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Egypt to Elon Musk: Aliens didn't build the pyramids, come see for yourself

Humans built the pyramids, and Egypt has their tombs to prove it.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read

Aliens didn't build Egypt's famed pyramids, and the country is happy to prove that fact to SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk . Over the weekend, the country's minister of international cooperation responded to a Musk tweet by offering him a trip to investigate the real history of the enormous structures.

On Friday, Musk tweeted "Aliens built the pyramids obv," and whether he was serious or not, his tweet was liked more than 538,000 times and retweeted more than 85,000 times as of Sunday morning. 

On Saturday, Rania A. Al Mashat, Egypt's minister of international cooperation, invited Musk to come to her country and explore the pyramids' history, including the tombs of the non-alien humans who built them.

"I follow your work with a lot of admiration," she tweeted. "I invite you and SpaceX to explore the writings about how the pyramids were built and also to check out the tombs of the pyramid builders. Mr. Musk, we are waiting for you."

While Musk hasn't said if he'll accept the offer, he did dig into some online sources explaining the real history of the ancient structures.

"The Great Pyramid was the tallest structure made by humans for 3,800 years," Musk tweeted on Saturday -- note the "by humans" part. "Three thousand, eight hundred years." He followed up with a link to a BBC article that discusses how most archaeologists agree the Great Pyramid was built by 4,000 laborers supported by 16,000 to 20,000 secondary workers, who worked for 20 years or more.

Musk may not be thinking much about the pyramids on Sunday. His tweets have switched focus to the SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission splashdown.

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