Gantenbrink's Door
In 1872 an explorer discovered two mysterious sealed shafts extending diagonally from the so-called Queen’s Chamber deep inside the Great Pyramid. One shaft began on the southern wall and the other began on the northern wall. Both were roughly 8 inches square and extended 210 feet into the pyramid in opposite directions. But unlike the two narrower (and equally puzzling) angled shafts that run from the Great Pyramid’s so-called King’s Chamber to the outside, the Queen’s Chamber shafts both appeared to hit dead ends inside the pyramid.
Why in the world would the builders of the Great Pyramid have constructed two very long and narrow shafts that led nowhere?
There are two main schools of thought on this.
The first is that of traditional Egyptologists – those unquestioned experts whose every word is truth, and to whom you should faithfully nod your head in agreement whenever they speak. Their explanation is that all elements of the Great Pyramid, however odd or mysterious, served a spiritual purpose. Great, guys. Really insightful. Thanks for enlightening us.
The second school of thought is that of industrial engineer and ancient technology expert Christopher Dunn (a pseudo-scientific kook, according to debunkheads), and other like-minded thinkers (more kooks). Dunn’s landmark book The Giza Power Plant explains in detail how the Great Pyramid was built as a vast, technologically advanced power generation machine. Dunn makes it clear his theory depends on every single structural element of the Great Pyramid serving a useful and specific mechanical or technological purpose.
So, who is this fellow Gantenbrink and what is so special about his door?
In 1992, Rudolf Gantenbrink, a German engineer, came to Egypt to install a ventilation system that would reduce humidity inside the Great Pyramid caused by the large number of daily visitors. This led to the Upuaut Project, a two-year exploration of the Queen’s Chamber shafts using a small mobile robot equipped with a camera.
At the end of the southern shaft, the robot found what appeared to be a limestone block with the eroded remains of small copper fittings. This has come to be known as Gantenbrink’s Door. A similar “door” was later found at the end of the northern shaft.
What was the purpose of the doors, and what lay behind them? Egyptian authorities curiously expressed no interest in finding out and banned Gantenbrink from doing any further work.
Christopher Dunn had very definite ideas about the Queen’s Chamber and the doors. According to Dunn’s “power plant” theory, hydrogen was the medium by which the energy drawn from the Great Pyramid was converted and transmitted to the outside. He believed the Queen’s Chamber was a chemical reaction chamber, and that the shafts were there to feed two separate solutions (hydrated zinc chloride and dilute hydrochloric acid) into the chamber, where the solutions interacted and produced hydrogen. Residue found in the chamber is consistent with this idea. Dunn claimed the copper fittings were electrodes and that the doors functioned as fluid switches that supplied more chemicals into the chamber when needed.
Dunn predicted Gantenbrink’s Door would be 3.6” thick, that the copper fittings would protrude through to the other side of the block, and that there would be a small chamber behind it. His prediction turned out to be stunningly accurate.
In 2011, a robot explorer called Djedi was permitted to drill a small hole through Gantenbrink’s Door and photograph what was on the other side. It found: (1) the block was 3.25” thick; (2) there was a small chamber containing markings some believe were numerical hieroglyphs, but that Dunn thinks were wiring schematics; and (3) the copper fittings protruded through the block and curved back on themselves. Dunn claims the photos also show a piece of a wire conduit next to the bottom of the block.
The evidence suggests Gantenbrink’s Door was a functioning electrical device – and indeed, Christopher Dunn has created a working model (above) to demonstrate this – but further exploration is needed to see if there were, or are, copper cables and further open spaces (including perhaps a maintenance area) behind the second block. Once again, Egyptian authorities show no interest in learning more. Or perhaps they already know more and are not telling.
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