BREAKING: A Declassified CIA Document Mentioning a “Temple Under the Sphinx” Has Gone Viral and Collided With a 2026 Italian Radar Team Claiming to Have Found a Massive Underground Structure at Giza, Reigniting the Debate Over What Is Actually Beneath One of the Most Studied Sites on Earth 🌏
A 1952 CIA photo inventory log declassified in 2004 has been resurfacing across social media this week, specifically a single line that reads “Temple under Sphinx; July ’50.” The document itself is a routine photographic catalogue with entries like “Tourist at Pyramids” and “Ruins near Sphinx,” and most Egyptologists believe the caption refers to the well-documented Sphinx Temple, a fully excavated above-ground structure directly in front of the monument known since the 19th century. But the timing of its viral spread collided with something harder to dismiss: a 2026 Italian research team from the Khafre Research Project, led by radar engineer Filippo Biondi, published claims based on Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler tomography that their scans detected a massive underground structure at the Giza Plateau matching the profile of a second Sphinx buried beneath a hardened sand dune roughly 108 feet high, with vertical shafts and interconnected passages. Mainstream Egyptologists have strongly disputed the interpretation of the radar data.
The underground anomaly question at Giza is not new and the most credible version of it predates both stories by decades. In the 1990s, geophysicist Thomas Dobecki and researcher John Anthony West conducted seismic surveys of the bedrock beneath the Sphinx and detected what appeared to be a rectangular chamber approximately 9 meters underground near the right paw, a result that Dobecki described as possibly man-made based on its geometry. Egyptian authorities subsequently restricted further independent investigation at the site, a decision that has fueled speculation ever since. A 2024 Smithsonian-covered discovery found an L-shaped underground structure roughly 33 feet long buried near the Great Pyramid that researchers confirmed “cannot be created in natural geological structures,” with a second deeper anomaly directly below it. Excavations are currently underway.
The Hall of Records mythology itself originates entirely with Edgar Cayce, a 1930s American psychic who claimed in a trance that Atlantean refugees buried a library of their civilization near the Sphinx’s right paw. No excavation has ever confirmed that claim, and every test drilling near the paw anomaly found natural limestone fissures rather than constructed chambers. But the distance between “no evidence of Atlantean records” and “nothing exists underground at Giza” is significant, and the legitimate scientific findings of the past 30 years suggest the Giza Plateau has not finished revealing what lies beneath it. The question is not whether ancient Egypt’s builders left anything underground. The question is what it actually is.