“Maybe he was trying to scare the birds away so he could enjoy the view to himself,” Lang, 27, who lives in Atlanta, said, adding that it had been “the trip of a lifetime.”

Marshall Mosher, who helped run the paragliding event, said he had flown over the pyramids several times but it was the first sighting of a dog at the summit, hundreds of feet from the ground.

He had frequently seen stray canines sunning themselves closer to the base of the structure, the Pyramid of Khafre. “If I was a Cairo street dog, I’d want to climb the pyramids, too,” he said.

Social media users fell in love with the adventurous animal, as videos of it accumulated more than a million views. The moment was captured by participants in an event run by air sports tour company Sky One Egypt, in which powered paragliding pilots fly over the country’s landmarks.

“Dog: ‘Well, that’s off the bucket list,’” one YouTube commenter joked. Instagram users speculated that it could have been the ancient god Anubis, a guide to the underworld with a canine head.

Another person wrote on X that they were “getting unreasonably emotional” at the thought of the dog climbing “a landmark full of history and prestige, completely unaware of any of it … just to bark at birds. … Animals are such simple but profound creatures.”

Afterward, another tour company filmed a dog that looked similar to the first descending from the pyramid. By the time the original team completed a second flight over the pyramids on Tuesday, the dog was no longer visible.

Lang said it was “surreal” to see the video go viral, with people from all over the world contacting him. “I think it resonates because it’s just a feel-good story — a dog, happy, barking at birds, enjoying the view,” he said.