Searches for Noah's Ark
[40]: iv In his account of the expedition, Parrot wrote that "all the Armenians are firmly persuaded that Noah's Ark remains to this very day on the top of Ararat, and that, in order to preserve it, no human being is allowed to approach it.
[42][43][44][45] As an April Fools' Day joke, George McCullagh Reed, writing as "Pollex" for his opinion column in the New Zealand Herald, claimed that the avalanche had revealed the remains of Noah's Ark.
[46][47][48]: 59–60 Reed's story largely takes the form of a dispatch supposedly received from the Levant Herald in Constantinople, which he believed to have ceased operations several years earlier; in fact the paper had by that time relaunched as the Eastern Express.
[49] The report describes the findings of "Commissioners appointed by the Turkish Government", including a nonexistent English scientist named "Captain Gascoyne", which had already been submitted to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
On 24 November, Reed wrote another column apologizing for the hoax and expressing amusement that the story had spread so far:[50][59] "From the London Times to the Glasgow Herald, from the Leeds Mercury to the Pall Mall Gazette, through all the principal metropolitan and provincial journals in Britain and all over America my friend Captain Gascoyne and our Ark have been honoured with being handed on; but the editor of the Prophetic Messenger is to be credited with the greatest zeal in establishing the authenticity.
"[50]Despite this retraction, the story has continued to be circulated, often referencing the Prophetic Messenger article, which Tim LaHaye and John D. Morris called "the most complete and accurate account of the discovery.
[70] Searches since the mid-20th century have been largely supported by evangelical, millenarian churches and sustained by ongoing popular interest, faith-based magazines, lecture tours, videos and occasional television specials.
In October 1945 he described the version of the story he told to Gurley, writing: "In conversation with him I had given him the few details originating from two soldiers in the Czarist Russian army during the First World War, deceased many years ago.
[78][60]: 123 Shukra Asena, who owned land in the area, reported to Greenwald that a farmer named Reshit found the ship's prow in September, about two-thirds of the way up the mountain.
[78] Although the article was largely secondhand hearsay, British amateur archaeologist Egerton Sykes hoped to organize an expedition to establish that Reshit's discovery was in fact Noah's Ark.
"[66]: 89–90 In 1986, David Fasold interviewed a man named Ali Oğlu Reșit Sarihan, whom he believed to be the Reshit described by Shukra Asena thirty-eight years earlier.
[66]: 111–116 Over the next few years, Eryl and his wife Violet worked to corroborate the story, locating Yearam's death certificate in 1956 and securing Williams's permission, in 1958, to publish his letters.
One day "three vile men who did not believe the Bible" hired Yearam and his father as guides, as they intended to search the mountain in order to disprove the Noah's Ark story.
After trying and failing to destroy the vessel, the scientists agreed to cover up the discovery and made Yearam and his father swear to keep the secret under threat of torture and murder.
[85]: 331 During a 1959 geodetic survey of Turkey, an anomalous shape near Doğubayazıt was identified by İlhan Durupınar of the Turkish Air Force and Sevket Kurtis of Ohio State University.
[90]: 278–279 Geophysicist John Baumgardner and salvage expert David Fasold strongly advocated that the site was in fact Noah's Ark, but both of them eventually broke with Wyatt to express misgivings about their findings.
To reconcile this estimate with traditional interpretations of the Ark's size, John Warwick Montgomery suggested that "Dimensions regularly appear greater than they actually are to small children.
"Jim himself had confided on our last trip, as the permit process reached new heights of lunacy, that the problems could be traced to him, not (as some had come to suspect) a sinister Turkish plot to prevent us from finding the ark.
According to ICR's John D. Morris, the Turkish government had banned exploration of Ararat earlier in the year, and only approved this expedition on the condition that the team also evaluate the Durupınar site.
[111]: 15–16 Davis was interviewed extensively about his story by Shockey's FIBER organization, and later subjected to a polygraph test on behalf of James Irwin's High Flight Foundation.
[118]: 4, 44 [120]: 308 According to Davis, during this assignment he befriended a local driver named Badi, and his father Abas-Abas, who claimed to have visited Noah's Ark atop the mountain near their village.
[123]: 3 In November 1985, actor George Jammal wrote to Duane Gish, vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research, falsely claiming to have searched for Noah's Ark between 1972 and 1984.
Unsure whether to perpetuate the hoax, Jammal contacted noted skeptic Gerald A. Larue, who described how he felt misrepresented by Sun's 1992 TV-movie Ancient Secrets of the Bible.
[127] Honolulu businessman Daniel McGivern began investigating the search for Noah's Ark in 1995, and eventually financed commercial satellite photos of Mount Ararat.
"[144]: xi In 2004, Media Evangelism founder Andrew Yuen Man-fai and pastor Boaz Li Chi-kwong announced the discovery of parts of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat.
[156][157] Mainstream scientists objected to the lack of professional archaeologists involved with the research, and the decision to reveal the findings via a media event rather than publishing a peer-reviewed study.
[161][162] Within days of the announcement, Randall Price, who had consulted with NAMI in 2008, came forward with allegations that Ertuğrul hired Kurdish workers to construct the site using wood from an old structure near the Black Sea.
[161] In rebuttal, Price and his colleague Don Patton cited the use of heavy equipment in other Ararat expeditions, as well as a 2007 publicity stunt in which Greenpeace built a 10-metre (33 ft) replica of Noah's Ark on the mountain.
According to Larry Eskridge, An interesting phenomenon that has arisen within twentieth-century conservative American evangelism – the widespread conviction that the ancient Ark of Noah is embedded in ice high atop Mount Ararat, waiting to be found.
(...) Moreover, it skirts the domain of pop pseudoscience and the paranormal, making the attempt to find the ark the evangelical equivalent of the search for Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster.
