Researchers discover second Sphinx in Egypt as scans unearth 'underground megastructure'
Researchers who conducted underground scans of the area around the Great Pyramid of Giza have said they believe they've found signs of a second Sphinx that could be buried beneath the ground.
Radar engineer Filippo Biondi appeared on the Matt Beall Limitless podcast to discuss his findings and how they pointed towards the possibility that there 'could be a second Sphinx'.
He said he was 'very confident to announce this' and while they were still working to confirm it he put his own confidence rating in the existence of the second Sphinx at 'about 80 percent'.
Biondi is one of a team of Italian researchers who say they found a 'vast underground city' underneath the Khafre pyramid, one of the three pyramids at the Giza complex.
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The team used radar signals below the pyramid and converted the signals they got back into sound waves which allowed them to get a picture of underground structures.
Biondi told the podcast that the signs which suggested to him there was a second Sphinx were the 'symmetrical correlations like the symmetry that we saw' as he identified a nearby mound beneath which a structure as large as as a Sphinx could be buried.
The fact there were two Sphinxes carved into the Dream Stele, a carved granite slab erected in front of the Great Sphinx of Giza, also added to his claims that there were always meant to be two of them at the site.
He said that 'we scanned the first Sphinx, all the pyramids, the conjunction between the Sphinx and the Khafre pyramid' to build a picture of what lay below the ground.
According to his findings those structures were made of 'vertical shafts, horizontal passages', and claimed that even beyond a Sphinx was an 'underground megastructure'.
He said: "Down underneath the Giza Plateau, there is something very huge that we are measuring. There is an underground megastructure."
However the findings of Italian researchers Biondi, Corrado Malanga and Armando Mei have been criticised by the wider scientific community.
Last year when they first spoke of finding a 'secret underground city' were denounced as 'bulls**t' by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder.
She argued that the Italian researchers had 'randomly identified some structures in their tomography images and ignored others', asking why other researchers didn't use their techniques if they were so successful.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s former minister of antiquities Dr Zahi Hawass told The National they were 'completely wrong and the way they gathered their data was 'neither scientifically approved nor validated'.
He said that in all the research done on the location they hadn't found anything other than 'small voids'.
Topics: Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, Science
Joe Harker