Two 2026 pyramid stories. Only one has a paper.
The same pyramid story keeps circulating in two shapes, and they get welded into one. They are not the same pyramid, and only one of them has anything published behind it.
1. Khufu's north face: a promise, unfulfilled as of 23 October 2026
In November 2025, at the Sharjah International Book Fair, Zahi Hawass said the corridor above the Great Pyramid's entrance would be opened and a “great archaeological discovery” announced in 2026.
The corridor is real. ScanPyramids published it on 2 March 2023, Nature Communications, DOI 10.1038/s41467-023-36351-0: roughly 9 m long, 2.10 m wide, found by cosmic-ray muon imaging and looked into with a 6 mm endoscope passed through a gap between the chevron stones above the entrance.
The 30 m figure that travels with this story is not from that corridor. At least 30 m is the length given to the Big Void, the cavity above the Grand Gallery published in Nature in November 2017 (552, 386-390, DOI 10.1038/nature24647). The corridor measured 9 m. Two different structures, one number borrowed from the other.
What lies behind the block at the end of the corridor is still unpublished. I looked today, 23 October 2026, and found no paper and no Ministry or Supreme Council of Antiquities statement announcing a result. The 2026 promise is still a promise.
2. Menkaure's east face: this one has a paper, and the paper is 2025
Helal et al., “Detection of two anomalies behind the Eastern face of the Menkaure Pyramid using a combination of non-destructive testing techniques”, NDT & E International, volume 155, October 2025, article 103331, DOI 10.1016/j.ndteint.2025.103331. Cairo University and the Technical University of Munich, ScanPyramids, under Supreme Council of Antiquities supervision. Hawass is on the author list, with Mehdi Tayoubi, Christian Grosse and Mohamed Elkarmoty.
What they found. The eastern face carries a patch of granite blocks about 4 m high and 6 m wide, dressed smooth and polished, the same finish otherwise seen only at the pyramid's known north entrance. Behind that patch are two air-filled voids:
- one 1.4 m behind the outer wall, about 1.0 m high by 1.5 m wide;
- one 1.13 m behind, about 0.9 m by 0.7 m.
Ground-penetrating radar, ultrasound and electrical resistivity tomography, fused into a single model. It is the first structural confirmation behind that polished surface.
Why anyone looked there: in 2019 Stijn van den Hoven argued a second entrance would sit at exactly that place. The paper does not claim an entrance. It reports two cavities where an entrance would be, and Grosse calls the hypothesis “very plausible.”
Where the two stories merge
The Technical University of Munich put the Menkaure finding in front of the public on 23 April 2026. That release is what “the 2026 pyramid discovery” mostly points at now. Menkaure, a possible second door, published October 2025. Khufu, a corridor to a sealed room, trending on a promise for 2026. Both called the mystery of the year, and the numbering of the year sits on the press release, not on the paper.
Check it yourself
- Menkaure voids: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ndteint.2025.103331
- North Face Corridor, 2023: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36351-0
- Big Void, 2017: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24647
If a Khufu corridor result lands, it will land as a paper or a Ministry statement, not in a video first. When it does, I will check it the same way.
First check free. Name a claim you have heard about Egypt and I will take it to the record.