Billy Carson argues that the underground city beneath the pyramids reported by Italian researchers in March 2025 is real, ancient technology rather than an empty cavern, and that it confirms what he wrote years earlier in his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets. In this interview with the Third Phase of the Moon channel, he explains how the satellite radar scan was said to work, ties the structures to the Emerald Tablets of Thoth and the Sumerian tablets, and answers critics who say the radar cannot see that deep.
The topic matters because the claim travelled far beyond the evidence behind it: a press conference about shafts and chambers hundreds of metres under the Khafre pyramid reached millions of people while the scientific case was still unpublished. Setting out exactly what Carson argues, what the researchers said and what Egyptologists and radar specialists replied is the fairest way to weigh it.
What the video covers
Vindication and the Compendium (from about 2:50)
Asked for his first reaction, Carson answers: "My first impression was I told you so." He points to page 34 of his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, published about five and a half years before the interview, where he included a rendering of columns running deep beneath the Giza plateau and wrote that they go on for miles. He says the idea came from verses in the Emerald Tablets and from Herodotus and other ancient writers who described underground works at Giza.
Age and the scan (from about 4:30)
Carson dates the complex to at least 36,000 to 40,000 years ago. He credits Filippo Biondi with leading the team and describes the method as a specialised synthetic aperture radar (SAR) scan from space: rather than imaging the ground directly, it picks up minute vibrations in the earth and converts them into a picture of what is solid and what is hollow. He praises Biondi for not seeking the Egyptian government's permission.
The scale (from about 5:55)
To convey the size, Carson imagines asking a modern developer to replicate it beneath the bedrock. He estimates the space at the volume of about eight Burj Khalifas, room for some 64,000 people, and a quote of roughly 50 trillion dollars and 20 years. On that basis he says mud-ramp and slave-labour explanations for Giza must be thrown out, because the engineering is greater than anything built today. A project on that scale, he argues, could only be attempted with foreknowledge that it would work. He also says he has seen LiDAR scans showing energy moving under the plateau: "Something is still active down there."
Why the story faded (from about 8:35)
The host notes that Zahi Hawass dismissed the researchers as amateurs and that major media largely ignored the story. Carson attributes this to gag orders and recounts being told during a 2014 visit to the Great Pyramid that NASA held rights to its interior, along with similar claims about sites in the American Southwest. No documentation is presented for these accounts.
Thoth and the land of Khem (from about 13:00)
Carson then turns to the Emerald Tablets. In his reading, Thoth's father, whom he identifies with Enki of the Sumerian tablets, sends Thoth and a crew upward in the great ship of the master after the waters recede. They look down on the children of Khem, his name for pre-dynastic Egypt, descend, and are attacked by local people. Thoth stops them with a ray of vibration from his staff, which Carson compares to the US military's Active Denial System, a real non-lethal device that beams energy causing an intense heating sensation on the skin. Thoth tells the people he is not a god but a son of Atlantis, come to restore their civilisation after a great flood, which Carson links to the Younger Dryas. His team then spreads out to build similar temples and pyramids worldwide. Carson connects the 36,000-year date to the Sphinx and the constellation Leo, arguing for going back further than the commonly cited 10,500 BCE alignment, which fell in an ice age, to a warmer era. He cites the tablet line in which Thoth builds the Great Pyramid "so that it too might remain through the ages."
The radar debate (from about 18:00)
Asked whether the method has been proven elsewhere, Carson says he understands the team tested it before Egypt with good results. He answers critics, Hawass among them, who say SAR cannot penetrate two kilometres underground, by arguing that they did not read the research: the technique uses X-band microwaves at 10 gigahertz with a three-centimetre wavelength and reads the resonance of tiny surface vibrations rather than scanning underground directly. "It's a revolutionary technique," he says, adding that he wants to help fund Biondi to scan Antarctica, the Amazon and Peru.
A device, not a cavern (from about 25:20)
The host asks whether the structure could still be working. Carson takes up the word device: "Make no mistake about it. We're talking about technology." He describes the Great Pyramid as about 2.3 million individually shaped, interlocking blocks and says its dimensions encode the length of the year, the speed of light and the mass of the Earth, and that scaling it up 43,200 times matches the dimensions of the Earth.
Under Khafre and the tunnel network (from about 27:55)
Carson summarises the reported findings: five small room-like structures inside the Khafre pyramid above the burial chamber known as the Belzoni chamber, and vertical shafts reaching about 2,000 feet down within a complex he puts at over 6,500 feet across. He says the chamber's granite sarcophagus was never a tomb and still gives off a vibration. He describes going beneath the bedrock of the Great Pyramid to the subterranean chamber and a further passage now blocked, getting lost with a guide in tunnels beneath the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, and being told by a local guide that tunnels run as far as the ziggurat of Ur in Iraq. He closes with the Sumerian account in which Enlil builds his fortress above ground and Enki builds his beneath the earth.
Key takeaways
- Carson treats the March 2025 radar claims as confirmation of the rendering and description in his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets.
- He dates the underground complex to at least 36,000 years ago and attributes it to Thoth and an Atlantean team, drawing on the Emerald Tablets.
- He argues that the structure is a working device, not an empty space, and says scans show energy still moving beneath the plateau.
- He answers critics by saying the method reads surface vibrations rather than seeing underground directly.
- Egyptologists and radar specialists rejected the depth claims, and the findings have not passed peer review.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson's position rests on three pillars. The first is textual: the Emerald Tablets describe Thoth building at Giza and descending to the Halls of Amenti, and Carson reads those passages as engineering history. The second is comparative: Enki's underground domain in the Sumerian tablets and Herodotus's reports of chambers beneath the pyramids suggest to him a memory of real subterranean works. The third is the scale argument, that a civilisation would not commit its resources to such a project without advanced knowledge, so the builders must have been more advanced than mainstream history allows.
He sees the Great Pyramid's construction and geometry as part of the same case, which is why he rejects ramp-based explanations; the evidence on that side is set out in [How Was the Great Pyramid Built?](/how-was-the-great-pyramid-of-giza-built-evidence-theories-and-open-questions). His deep date draws on the debate over the Sphinx's age, covered in [How Old Is the Sphinx?](/how-old-is-the-sphinx-who-built-it-water-erosion-and-what-lies-beneath). For Carson, the radar story is less a discovery than a vindication.
What mainstream scholarship says
The claims were made by Corrado Malanga, Filippo Biondi and Armando Mei at a press conference in Italy in March 2025. They described eight cylindrical shafts descending more than 600 metres beneath the Khafre pyramid and large chambers deeper still. The findings were presented to the press and in a preprint, not in a peer-reviewed journal, and no excavation or independent measurement has confirmed them. The pyramid itself was built for the Fourth Dynasty king Khafre around 2500 BCE.
Zahi Hawass, the former Egyptian antiquities minister, called the claims baseless and said the methods had not been scientifically validated. Radar specialists, including the ground-penetrating radar expert Lawrence Conyers of the University of Denver, said satellite radar cannot resolve structures at those depths and described the claims as a large exaggeration. X-band microwaves penetrate dry sand and rock by metres at most, so the case depends on inferring deep structure from tiny vibrations recorded in the radar signal, an approach that has not been independently validated to kilometre depths. By contrast, the ScanPyramids project's muon imaging of the Great Pyramid was published in Nature in 2017 and 2023, and the corridor it detected was confirmed with an endoscope.
The texts also need care. The Emerald Tablets of Thoth are a modern work first published by Maurice Doreal in the twentieth century, with no known ancient manuscript. Herodotus did report that Khufu had underground chambers cut into the hill at Giza, but he was relaying what he was told; at the Labyrinth near Lake Moeris he wrote that officials refused to show him the underground rooms. Real tunnels do exist in the region, such as the galleries beneath Djoser's Step Pyramid, and they are dated to the Old Kingdom. Egyptologists regard the Khafre burial chamber as a royal tomb, and the encoded-measurement claims as numerical coincidences dependent on chosen units and rounding.
Watch, read and go deeper
For what is known to lie under the plateau, from the Great Pyramid's subterranean chamber to the tunnels around the Sphinx, start with [The Giza Plateau Explained](/the-giza-plateau-explained-a-visitors-guide-to-the-pyramids-sphinx-and-what-lies-beneath). The full conversation is available as an audio episode on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast. Every article on Giza, Saqqara and the Egyptian texts is gathered in [the Ancient Egypt topic hub](/topics/ancient-egypt).
Frequently asked questions
Is there an underground city beneath the pyramids?
No underground city has been confirmed. In March 2025, Italian researchers claimed that satellite radar revealed shafts and chambers hundreds of metres beneath the Khafre pyramid, but the work was not peer-reviewed and Egyptologists and radar experts rejected the depth claims. Billy Carson believes the structures are real and date back at least 36,000 years.
Who made the Khafre pyramid radar claims?
Corrado Malanga, Filippo Biondi and Armando Mei announced them at a press conference in Italy in March 2025. They said a synthetic aperture radar technique based on tiny vibrations revealed eight shafts descending more than 600 metres and large chambers below. No independent team has reproduced the result.
Can satellite radar see deep underground?
Not directly. Satellite radar such as X-band SAR penetrates dry sand and rock by metres at most, which is why specialists said kilometre-deep imaging was beyond what it can resolve. The researchers say their method infers structure from vibrations rather than seeing it, but that approach has not been independently validated at those depths.
What did Zahi Hawass say about the structures under Khafre?
Hawass, Egypt's former antiquities minister, called the claims baseless and said the methods were not scientifically approved. Billy Carson counters that critics did not engage with the vibration-based method and attributes the official response to pressure to keep the story quiet.
Sources mentioned
Carson cites his own Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, including the rendering on page 34; the Emerald Tablets of Thoth; the Histories of Herodotus; the Sumerian tablets on Enki and Enlil; the 2025 synthetic aperture radar research of Filippo Biondi and his colleagues; and the US military's Active Denial System. Further reading: Herodotus, Histories, Book 2; Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (1997); Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids (2017); and the ScanPyramids muon-imaging papers in Nature (2017 and 2023).
