CH500: Noah's ark sightings

Claim CH500:

• Berosus, ca. 275 B.C.E., reported remains of it in the mountains of the Gordyaeans in Armenia (p. 15).
• Flavius Josephus mentions remains of the ark on Baris (16-17).
• Several writers tell of St. Jacob of Medzpin, who persistently tried to climb Ararat. Angels commanded him to stop trying but brought him a plank from the ark (17-21).
• Several accounts through history suggest that Armenians have knowledge of and wood from the ark (21-22).
• In 1952, Harold Williams wrote a story told by Haji Yearam in 1916. According to the story, Yearam helped guide three scientists to the ark in 1856. Upon finding the ark sticking out of a glacier near the summit, the scientists flew into a rage and tried futilely to destroy it. Then they took an oath to keep the discovery a secret and murder anyone who revealed it. About 1918, Williams saw a newspaper article giving a scientist's deathbed confession, which corroborated Yearam's story (43-48).
• In 1876, English explorer James Bryce found a four-foot long hand-tooled piece of wood on Ararat at the 13,000 feet level (51-55).
• In 1883, a Turkish commission surveying Ararat for possible avalanche conditions found part of the ark protruding 20 or 30 feet from the foot of a glacier (56-58).
• In 1887, on his third attempt to find the ark, Prince Nouri of Bhagdad found it on the higher peaks of Ararat (64-67).
• In 1908 and again in 1910, a local Armenian, Georgie Hagopian, then just a boy, visited the ark with his uncle. The ark was on the edge of a cliff; its wood was like stone (69-72).
• In 1916, a story by Vladimir Roskovitsky told how he and other Russian aviators sighted the ark, nearly intact, grounded on the shore of a lake on Ararat. An expedition reached the ark about a month later. Photographs and plans were sent to the czar, but the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar a few days later, and the evidence was lost. Later testimony revealed that that account was 95 percent fiction, but other Russian soldiers have told of hearing of an expedition that discovered Noah's ark in 1917 (76-87).
• Six Turkish soldiers climbed Ararat and saw the ark in 1916 (90-92).
• A monestary at Echmiazin hosts a piece of wood reputedly from the ark (93-97).
• While lost on Ararat in 1936, Hardwicke Knight found timbers of dark, soft wood (98-101).
• Two American pilots saw the ark several times and once brought a photographer along. The photograph appeared in the Tunisian edition of Stars and Stripes in 1943. Many people remembered the article, but no copies remain (102-107).
• Donald Liedmann met a Russian Air Force major in 1938 and 1943 who showed him pictures of the ark. It was mostly buried in a glacier. The photographs have never been released (109-112).
• In 1948, a Kurdish farmer named Resit reported finding the prow of the ark about 2/3rds the way up Ararat, protruding from ice. The wood was black and too hard for him to cut off a piece (115-116).
• A 1949 satellite photograph of the Western Plateau of Mt. Ararat shows an elongated box-like object which could be Noah's ark (Morris 2001).
• In 1955, after two unsuccessful searches, Fernand Navarra found hand-hewn wood in the ice at the 13,750 foot level. He retrieved a small sample of the wood. However, even die-hard arkeologists suspect fraud. In 1969, small pieces of wood were found where Navarra directed people to dig. Again, fraud is suspected (129-134, 158-160).
• George Green photographed the ark from a helicopter in 1953, but his pictures aroused no serious interest, and they are now lost (135-137).
• The ERTS satellite photographed Noah's ark in 1973, but the satellite's resolution was insufficient (203-206).

Source:

Response:

1. What the reports of ark sightings have in common is that none has been corroborated. Most have few if any witnesses. Photographs and newspaper articles disappear, sometimes inexplicably, or they are too vague to be meaningful. Physical evidence either is not retrieved, is faked, or comes from recent wood carried up the mountain. They have the appearance of fables, not fact.
   
   
2. The reports are inconsistent. The ark has been found in different places on the mountain (and on different mountains, if you include earlier accounts). Its condition varies from almost intact to broken in half to only isolated timbers. The character of the wood varies from too hard to cut to falling apart at a touch. Some accounts make it sound like local residents visited the ark routinely, while other accounts stress the hardships encountered.
   
   
3. Noah's ark is the sort of subject that people would tell stories about. Some people might be motivated by misplaced piety to make up stories. Some have been motivated by money. Others might elaborate a story simply to get attention. Since the ark story is so famous, some people might conclude they have found the ark on the basis of ambiguous evidence. For example, they might misinterpret a blurry photograph or a shape seen through fog, or they might conclude that any wood they find is from the ark, although wood has been carried up Ararat in historical times for building crosses and huts.

Further Reading: