Scanning the Pyramids: What Is Real and What Is Not

Few places on Earth have been studied as closely as the Giza plateau, and yet the pyramids are still giving up secrets. Over the past decade, physicists and engineers have looked inside them without moving a single stone, using cosmic rays, radar, and ultrasound. Some of what they found is real and genuinely surprising. Some of what has been claimed in their wake is not.

For readers of a site like this one, learning to tell those two apart is a useful skill. Here is the state of the evidence at the end of 2026.

How You Look Inside a Pyramid

The most powerful technique is muon radiography, or muography. Muons are particles created when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere. Millions rain down on every square meter of the Earth’s surface each day, and they can pass through tens of meters of solid stone, though some are absorbed along the way. Place sensitive detectors inside or beside a pyramid, count how many muons arrive from each direction, and you can map where the stone is denser or thinner. An empty space shows up as an excess of muons coming from that direction.

It is slow work, often requiring months of data collection, but it is non-destructive and very hard to fool. The international ScanPyramids project, launched in 2015 with Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities, combines muography with infrared thermography, radar, ultrasound, and 3D modeling.

Real Find 1: The Big Void (2017)

In 2017, ScanPyramids teams published a paper in Nature announcing a large, previously unknown empty space inside the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Three independent groups, using three different kinds of muon detector, saw the same thing: a void at least 30 meters long, directly above the Grand Gallery, the pyramid’s great sloping internal corridor.

Nobody knows what it is. Leading suggestions include an internal ramp used during construction, a space designed to relieve weight above the Grand Gallery, or a second gallery. What is certain is that it exists, and that nobody had suspected it for 4,500 years.

Real Find 2: The North Face Corridor (2023)

In March 2023, Egyptian officials announced a second discovery: a sealed corridor about 9 meters long, roughly 2 meters wide and 2 meters high, hidden behind the great chevron-shaped blocks above the pyramid’s original entrance. It had been detected by muography, and the findings were published in Nature Communications.

This time the team could confirm it directly. Engineers passed a thin endoscope camera through a small gap between the stones and filmed the inside: an empty passage with a pointed, gabled ceiling of roughly cut blocks. It may have been designed to relieve the weight on the entrance below, or to lead somewhere not yet found.

Real Find 3: Menkaure’s Hidden Entrance? (2025)

The smallest of the three main Giza pyramids, built for Menkaure, has blocks polished smooth on its eastern side, similar to those around its known entrance on the north side. The polished eastern blocks led researcher Stijn van den Hoven to suggest in 2019 that a second entrance might exist there.

In late 2025, researchers from Cairo University and the Technical University of Munich, working within ScanPyramids, reported two air-filled anomalies just behind the eastern face, using a combination of ground-penetrating radar, ultrasound, and electrical resistivity tomography. One sits a little over a meter behind the outer surface and measures roughly a meter high and less than a meter wide. The findings, published in NDT&E International, are consistent with a hidden entrance, though that remains to be confirmed.

The Promised Reveal

In November 2025, Egyptologist Zahi Hawass said that scanning had located a corridor about 30 meters long inside Khufu’s pyramid, and promised a major announcement in 2026 that would “write a new chapter in the history of the pharaohs.” He described robots reaching and cleaning previously inaccessible openings, and a sealed door at the corridor’s end.

As of early November 2026, we have found no report that this announcement has been made, nor any published scientific report on the corridor’s contents. Hawass has a long record of genuine discoveries, and also a flair for dramatic previews. We will report the results when they appear, and until then we treat this as a promise, not a finding.

Not Real: The City Beneath Khafre (2025)

In March 2025, a very different claim went viral. Researchers Corrado Malanga and Filippo Biondi announced at a press conference in Italy that they had used a new way of interpreting satellite radar, known as Synthetic Aperture Radar or SAR, to detect enormous structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre: eight vertical shafts wrapped in spiral pathways, descending about 2 kilometers to giant cube-shaped chambers, all supposedly around 38,000 years old. Online, the story quickly became a “lost city” or an “ancient power plant.”

The experts’ response was swift and close to unanimous:

The technology cannot do it. Satellite archaeologist Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama said simply, “SAR data can’t see through rock, period.” In conditions like Giza’s, SAR typically senses only about two meters below the surface.
The geology rules it out. Archaeologist Flint Dibble pointed out that the water table at Giza lies only a few dozen meters down. Structures two kilometers deep would be far below it, in saturated rock.
A radar specialist agreed. Ground-penetrating radar expert Lawrence Conyers called the claims “a huge exaggeration.”
No permission, no review. Hawass called them “baseless” and said no permits had been issued for such a study. The Khafre claims were never published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Then, in August 2026, the journal Remote Sensing retracted an earlier 2022 paper by Biondi and Malanga, the one that introduced their radar method by applying it to the Great Pyramid. The journal cited “serious methodological flaws and statistical errors” and said its findings and conclusions “are not reliable.” It did not allege misconduct, and the authors disagree with the retraction. But the method underlying the Khafre claims has now been formally withdrawn from the scientific record.

How to Tell the Difference

Put the real finds and the viral claim side by side, and a few clear tests emerge. They are useful for any extraordinary claim about the ancient world.

Test	The real finds	The Khafre “city”
Is the method proven to work?	Muography is well established physics, used for decades on volcanoes and mines.	A new, unexplained way of reading radar, beyond its known depth limits.
Was it independently confirmed?	The Big Void was seen by three teams with three detector types. The corridor was filmed.	No independent confirmation.
Was it published and reviewed?	Nature, Nature Communications, NDT&E International.	Announced at a press conference. The related method paper was retracted.
Does it fit the physical setting?	Yes.	No. It would lie far below the water table.
Are the claims proportionate?	Modest: a void, a corridor, a possible entrance.	Extraordinary: a 2 km deep complex 38,000 years old.

None of this means the plateau has no surprises left. The real discoveries prove that it does. But it is the careful, confirmable work that keeps finding them.