In early November 2026, the story of the tomographic studies of the Giza Plateau took a new turn. Researcher Trevor Grassi drew public attention to a detail that had until then gone almost unnoticed. In August 2026, the journal Remote Sensing (MDPI) retracted the 2022 article by Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga on the internal structure of the Great Pyramid. Yet in the same journal, an almost identical work by Biondi, carried out with the same method — SAR Doppler tomography — but this time on the volcano Vesuvius, continues to remain published.
Both articles describe the same approach: an analysis of micro-movements recorded by the COSMO-SkyMed satellites, followed by the construction of tomographic depth maps. In the case of Vesuvius, the method made it possible to see the magma chamber and the system of conduits. The article remains openly accessible. When the same tool was directed at the Pyramid of Cheops and revealed a network of internal structures, the journal, four years after publication, announced "serious methodological and statistical errors" and withdrew the work.
The authors did not agree with the decision. The official retraction notice explicitly states that Biondi and Malanga expressed their disagreement. There are almost no specific technical remarks in the public domain — only a general formulation. It is precisely this contrast that became the subject of discussion. The same technology, in the same publication, is recognized as workable when the subject is a volcano, and declared unsound when the subject turns to the most ancient monuments of Egypt.
In his message, Trevor Grassi directly linked this to the fact that scanning a volcano does not affect established ideas about the history of civilization, whereas the Giza data do. Biondi's work became the basis for the team's subsequent claims about a second sphinx and an extensive underground complex beneath the plateau. After the conference in Bologna in June 2026 and the release of the English version of the materials, interest in these results only grew. The retraction of the 2022 article occurred against the backdrop of this growing attention.
The method in question relies on processing the coherent vibrational information contained in satellite radar images. The researchers claim that background seismic oscillations make it possible to "see through" objects to a considerable depth. In the case of Vesuvius, this yielded a picture of the internal structure consistent with other geophysical data. Applied to Giza, the same principles revealed anomalies that do not fit the classical picture of the pyramids as exclusively funerary structures.
This week, according to Grassi, further developments are expected. The very fact of the parallel existence of two almost identical works in one journal already brings to the surface the question of the criteria for scientific evaluation. Either the technology works or it does not. If it is recognized as suitable for studying magma chambers, then its application to the stone structures of antiquity requires no less careful consideration, rather than selective retraction.
The story of these two articles shows how sensitive the subject of Giza remains. Data obtained from orbit continue to accumulate. The English version of the Bologna conference is available to a wide audience. Now attention shifts to how the scientific community will react to the very fact of the double standard. The Giza Plateau still holds information that modern methods are only beginning to extract. And the further it goes, the harder it becomes to pretend that this information does not exist.
