This is exactly what we predicted. The real site is most probably the Dogubayazit site. The Bible NEVER says Noah's Arl landed on My Ararat, but in the MOUNTAINS (plural) of the Ararat region.
By Joe
Kovacs
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
Has the real Noah's Ark spoken of in the Bible truly been found?
At least two seasoned archaeologists who have made numerous
expeditions to Mount Ararat in search of Noah's Ark are throwing cold
water on this week's claim the Old Testament vessel has finally been
discovered, saying it's a hoax involving wood hauled in from the Black
Sea region.
 In this photo from Noah's Ark Ministries International, an explorer is purported to be investigating a wooden structure on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey that it says may be the remnant of Noah's Ark mentioned in the Bible. |
"To make a long story short: this is all reported to be a fake," said
Randall Price,
director of Judaic Studies at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va.
"This is not Noah's Ark," adds Bob Cornuke of the Bible Archaeology Search and
Exploration Institute. "This is a fake. It's a fraud and it's of the
highest caliber according to what I can assess from the evidence and
talking to eyewitnesses and people from Turkey."
WND
reported yesterday that Chinese and Turkish explorers with Noah's Ark Ministries
International said they were "99.9 percent sure" they found the
remnants of the legendary biblical vessel high up on Mount Ararat in
eastern Turkey.
The 15-member team claims it recovered wooden specimens from a
structure at an altitude of 13,000 feet and that carbon dating suggested
it was 4,800 years old.
Several
compartments, some with wooden beams, are said to be inside and could
have been used to house
animals, the group indicated.
"The search team has made the
greatest discovery in history," declared Prof.
Oktay Belli, an archaeologist at Istanbul University. "This
finding is very important and the greatest up to now."
Some video has been posted
on YouTube and can be seen here:
But Dr. Price, who is spearheading efforts to explore two
competing locations for Noah's Ark, sent an e-mail dispatch to
supporters with his personal take on the alleged find, asserting the
structure is a hoax perpetrated by a Kurdish guide and his partners to
extort money from Chinese evangelical Christians.
"I was the archaeologist with the Chinese expedition in the
summer of 2008 and was given photos of what they now are reporting to be
the inside of the Ark," he wrote in his message dated April 26.
The photos were reputed to have been taken off site near
the Black Sea, but the film footage the Chinese now have was shot on
location on Mt. Ararat. In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers
hired by Parasut, the guide used by the Chinese, are said to have
planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea
area (where the photos were originally taken) at the Mt. Ararat site. In
the winter of 2008 a Chinese climber taken by Parasut's men to the site
saw the wood, but couldn't get inside because of the severe weather
conditions.During the summer of 2009 more wood was planted inside a cave at the
site. The Chinese team went in the late summer of 2009 (I was there at
the time and knew about the hoax) and was shown the cave with the wood
and made their film. As I said, I have the photos of the inside of the
so-called Ark (that show cobwebs in the corners of rafters – something
just not possible in these conditions) and our Kurdish partner in
Dogubayazit (the village at the foot of Mt. Ararat) has all of the facts
about the location, the men who planted the wood, and even the truck
that transported it.To my knowledge, the Chinese took no professional archaeologist
or geologist who could verify or document the wood or the structure … .
In the wake of the e-mail's circulation online, a subsequent statement
was issued tonight which stated, "While Dr. Price does not retract his
statements, he wants the public to understand that these only represent
his opinion as informed by his experience with the Kurdish guide and the
Chinese and other sources in eastern Turkey."
It went on to say
Price "urges the Chinese-Turkish team to make their collected samples
from the structure available to scientists and scholars for comparative
analysis.While he has reservations about the nature and procedure of the
Chinese-Turkish expedition and the artifacts related to it, he believes
that a decision concerning this matter must wait until independent
examinations of the site and the structure can be made and published."
Another
ark-hunter, Richard Rives of Tennessee-based Wyatt Archaeological Research, said
while he's skeptical of the new alleged find, he's not completely ruling
it out it just yet.
"Just because Randall Price says something doesn't make it so,"
Rives told WND. "We don't know what it is until we get a little more
information. It is something of interest. I can't wait to find out to
find out the real truth."
Rives noted one thing that seemed strange was the wood reportedly
discovered appeared in excellent condition.
"The wood's in too good a shape to be that old," he said.
 Is this a beam from Noah's Ark? Explorers with Noah's Ark Ministries International have released this photo of a wooden structure it says it has documented at an altitude of 13,000 feet on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey. |
Regarding some of the photos published online, Cornuke told American
Family Radio, "There are cobwebs up in the beams. You're not going
to have wood at
14,000 feet in a glacier to have cobwebs in it. It's impossible to have
that situation."
 This photo of what is alleged to be wood inside a possible site of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat reveals apparent cobwebs, which archaeologist Bob Cornuke says would be impossible in a glacier at high altitude. (photo: Noah's Ark Ministries International) |
He agrees with Price about wood being transported up Ararat,
saying "a lot of the beams that you see were actually imported into the
mountain probably in 2008."
Cornell archaeologist Peter Ian Kuniholm,
who has focused on Turkey for decades, called the alleged discovery a
"crock."
"There's not enough H2O in the world to get an ark that
high up a mountain," Kuniholm said.
Archaeologist Paul
Zimansky of Stony Brook University in New York said he'd welcome
learning more about the site. "It would be nice to know what they have
found – if there's a scientific publication in the offing," he told MSNBC.com.
"Press releases are not the way archaeology advances."
He added:
"It's not inconceivable to me that they've found pieces of wood at that
level, but that doesn't mean they've found an ark."
If the latest
proclaimed find of Noah's Ark does indeed turn out to be false, it
certainly would not be the first time phony claims have been floated.
Among the best-known scams is one from 1993, when California
actor George Jammal deliberately duped CBS Television
and the filmmakers of "The
Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark" into believing he saw and
touched the vessel on Mount Ararat.
According to the Internet
Movie Database, Jammal "made the hoax as blatant as possible,
making up persons with names such as 'the Armenian friend, Mr. Allis
Buls Hitian' or 'my dear Polish companion Vladimir Sobitchsky,' and cooking
a piece of pine in sauce
to present it as 'a piece of the Ark' – and yet his story was presented
as the real thing and shown as the key testimony in the video; after
some time, humiliating its makers, Jammal publicly revealed the details
of his hoax."
 The Press-Telegram of Long Beach, Calif., was among those documenting a Noah's Ark hoax perpetrated by Southern California actor George Jammal in 1993. Jammal admitted cooking railroad tracks in sauce to create "sacred wood" he claimed he had retrieved from the biblical vessel on Mount Ararat. |
With attention refocused on the vessel mentioned in the Book of
Genesis, Rives says there are several key points about a well-known
alternate site he has explored some 15 miles from Mount Ararat,
featuring an object that resembles a boat on a smaller mountain in
Dogubayazit, Turkey.
 Many believe this might be Noah's Ark, already found on a mountain next to Mount Ararat (courtesy: wyattmuseum.com). |
It was first
photographed in 1959 by a Turkish air-force pilot on a NATO mapping
mission, and gained worldwide attention after its image was published in
a 1960 issue of Life Magazine. Rives summarized evidence for the
possibility that site could be the resting place of the ship,
indicating:
- A boat-shaped object 300 cubits in length can plainly be
seen in the mountains of Ararat or Urartu. Visible, equable, and
symmetrical features can be examined. Subsurface interface radar scans
reveal buried features which, once again, are equable and symmetrical.
- Much of the material found at the site is fossilized
and contains organic carbon, demonstrating that it was once associated
with living matter. The presence of organic carbon has been verified by
multiple scientific laboratories. Plant and animal fibers have also been
found within the object and have been documented by way of forensic
testing.
- In addition, metal artifacts found at the site are
composed of a combination of metals such as modern day sophisticated
alloys – once again, verified by metallurgical laboratories.
His museum's website features on-location
photographs and charts, making its case with
physical evidence including radar scans of
bulkheads on the alleged vessel, deck timber and iron rivets and
large "drogue"
stones, which may have acted as types of
anchors.
However, there's been no shortage of critics
from both scientific and Christian circles who think the Dogubayazit
site is
erroneous.
Lorence Collins, a retired geology professor
from California State University, Northridge, joined the late David
Fasold, a
one-time proponent of that site, in writing a scientific summary
claiming the location is
"bogus."
"Evidence from microscopic studies and photo
analyses demonstrates that the supposed Ark near Dogubayazit is a
completely
natural rock formation," said the 1996 paper
published in the Journal of
Geoscience Education. "It cannot have been Noah's Ark nor even a
man-made model.
It is understandable why early investigators falsely identified it."
Today's interactive WND
poll focused on the purported discovery, and 32
percent of respondents said "I don't know if this is the Ark, but I
have no doubt Noah and his flood are reality, as all civilizations tell
a similar story."
Another 26 percent indicated, "It may be that in this
increasingly faithless age, God is unearthing some bits of
faith-enhancing evidence."
Some reader comments about the issue include:
- "To be realistic, it was a boat made of wood. It was
abandoned, almost certainly exposed to the elements, before the rise of
Egypt [some] 5,000 years ago or more. If that was the case, It would
almost certainly have rotted away to nothing, probably before Christ."
- "I don't need tangible evidence that Noah's Ark
existed. I have 100% faith in God and the Bible. If God said it
happened, it happened. God does not lie."
- "I'm a dummy, so somebody has to tell me how kangaroos
and Tasmanian devils made it to the Ark and back at just the right
time."
In both the Old and New Testaments, the Bible speaks of Noah's Ark,
and
Jesus Christ and the apostles Paul and Peter all make reference to
Noah's flood
as an actual historical event.
According to Genesis, Noah was a righteous man who was instructed by
God to
construct a large vessel to hold his family
and many species of animals, as a
massive deluge was coming to purify the world which had become corrupt.
Genesis
6:5 states: "And God saw that the wickedness of man
was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of
his heart
was only evil continually."
Noah was told by God to take aboard seven pairs of each of the
"clean"
animals – that is to say, those permissible to eat
– and two each of the
"unclean" variety (Genesis
7:2).
Though the Bible says it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, it also
mentions
"the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days."
Genesis
8:4 does not say the ark rested on "Mount Ararat," but rather the
"mountains of Ararat," and it was still months
before Noah and his family – his wife, his three sons and the sons'
wives – were
able to leave the ark and begin replenishing the world.
Note:
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Joe Kovacs is
executive news editor for WorldNetDaily.com and author of the No. 1
best-seller that champions the truth of Scripture and reveals your spectacular, ultimate
destiny that's far more glorious than just floating on clouds: "Shocked by
the Bible: The Most Astonishing Facts You've Never Been Told."