Exploring the Giza Plateau

The story of Ingo’s 1973 journey to Egypt begins not at the pyramids, but with a letter.

On April 4, 1973, Cleve Backster (the pioneering consciousness researcher whose work on bioenergetics and plant perception had attracted international attention) wrote to Ingo after speaking by telephone with Peter Tompkins, the former OSS intelligence officer and bestselling author of Secrets of the Great Pyramid, who had agreed to accompany the expedition following the Prague Conference.

Backster also planned to contact Charles Berlitz, the former U.S. Army intelligence officer, linguist, and bestselling author of The Mystery of Atlantis (1969) and Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds (1972). Explaining that Berlitz was “on excellent terms with the Egyptian authorities,“ Backster believed he might be able to arrange for the group to visit Egypt “in a status other than just tourists.“

This contemporary correspondence reveals that the expedition was being carefully organized months before Ingo arrived at Giza. It was not simply a sightseeing trip, but a journey that brought together an unusual group of researchers whose interests spanned archaeology, consciousness research, intelligence, ancient civilizations, and scientific inquiry.

By 1973, Tompkins’ Secrets of the Great Pyramid had helped renew worldwide interest in the unresolved mysteries surrounding ancient Egypt, while Berlitz was already recognized as one of the leading popular writers exploring lost civilizations and historical enigmas. Just one year later, he would publish The Bermuda Triangle (1974), the international bestseller that made him one of the most recognizable authors in the field of historical mysteries.

Officially, they were visiting one of the world’s greatest archaeological sites.

Unofficially, Ingo was conducting perceptual observations at one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring mysteries.

Following his return from Egypt, Ingo prepared a series of memoranda and letters documenting the impressions he believed he had received while exploring the Giza Plateau.

The reports are notable for their measured tone. Rather than presenting conclusions as certainty, Ingo carefully distinguishes between direct impressions, observations confirmed by local guides, and ideas that remained speculative because feedback was limited.

One memorandum records that while touring the Great Pyramid complex with Tompkins and Backster, “certain psychic impressions were formed,“ while also acknowledging that “matters of feedback were difficult.“

Among the observations recorded in the July 1973 papers were:

• covered entrances near the temples in front of the Sphinx; 
• vertical shafts descending beneath the Great Pyramid; 
• underground chambers near the King's Chamber and Queen's Chamber; 
• tunnel systems extending westward beneath the plateau; 
• structures hidden beneath the sands south of the Sphinx; and 
• an extensive interconnected subterranean system linking portions of the Giza complex. 

Long before Ingo arrived in Egypt, the Giza Plateau had become closely associated with the psychic readings of Edgar Cayce.

Beginning in the 1930s, Cayce described a hidden repository beneath the Giza Plateau that he called the Hall of Records (a chamber said to preserve knowledge from a much earlier civilization). His readings placed the chamber somewhere near the Sphinx and suggested that it would one day be rediscovered.

Those predictions inspired decades of interest from researchers associated with Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), archaeologists, engineers, geophysicists, and independent investigators.

Against that backdrop, Ingo’s journey assumed additional significance.

His reports neither simply confirmed nor rejected Cayce’s descriptions. Instead, they pointed toward something more complex: an interconnected underground landscape rather than a single hidden chamber.

The surviving Egypt papers also introduce one of the most important scientific collaborators in Ingo's later career.

One of Ingo’s Egypt sketches memoranda bears the handwritten notation:

"Lambert Dolphin — Bldg. 44 SRI Man. NSF sponsored project."

This brief annotation places the material within the broader research environment of SRI and identifies physicist Dr. Lambert Dolphin as being associated with the work.

During the 1970s, Dolphin became involved in applying geophysical techniques to archaeological questions in Egypt. Historical accounts describe SRI expeditions to Giza using electrical resistivity, magnetometers, acoustic methods, seismic techniques, and other remote-sensing technologies to investigate possible subsurface structures surrounding the Sphinx.

In the Updated Special Edition of Penetration, Ingo later recalled that Dolphin introduced him to an Egypt project co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E.

Years later, Dolphin again approached Ingo (this time with NASA Viking photographs of Mars, (for more on Ingo's Mars sessions see the Planetary Explorations page) proposing a more controlled experiment using multiple independent viewers working under blinded conditions.

Taken together, these documents suggest that Egypt marked the beginning of a long research relationship between Ingo and Dolphin that would eventually encompass archaeology, underground sensing, planetary exploration, and the scientific study of human perception.

On January 31, 1978, nearly five years later, he conducted another series of structured perceptual sessions targeting the Giza Plateau.

Unlike the handwritten travel notes from 1973, these sessions resemble the methodology that would later characterize Controlled Remote Viewing.

Working from geographic coordinates corresponding to Giza, Ingo began by recording immediate sensory impressions (including dust, smells, wind, atmospheric conditions, and orientation) before producing a sequence of analytical sketches.

These drawings are working documents rather than artistic illustrations.

They include plan views, cross-sections, underground chambers, vertical shafts, tunnel systems, entrances, causeways, measurements, and spatial relationships between the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, and surrounding structures.

Several of the sketches closely parallel themes already present in the 1973 reports, including:

• extensive subterranean passageways; 
• vertical shafts beneath the Great Pyramid; 
• hidden chambers; 
• structures associated with the Sphinx; 
• and interconnected underground systems extending beneath the plateau. 

Together, the 1973 field notes and the 1978 session drawings demonstrate that Egypt was not an isolated episode in Ingo’s life.

It became one of his longest-running exploratory investigations.