientists hiding the “true history of humanity.”
Researchers continue to insist that they are right
On March 26, Malanga and his colleagues announced that they had studied the scan data in more detail and were “more than 85 percent confident that the mysterious underground structures are indeed located beneath the Pyramid of Khafre and the other pyramids of Giza.” The researchers said they had used a “special algorithm” to process the information received from the satellites.
On April 3, the Daily Mail published another round of clarification from Malanga and his team. Filippo Biondi, who was in charge of the technical part of the study, said they had been misunderstood. Radar wasn’t the only thing used to discover the underground city. “Acoustic data from deep within the earth, including seismic noise, human activity, and photon interactions,” were used to map the structures beneath Giza. According to Biondi, all of these waves were collected by analyzing “shifts and distortions in the frequency patterns used to detect underground structures.”
An expert in the use of radar scanning in archaeology, Lawrence Conyers of the University of Denver, said from the outset that synthetic aperture radar simply could not probe the earth at such depths. He was not convinced by the researchers’ new explanations either.
Photon interactions? That’s science fiction. Frequency shifts of what? We now have three energy sources moving around: radar (electromagnetic), sound (seismic), and light (photons). That’s just nonsense.
Lawrence Conyers
Researchers believe they may have found the legendary afterlife of the ancient Egyptians
Another member of Malanga’s team, Armando Mei, is also quite an interesting character. He started his career as a scientist, but in 2002 he became a journalist, and then became fascinated with the mysteries of Ancient Egypt, especially the pyramids of Giza. Now he calls himself an expert on the pre-dynastic period of Egyptian history and throws out the most daring theories.
Mei stated that the legendary Amenti, the afterlife as believed by the ancient Egyptians, could be located under the pyramids. The researcher bases his theory on Chapter 149 of the Book of the Dead and believes that this is a real city.
It describes some of the rooms and inhabitants of the city. Therefore, we believe that this could be Amenti from the ancient texts.
Armando Mei
The fact that the Book of the Dead was created about a thousand years after the construction of the Giza pyramids and is actually a collection of spells designed to help a person’s soul find peace in the afterlife does not seem to bother the researcher.
At the same time, Malanga, Biondi and Mei are calling on scientists to help them analyze the data and search for the underground city. The scientific community initially wants one thing: for all the results of the study, with a detailed description of its methods, to be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
However, Malanga and his colleagues prefer to send press releases to tabloid editors and communicate with scientists through them. One gets the distinct impression that their intention is not to seriously present their discovery (if there is anything to present), but simply to raise as much hype around it as possible.
The Giza pyramids are already four and a half thousand years old, and it seems that fate itself destined them to be a source of legends, myths and tales, which, by the way, the ancient Egyptians themselves loved very much. Many ancient inventions are almost indistinguishable from modern ones.
Two thousand years after the construction of the Cheops pyramid, a temple of Isis was built next to it. The priests of the goddess decided to “ancientize” their workplace – for the sake of solidity and to attract more parishioners. They erected a stele at the entrance, on which they wrote in the almost forgotten ancient Egyptian language with a huge number of errors that their temple was older than all the pyramids and that Cheops himself had found it and ordered to clear it of sand. Isis was called “the mother of the pyramids” in the illiterate text.
Sounds like a modern fantasy. Apparently, people haven’t changed much in the last thousand years. At least some of them have.