Did aliens build the pyramids? Fact check

Nineteenth-century drawing of long teams of men hauling a colossal seated statue on a sledge, from the tomb of Djehutihotep at el-Bersheh

October

/ 2026

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Fact Check verdict:
Egyptians of the Fourth Dynasty built the Giza pyramids as a state project: Established
Aliens built the pyramids: Fringe
A lost civilization built or designed them: Unverified
How the blocks were raised to the upper levels: Disputed
How many people worked on the Great Pyramid: Disputed

The verdict

Near the end of King Khufu's reign, an inspector named Merer wrote one line in his team's logbook: "Inspector Merer casts off from Tura North, sails towards Akhet-Khufu loaded with stone." Akhet-Khufu, the Horizon of Khufu, was the Great Pyramid, then still being built. Verdict: the claim that aliens built the Giza pyramids is Fringe, because the records below name an Egyptian workforce and no source reports a trace of anyone else. The claim that a lost civilization built them is Unverified, as no source reports physical evidence for it. That the pyramids were an Egyptian state project of the Fourth Dynasty is Established, because papyri written during the work, the builders' own town and the work gangs' marks inside the Great Pyramid all point to it.

Our labels for each part:

Egyptians of the Fourth Dynasty built the Giza pyramids as a state project: Established.
Aliens built the pyramids: Fringe.
A lost civilization built or designed them: Unverified.
How the blocks were raised to the upper levels: Disputed.
How many people worked on the Great Pyramid: Disputed.

What the evidence says

Merer's papyri were found in 2013 at Wadi el-Jarf, a harbor on the Red Sea coast, at the entrance to one of its storage galleries. Pierre Tallet, who published them in Cairo in 2017, writes: "This is at the moment the oldest papyrus archive ever found in Egypt." The logbooks date to the end of Khufu's reign. They follow a team of probably about 40 men moving fine limestone by river from the Tura quarries to the pyramid site. The team made two or three round trips every ten days, from July to November, while the Nile flood was high enough to carry heavy loads. Tallet estimates their boat could take 70 to 80 tons, or some 30 blocks of about 2.5 tons each. Their usual overnight stop, Ro-She Khufu, was run by Khufu's half-brother Ankhhaf, the vizier in charge of all the king's works.

Tallet sums up why the archive matters: "This monument is clearly being created at the very moment these documents are being written, and the person who holds the reed pen, probably Inspector Merer himself, is undoubtedly an eye-witness to the works in question."

The builders also left a town. Since December 1988 Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) has been digging a settlement of more than 7 hectares, 400 meters south of the Sphinx, beside a stone wall known as the Wall of the Crow (Heit el-Ghurab). AERA writes: "Purpose-built by the crown, this city served as the base of operations for constructing the great pyramid complexes of kings Menkaure, Khafre, and probably Khufu." It had bakeries, kitchens, workshops, warehouses and large royal grain silos. When Menkaure's pyramid was finished, the town was taken down. Marc Van De Mieroop, writing in the journal Groniek in 2020, describes 32 long galleries that could sleep about 1,600 people. Skeletons from tombs near the town show broken bones that had been set and had healed.

The workforce was organized in units. Van De Mieroop explains that in Khufu's time four divisions of ten men made one phyle, za in Egyptian. That is the size of Merer's crew. Four phyles made a gang and two gangs a crew. The gangs took names built on the king's name, such as "Friends of Khufu" or "Drunkards of Menkaura". The Friends of Khufu painted their name in red ink inside the relieving chambers above the king's burial chamber, out of sight once the pyramid was finished. Van De Mieroop also cites a block found at the far end of a Tura quarry, still on its wooden rollers, with a job code written on it in lamp black.

The stone matches the paperwork. Most of the Great Pyramid's roughly 2,300,000 blocks came from a quarry just south of the plateau. The fine white outer casing, now almost all gone, came from Tura. Tallet notes that Khufu's predecessor, Sneferu, appears to have been the first king to quarry this stretch of limestone, for the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur. The river did the heavy carrying. A 2022 study in PNAS led by Hader Sheisha states: "It is now accepted that ancient Egyptian engineers exploited a former channel of the Nile to transport building materials and provisions to the Giza plateau." Its pollen record shows this Khufu branch stayed high through the reigns of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. In 2024 Eman Ghoneim and colleagues traced an extinct branch about 64 kilometers long running past 31 pyramids.

The alternative view

Kevin Jackson, writing for BBC History, sums up the two main rivals: "Some believe the Great Pyramid was built by the survivors of a lost civilisation, others that it was the work of visiting extra-terrestrials." The best-known lost civilization version comes from Edgar Cayce, an American trance medium. From about 1923 he told listeners about Atlantis, and he claimed that refugees from there built or designed the pyramid around 10,400 BC and left a Hall of Records nearby. He predicted it would be found in the last 20 years of the millennium. No such find was announced. The best-known alien version comes from Erich von Däniken's 1968 book Erinnerungen an die Zukunft, published in English as Chariots of the Gods? Stephen Epstein, writing in the Penn Museum's Expedition magazine in 1987, summed up his case in one line: "He claimed that human history had been shaped by visitors from outer space."

At its strongest, the case rests on scale and on real gaps in the record. AERA's Glen Dash writes that "The builders of the Great Pyramid of Khufu aligned the huge monument to true north to within six minutes of arc, or one tenth of a degree." In Jackson's words, von Däniken "maintains that its construction by existing earthly methods would have taken at least 664 years, although the evidence he gives for this is not clear". Tallet admits the papyri's limits: "Unfortunately, there is no mention of the construction techniques that were employed". Jackson notes that specialists agree some kind of ramp was used for the upper levels but have not settled which kind. Van De Mieroop is frank: "How the stones, weighing up to sixteen tons, were raised into position on top of an increasingly high pyramid remains a mystery."

The earlier pyramids answer much of this. Sneferu, Khufu's father, built three, the first at Meidum and then the Bent and Red pyramids at Dahshur. Dash reproduces figures from Kate Spence of the University of Cambridge for how far each pyramid's casing sits from true north, in minutes of arc. They run 18.1 at Meidum, 11.85 at the Bent Pyramid, 8.76 at the Red Pyramid and 2.8 at Khufu's. In 2012 Dash tested a pole-star method proposed by Flinders Petrie in 1883 and concluded that the Egyptians could have found north to within one or two minutes of arc. The open questions are about method. The evidence for who did the work comes from the builders themselves.

Where this leaves it

Aliens stay Fringe and a lost civilization stays Unverified unless physical evidence turns up that a Fourth Dynasty workforce cannot explain. The Egyptian state project stays Established. Two questions stay Disputed. One is the ramp. The other is the size of the workforce, where Van De Mieroop reports estimates from 2,000 people on site at one time to 36,000 in all, and leans towards about 10,000. Tallet wonders how many other crews kept logbooks like Merer's. Did one of them write down how the last blocks reached the top?

How we checked this

We read the AERA page, Van De Mieroop, Dash, Sheisha and Jackson in full. For Tallet we read the publisher's open PDF with the English translation of the logbooks. For Ghoneim we read the abstract and results, and for Epstein the opening section. We checked only the publication record of von Däniken's book, so his claims are summarized from Jackson and Epstein. Links were checked on 20 October 2026. How we label claims: see How we check evidence. For the Sphinx and Atlantis, see our evidence page Göbekli Tepe, the Sphinx and Atlantis: what the evidence says. Earlier reports: Ancient Egyptian Logbook of Inspector Who Helped Construct the Great Pyramid Revealed and How Egyptian Pyramid Builders Moved Construction Materials by Water.

Image: Egyptians hauling the colossus of Djehutihotep on a sledge, after a Middle Kingdom tomb relief at el-Bersheh of about 1900 BC, centuries after Khufu. It shows how heavy stone was moved by human teams, not how Giza itself was built. Hauling the colossus of Djehutihotep, after the tomb relief at el-Bersheh. Drawing by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians, 1854. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

By Aris Manus