A US research group is pushing to prove a boat-shaped mound near Mount Ararat holds the buried remains of Noah’s Ark, with radar scans of the 157-metre formation revealing what it describes as corridors and chambers. It comes as Noah’s Ark Scans declared yesterday, in a preliminary radar report, that the Durupınar Formation in Türkiye’s Ağrı Province contains a “man-made object” rather than solid rock.
“It could be a ship, it could be a spaceship. What I can say from the radar is that it is organised, it is structural,” Dr Khosrow Bakhtar, who led the radar survey, said in a statement. Bakhtar, a University of Utah-trained mining engineer, has spent more than 40 years building systems that detect buried tunnels for US defence agencies.
Bakhtar also supplied the coordinates for the team’s core holes, which the group says reach as deep as 18 metres with no bedrock or solid limestone found inside the formation. In one hole within the boat shape, the drill bit broke four to five metres down on a layer the team said was harder than limestone.
“This is a major breakthrough in our ability to investigate what lies beneath this remarkable site,” Andrew Jones, the group’s founder, said last week. The team says its cores contain organic-rich layers, but Jones has since said it has “not identified any material as ancient wood or established its age.”
Jones said the layer that broke the bit could be “petrified or heavily mineralised wood” or simply a hard rock lodged in the earth around it. He has, however, cautioned that organic matter gathers naturally in hillside soils, and that “even identifying ancient wood would not by itself establish human construction.”
“No fossilized wood or traces of elemental carbon, wood, or reed fragments have ever been found” in earlier digs at the site, geologist Lorence Collins and ark researcher David Fasold wrote in a 1996 paper. Samples Fasold recovered from what others had called rib timbers, planking, and deck beams proved to be andesite or basalt pebbles rather than petrified wood.
Fasold suggested the mound may still be the site the ancients regarded as the flood ship, a speculation Collins called interesting. Collins, a retired California State University Northridge geology professor, later revised how the boat shape formed but maintained that it is a natural structure.
As it stands, the team plans to lower GOPHER, a camera drone named after the gopher wood in Genesis, into the voids mapped by its radar. Whilst the hunters search for that ancient timber, living timber grows on Mount Ararat’s eastern cone, Little Ağrı, where Turkish researchers began studying a 161-hectare birch forest last year.
Professor Cenker Atila, the Sivas Cumhuriyet University archaeologist directing the program, has said a public scientific statement will follow once laboratory work is complete. The group expects initial laboratory results over the northern winter, and a more detailed scientific report in the northern spring.
