Jan Francke: Scanning the Ancient World, with Ground Penetrating Radar

Summary

Geophysicist Jan Francke, known from Skinwalker Ranch and Oak Island, explains how ground penetrating radar lets researchers look inside ancient structures without damaging them, from Chichen Itza to the Nabataean city of AlUla. He takes apart the viral satellite radar claims of giant shafts beneath the Giza pyramids, noting that the original paper was retracted. He then reveals his own puzzling findings inside the Great Pyramid, including hidden tunnels behind the King's Chamber walls and capacitors that mysteriously gain charge in the Queen's Chamber.

Key takeaways

• 1Francke says radar scans at Chichen Itza's El Castillo (Kukulcan) show filled-in vertical shafts, 15-18 m deep, that may lead to a cenote (natural sinkhole) beneath the pyramid. A third inner pyramid, about 24 m tall, has also been identified there.
• 2He argues that Filippo Biondi and Armando Mei's synthetic aperture radar (SAR) claims about structures under Giza break the laws of physics. SAR resolves only millimeter-scale changes, while ground vibrations are micrometer-scale, and the satellite passes overhead only once a day. The related paper in the journal Remote Sensing was reportedly retracted.
• 3The ScanPyramids muon project (announced in 2017) detected a low-density void about 50 m long above the Grand Gallery. Francke suggests the King's Chamber could be a decoy, since Caliph al-Ma'mun reportedly found it empty.
• 4Francke reports at least three evenly spaced tunnels, each 1.2 m by 1.2 m, running north from the King's Chamber's granite wall, plus more tunnels in the south wall. He also says the granite sarcophagus rests on a rim with a few-millimeter air gap beneath it.
• 5He says capacitors gained charge over a week in one roughly 2 ft by 2 ft area beside the Queen's Chamber north shaft, which would seem to defy conservation of energy. He links this to unpublished 1960s-70s Russian and Polish reports of electromagnetic anomalies and to Tesla's interest in the pyramid.
• 6He describes Giza limestone as unusually electrically conductive, limiting radar to under 10 m, and says salt from tourists' sweat cannot explain it. He also notes the Supreme Council of Antiquities controls what findings can be released, and that he is seeking permission to scan the Hawara Labyrinth.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

Hey, how you doing? This is clip your host of Earth Ancients and welcome to the program. I hope you're doing well today. On the recent destiny, we were talking about the interior of El Castillo and what I had discovered in the last i'd say six or seven months regarding penetrating radar ground penetrating radar, unique scanning technology that had come out and what they're able to do with it now is amazing. In this program today we have an expert, Jan Frankie is joining us. Doctor Frankie's coming to us from Canada and he is a ground printing training radar expert. And we have never had an expert on the program on ground printing training radar. We've had car with Filippo Bioni, and we've had a couple of other people on other technologies. But it's funny because if you follow the History Channel, and a lot of people love that channel, there are a number of programs where Frankie is featured. Skinwalker Ranch is one, The Oak Island Group is another one, and they bring him in with his equipment and he's scanning the ground and finding all kinds of anomolies. So it's very very appropriate and one of the things we're going to learn about today is ground printing and training. Radar has a ton of applications. Now Frankie uses it my primarily for mining and this is where he makes his living, but as well here today he has actually modified and developed his own equipment because the old types of radar systems were so bulky and required so much care that they continue to break. And so he and we'll hear about this, he actually makes his own tools, his own devices, which really enhances what we're going to learn about today. ...

Excerpt from Earth Ancients, Aug 15, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.