On the 2022 study that promised to look inside the Cheops pyramid, a word appeared that was rather difficult to ignore: “Retracted”. August 10, 2026 Remote Sensing formally withdrew the article signed by Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga after an editorial check started from doubts raised by a reader.
The decision also weighs on the debate that has exploded in recent months around the alleged enormous underground structures identified under the Giza plateau. Not because that 2022 study already described the famous “hidden city”, which only arrived in the news in 2025. The link lies in the radar method used to produce those reconstructionsnow hit by a retraction due to methodological problems and statistical errors deemed serious enough to compromise the conclusions.
The authors, it must be said, .
The study that promised to see through Cheops
The article published in October 2022 used images from the Italian COSMO-SkyMed satellites and a technique called Doppler SAR tomography.
The idea was definitely fascinating. Radar waves cannot penetrate enough into a stone mountain like the Great Pyramid, so researchers tried to get around the obstacle by studying tiny movements of the structure and deriving from these a sort of reconstruction of the interior.
According to the authors, the system allowed the identification of hidden rooms, corridors and other structures. Basically, an almost 4,500 year old pyramid transformed into something very close to a satellite CT scan. It’s understandable that the story made a lot of noise.
The subsequent check of the magazine, however, led to a completely different result. Remote Sensing reports having identified serious methodological problems and statistical errors such as to make the conclusions of the article unreliable. This does not establish that every space reconstructed by the authors is necessarily non-existent. It means something much simpler: that study can no longer be used as scientific proof of their existence.
And the gigantic “city” under the pyramids?
The story that went viral in 2025 was even more spectacular. Biondi, Malanga and Armando Mei presented new radar elaborations, this time concentrated above all on the Khafre pyramid, talking about cylindrical structures, wells and artificial environments that extend hundreds of meters underground. From there to a kilometers-long “underground city”, the media journey was rather short.
Those reconstructions, however, were not published in a new scientific article subjected to normal peer review. The 2022 retraction of the work, therefore, cannot be presented as the discovery that “there is nothing under Giza”.
However, it takes away a lot of solidity from the previous step: the technique with which those images were interpreted. To go from a radar reconstruction to columns, corridors, rooms or entire artificial structures, independent verifications are needed. Those, at the moment, for the gigantic underground architecture announced in 2025 are still missing.
Cheops really hides unknown spaces
The almost paradoxical part of the matter is that Inside the Great Pyramid, unknown environments have truly been discovered. You didn’t even need to invent them. In 2017 the ScanPyramids project announced on Nature the discovery of the Big Void, a large space located above the Grand Gallery and at least thirty meters long.
In that case, muons were used, particles produced in the atmosphere by cosmic rays capable of passing through enormous quantities of matter. Their distribution allows us to identify differences in density within a structure, a bit as if nature had provided archaeologists with a gigantic x-ray.
In 2023, the characterization of a corridor hidden behind the north facade of the pyramid, approximately nine meters long, also arrived. Here too the analyzes were conducted with multiple techniques and independent checks.
Giza therefore still holds enough mysteries to keep archaeologists and physicists busy without having to immediately excavate a lost subway under Khafre. The 2022 retraction leaves above all this: a technology presented as capable of making the Great Pyramid almost transparent has yet to demonstrate that it can do so. The pyramids, for the moment, can keep some secrets.
