Piers Morgan Had Three Conspiracy Theorists Debate Zahi Hawass. They Lost.

​On Friday, Piers Morgan Uncensored aired an hour-long episode featuring an interview with Egyptologist Zahi Hawass and a debate between Hawass and three fringe history social media agitators. The episode was a sequel to one that aired last year that found the host asking if debunking fringe pyramid claims was racist against white men. During the debate portion, Jimmy Corsetti accused Hawass of conspiring to suppress discoveries at Giza and was humiliated alongside fellow conspiracy theorists Michael Button and Timothy Alberino when Hawass exposed how painfully little reading any of them had done in the academic literature on Egypt. The three of them were unable to discuss anything they hadn’t read in a Graham Hancock book. Even a chastened Morgan seemed to have a change of heart. In response, Corsetti later took to social media to make the outrageous accusation that Hawass was complicit in trafficking Egyptian antiquities on the black market. 

​The first half of the hour-long show featured a one-on-one interview between Morgan and Hawass, the majority of which was a standard rehearsal of Hawass’s career, with particular focus on Giza and the pyramids. Aside from Morgan bringing up conspiracy theories about the pyramids a couple of times, only for Hawass to swat them away, this half of the show could have passed for an interview on any mainstream news outlet.
 
Of particular interest was Hawass’s belief that Khufu’s apparently untouched burial chamber is still undiscovered within the Great Pyramid, a claim that is not universally accepted among Egyptologists. Hawass thinks that a void detected in 2017 by noninvasive scanning could be the chamber. “I still believe that Khufu’s real burial chamber is still hidden inside the pyramid and this void has to do with this burial chamber,” he said. He added that researchers will be exploring this month how best to probe the void to see what is inside. “I would like to end my career by revealing the mystery and the secret of the Great Pyramid,” Hawass said.
 
Most archaeologists believe that Khufu’s burial chamber is the so-called King’s Chamber in the pyramid and that it was robbed in ancient times. Arab historians reported the discovery of treasures and a mummy inside the chamber when the Caliph al-Ma’mun opened it in 820 CE, though many of these accounts are of dubious value and are heavily embroidered with fantasy. According to these historians, Khufu’s sarcophagus was taken from the pyramid and set up in al-Ma’mun’s palace, where it was displayed for centuries. (Such accounts possibly conflate real discoveries in the Valley of the Kings with the pyramids.)
 
The second half of the show saw the sparks fly when a rogue’s gallery of gadflies joined Morgan in questioning Hawass. Here is how Morgan introduced his chorus of hecklers: “Michael Button is a YouTuber specializing in ancient mysteries. Jimmy Corsetti is an investigative researcher and host of Bright Insight. And Timothy Alberino is an author and explorer known as the Rogue Archaeologist. So, a great lineup here of alternative Egyptologists, I guess, is how I would describe you all.”
 
None is an Egyptologist of any kind. Button is indeed a YouTuber but seems to have no significant body of work beyond making videos and appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience. Corsetti similarly is a YouTuber with no significant work beyond conspiracy theory videos. Alberino is no archaeologist. The former Nephilim-hunting partner of Steve Quayle, Alberino is a Christian extremist whose videos and lectures still revolve around Fallen Angels and Nephilim. None of these men could be described as an Egyptologist of any kind, and they have no work that one might describe as original on Egypt. For whatever it’s worth, the older generation of self-described “alternative Egyptologists” like Robert Bauval or Robert Schoch at least had a few somewhat original ideas and did some work, however misbegotten, that went beyond repeating Google search results.
 
Button, who admitted that he has never visited the pyramids, kicked off the questioning by accusing Hawass of unfairly dismissing the team of Italian ancient astronaut theorists who claimed to have discovered pillars and even a buried prehistoric city under Giza by scanning it from space. Morgan adds the “second Sphinx” claim to this before asking: “How are you so certain that this isn't lurking beneath the pyramids?” Hawass replied that the types of scanning Filippo Biondi did cannot penetrate deep enough to see the features he claims are beneath the pyramids. He further added of the spot identified as a second Sphinx “this has been excavated completely to the solid rock. There is no one single place in this area can accommodate a second [one].”
 
Hawass adds that there is no conspiracy to prevent research on the pyramids; however, researchers are required to have credentials. “We welcome anyone who comes from a university or a museum. […] We have the pyramid committee that permit[s] people to work, but you have to be connected with an institution.”
 
Button responds by demanding to know why “we” have not “dug down” under the pyramids to “settle” the matter—just one year after Biondi made the claim. Apparently, he thinks excavations at one of the world’s most popular archaeological areas are something that just happen at a moment’s notice whenever someone makes a claim, not after years of proposals and permitting. Hawass repeats that Giza is open to institutional research with proper permits but noted that there is no technology that will let one view through the massive layers of solid rock beneath the pyramids, nor any way to effectively dig through that much rock easily.
 
After this, Morgan introduces Corsetti and asks him point-blank why he thinks Hawass is a “monster” trying to stop research. Corsetti says that he does not think Hawass is a monster, that he is a good man, and that humans, not aliens, built the pyramids. However, he claims that the people who built the pyramids were “more advanced” than the Egyptians and did not use copper tools, falling back on the argument that heavy rocks are too hard for lazy people to move without machines. He then suggests that Hawass and Mark Lehner were covering something up by not releasing photographs of the lack of any human-made materials that turned up when they excavated beneath the Sphinx’s left paw in 2009, a site conspiracy theorists associate with the imaginary Hall of Records.
 
Hawass replies that his findings about what lies under the Sphinx were published in a book he put out through Thames & Hudson, Giza and the Pyramids: The Definitive History (2017), written with Mark Lehner. (The book is now published by the University of Chicago Press.) Just because the book is not online for easy Googling does not mean the findings are secret. He reiterated that they found nothing but rock. Corsetti replied that he is frustrated about “locked gates” at Giza that prevent him, who holds no credentials and applied for no research permit, from accessing areas off-limits to the general public for a variety of reasons, including protection of sensitive areas. This is the same at any major tourist site.
 
At Morgan’s prompting, Corsetti states that he was upset that the only information he ever saw about the cenotaph at the bottom of the so-called “Osiris shaft” came from a 1999 Fox-TV special (Opening the Lost Tombs: Live from Egypt) and that “nothing” was ever released after that. “I never received any type of information regarding who the mummy was, what the mummy was,” Corsetti said, apparently unaware that Hawass had published a full description of the excavation and what was found. Hawass reminded Corsetti that “Osiris is a myth,” so there is no mummy for someone who didn’t exist. The tomb was symbolic, and he again reiterated that Corsetti, like Button, has not bothered to research any literature not immediately accessible by Google. “I published an article in a in a book dedicated to David O’Connor from University of Pennsylvania, and it's written in our big book on Giza,” he said. However, Corsetti cannot accept the concept of symbolism and again demands to know why anyone—for he thinks all humans are lazy—would put in labor to build a whole chamber around an empty tomb. I’m glad he has never visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He then suggests that Hawass is trying to prevent us from learning that the tomb is “thousands” of years older than claimed.
 
At this point, even Morgan seems baffled by the inconsistencies and insinuations. “But again,” Morgan, interjects, “why would—if that was true—why would he not view it with the same incredible excitement and enthusiasm he’s been talking about potentially discovering the tomb of Khufu, for example. I mean, I don’t detect from him a need to suppress stuff. I detect the opposite. And yet, you guys are all out there going, ‘He knows stuff. He's not being clean with us.’ And I’m like, I’m not really sure where you get this from or what his motivation would be.”
 
Corsetti answers that Hawass is hiding tunnels inside the Sphinx that he saw in an Instagram video. Hawass notes that the tunnels were fully reported when they were excavated and they date to Greco-Roman times, when Classical people were hunting for hidden chambers that did not exist. “[Just as we think today there is something hidden underneath the Sphinx,” Hawass said, “the Egyptians in the Late Period thought the same, and they dug and they found nothing.” Once again, the problem is that Corsetti did not research beyond Google.
 
In the final minutes, Morgan brings in Tony Alberino, who begins by correcting Morgan’s description of him, saying he is not “an archaeologist, rogue or otherwise” and instead calling himself an “investigative researcher.” Apparently having developed an ability to read the room, and seeing how poorly things went for Button and Corsetti, Alberino twice denies using the title “rogue archaeologist” and emphasizes that he has no academic archaeological credentials. (Alberino used the phrase with podcaster Michael Knowles last year in a multipart interview series about himself literally titled The Rogue Archaeologist but does not appear to have otherwise employed it.)
 
Alberino, instead of attacking Hawass, offers to make available his ground-penetrating radar drones, which can scan up to 300 feet below ground, to scan beneath Khafre’s pyramid, and Hawass invites him to send a proposal for consideration, but warns that the permitting process takes time.
 
At this point, Alberino veers off into claiming that the pyramids were the work of the “antediluvians” who built a “megalithic system” around the world until the Flood destroyed them all, leaving the Egyptians and other cultures to rebuild from the ruins of the people they remembered as gods—basically Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World but more explicitly biblical. More directly, it’s more or less Eusebius’s fourth-century Christian adaptation of Euhemerus, if you want to go that far back looking for precedent. “I think it's possible that these megastructures fall into the same category and time frame as some of the other megalithic structures around the world, which I do believe are antediluvian,” Alberino said, placing the date of the Flood around 10,000 BCE, a number not supported by any traditional biblical chronology but one taken from Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval.
 
Hawass responds by providing concrete examples of Egyptians working on the pyramids in historical times.
 
Morgan decides to poll the panel on whether aliens built the pyramids, despite all three “alternative” voices already having rejected the ancient alien idea. All three, however, endorse some version of the Graham Hancock Cinematic Universe, with Button raising Hancock’s long-debunked claims that the “most perfect” Egyptian pyramids were built first (a claim that makes no sense unless you move the Great Pyramid out of sequence) and were therefore the inheritance of a lost civilization and Corsetti raising Schoch’s idea that the Sphinx dates back to the Ice Age and was the work of a lost civilization.
 
Instead of plainly stating that these inheritors of a fallen culture—they root around in the ruins of Graham Hancock’s and Ignatus Donnelly’s comparative greatness after all—are wrong and rehashing old, false claims, Hawass uses his response time to plug his book again, saying that all the answers rebutting their allegations are in the book. “But the most important thing that all your doubts and all your questions, we have an answer to it,” he says. He does manage to wedge in an important point that the gadflies fail to address: “Egypt, by the way, is not the Great Pyramid. It is many other things.” There is a whole culture surrounding these works, not simply isolated buildings.
 
At the end, Morgan tries to arrange a trip for himself, Robbie Williams (!), Graham Hancock, and the Three Stooges he just interviewed to visit Giza, and Hawass agrees to provide red-carpet treatment and to treat them to dinner at a restaurant offering “the best Egyptian food.”
 
This was an embarrassment, and even Morgan, who typically takes the fringe history side, seemed to recognize that his guests were so ill-prepared that he needed to disown their ideas. The whole program could be summed up in one of Hawass’s final remarks: “Everything we discover, we publish it in a scientific article or in a book. And all of this is accessible, and people can look at it and read it. And it’s not my problem that you don’t really read this.”
 
But, in the end, it’s all our problems that the people shaping public opinion don’t read.
 
Corsetti posted on his X feed that he had discovered proof that Hawass “lied” about the Osiris shaft sarcophagus being empty and that Hawass was lying about Egyptian history for three reasons, which he gave this way:

- To coverup for LOOTING. Illegal antiquity trade is a MULTI-BILLION $$$ PER YEAR market
- To uphold the fraudulent Narrative and Timeline that all of Egyptian History is based on today
- To prevent having to REWRITE his 1,000 page book that he’s selling for $81 a pop

It is evident that Corsetti never read Giza and the Pyramids, or he would know that it is only 560 pages long and the $81 price is discounted from the original $102 list price.

​Corsetti promised to reveal his evidence by YouTube video this weekend, but as of this writing has not yet done so on any platform.

UPDATE: Corsetti released his video on Sunday, and I reviewed it here.