Steefen said:

This researcher got a permit from Turkish authorities. She’s over there doing what’s in the report. It is about the Bible. She has expensive equipment and people to operate that equipment.

When what she’s doing concludes, it will bring scientific information to the accounts of Sumer and the biblical account.

The Director of Marketing and Fundraising is a researcher?  Her degree is in Business Management.  Perhaps, she has a minor in archaeology?

“When what she’s doing concludes, it will bring scientific information to the accounts of Sumer and the biblical account”
She’s not working with Noah’s ark.

“The Director of Marketing and Fundraising is a researcher? Her degree is in Business Management”
Pretty much anybody with or without any degree can be “a researcher.”
All it takes is to do some research.

“you are unable to provide information and perspectives critical of her claims”
What are 2 of the video’s claims with which you disagree– if any?

** you do not have permission to see this link ** doesn’t look very credible either.

It is abundantly clear that David and Steefen are working under the false assumption that any video can be posted on the forum regardless of its complete and total lack of credibility, and it is incumbent on the rest of us to prove it faulty (of if you prefer Monty Python, fawlty). 

If they are unwilling or unable to ensure their credibility, the videos should either be deleted or the thread closed, and if possible, the reason why stated.

As well you should.

But perhaps we haven’t considered the possibility that there is more than one Noah’s Ark or that the original multiplied throughout the earth and galaxy (and universe?) like crab grass?

As a researcher with no known expertise or knowledge of anything, which obviously gives me the edge, this is what my studies using expensive equipment has shown.

Please don’t doubt me.  I don’t want to tell you that you’re wrong.

“are working under the false assumption that any video can be posted on the forum regardless of its complete and total lack of credibility”
What’s the basis/ grounds– if any– for the allegation that the material below has “complete and total lack of credibility”?

A Robot Entered the “Noah’s Ark” Site – Curious Explorer (Oct 16, 2026)

** you do not have permission to see this link **
Durupinar’s photos create a real kind of firestorm of controversy and excitement. People are super excited because if these photos actually show Noah’s ark, then they can prove that everything that’s written in the Bible about this whole event is actually true.

**[0:17]**
A small tracked robot is lowered into the dark down a hole drilled into a hillside near Mount Ararat. Its camera creeps along crumbling brown walls. Somewhere on the screen, an ant strolls across the bottom of the frame. That is the footage behind the headlines declaring that Noah’s ark has been 100% confirmed. The machine is called Gopher. The hill is the so-called ark site in eastern Turkey. And the radar that sent the robot there had suggested the ground might hide corridors and rooms.

We want to show you what that clip actually contains because it contains a puzzle. The team that filmed it captioned the video by saying, “No rock or bedrock had been found.” Yet, only days earlier, the same crew snapped a drill bit in a different hole four or 5 m down on a layer they called harder than limestone. So, which is it? Soft ground with nothing solid in it or something tough enough to break steel?

That contradiction is the thread we’re going to pull. By the end of this video, you’ll know the specific laboratory test that can settle the question and roughly when the answer is due. But first, we have to understand why anyone is drilling on this hill at all. And the answer begins with a shape.

**Chapter 2: History of the site**

**[1:38]**
A ship in the grass. The formation sits on the slopes of Mount Tendürek, a volcano separate from Ararat, about 29 km south of Ararat summit and a few kilometres from the Iranian border. From the air, it looks uncannily like a long pointed hull resting in the grass, roughly 157 m from bow to stern.

According to local accounts, it emerged as a clear outline in May 1948 after heavy rains and a run of earthquakes washed the mud away from its edges. By November of that year, an Associated Press story was carrying a Turkish report of a ship on Ararat. Then in October 1959, a Turkish army captain named İlhan Durupınar spotted it on an aerial photograph from a NATO mapping flight. The site has carried his name ever since.

What surprised me is how fast the first real test came and how rough it was. In September 1960, an expedition that included the captain himself went to the site and did something you would never be allowed to do at a protected place today. They used dynamite. After 2 days of digging and blasting inside the outline, they found soil and rock. And their official verdict called the formation a freak of nature. That should have been the end.

It wasn’t. The wider context helps explain why. The ark has never been a single mountain mystery. Ancient writers placed its landing in different places. The Babylonian priest Berossus writing in the 3rd century BCE located the remains in the mountains of Kurdistan and said locals scraped tar from them. Later traditions favored Armenia and the story itself is older than the Bible’s version of it. Mesopotamian flood tales including the epic of Gilgamesh already feature a man who builds a great boat to survive a deluge.

The attraction was strong enough that in 1987 Turkey designated the area a national park and a visitor center now stands near the site. A local man named Raşit Suhan is often credited in popular accounts as an early guide to the formation and his family’s name still turns up around the project today. Whatever its geology, the hill had become a destination.

In 1977, an American amateur explorer named Ron Wyatt took up the site and spent years promoting it as the Ark. In the 1980s, he tried to win over the former astronaut James Irwin, who walked on the moon on Apollo 15 and later became a devoted ark hunter himself. Irwin wasn’t persuaded. Wyatt’s team also pointed to huge standing stones in the nearby village of Kazan, each with a hole cut through one end. They argued these were drogue stones, heavy weights that ancient sailors dragged behind a ship to keep it pointed into the waves. Keep those stones in mind. They come back later.

So, how did the idea survive a dynamite crew and a skeptical astronaut? Mostly because of one number.

**Chapter 3: Biblical and logical gaps**

**[4:49]**
The measuring stick problem. Genesis gives the ark’s length as 300 cubits. The trouble is that a cubit was never one fixed length. It is roughly the distance from your elbow to your fingertips and different ancient cultures standardized it differently. Use the common biblical cubit of about 45 cm and 300 of them comes to around 135 m. A good 20 short of this hill. To get the famous match, you have to switch to the Royal Egyptian cubit of about 52.3 cm. Even then, the target moves.

The salvage expert David Fasold, who joined Wyatt in 1985 and reportedly called it a shipwreck the moment he saw it, measured the formation at 164 m. Yet, the team’s founder has described the site as the exact length of the ark given in the Bible. That only works if you choose one particular ruler and one particular measurement of the hill.

There is a second problem and it comes from the text, not from geologists. The Hebrew word Genesis uses for the vessel, *teva*, means a box or chest. And the proportions it gives—300 × 50 × 30 cubits—describe a long rectangle. A pointed bow and a tapered stern are not in the description. The very feature that makes this hill look like a ship is a shape the text never asks for.

Here is a detail most videos skip. In 2014, the British Museum scholar Irving Finkel published a Babylonian clay tablet from roughly 1750 BCE that describes a flood boat as a giant round coracle like a woven basket. So, the ancient world did not agree on what such a vessel looked like in the first place. Genesis also describes three decks stacked one above another, while the team scans describe three sections sitting inside a single bottom layer. That is part of why some of the sharpest push back has come from believers. The young earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis has argued that the team’s founder settled on his answer before the surveys were even run.

And then there’s the engineering. The largest wooden sailing ship ever built, the schooner *Wyoming*, launched in 1909 at about 100 m on deck. Even with iron strapping, its hull flexed and leaked so badly that pumps ran constantly and it foundered in 1924. A wooden hull of 157 m would have been a different order of problem. That does not settle anything about a story many people hold on faith. It simply means the shape alone cannot carry the weight placed on it.

Even the location is looser than it sounds. Genesis says the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, plural. Ararat is the biblical name for Urartu, an Iron Age kingdom that flourished between roughly the 9th and 6th centuries BCE and spread across this whole highland region. So the text points to a region, not a single peak, let alone one hillside. The Quran names a different mountain altogether, Judy, traditionally identified with a peak in southeastern Turkey near the Iraqi border. Fasold later claimed locals called a peak near this formation by that name, but the link is disputed. The outline cannot carry the claim by itself and everyone involved knows it. That is why the search went underground.

**Chapter 4: Radar and geophysical scans**

**[8:22]**
What radar can and can’t see. Ground penetrating radar works a little like shouting into a canyon and listening for the echo. An antenna fires short pulses of radio energy into the soil. Every time a pulse meets a boundary where the electrical properties change, part of it bounces back. A wet layer over a dry one can do that. So can a buried pipe, a pocket of air or water, a band of clay, or a crack in rock. What the radar records is the boundary itself. On its own, it cannot tell wet clay from old timber.

The team has also used electrical resistivity, which works differently. Instead of echoes, it pushes a small current through the ground between metal stakes and measures how hard the ground pushes back. Wet clay conducts easily. Dry rock and voids resist. It is good at spotting where the ground changes, but the images grow blurrier with depth, and turning blurry patches into neat corridors takes a lot of interpretation.

This particular hill makes the job harder. Clay and water absorb radar energy quickly. In dry sand, radar can look tens of meters down. In wet clay, it can fade within a meter or two. One field study in South Australia blamed exactly this kind of signal loss on clay conductivity and iron oxides in the soil. Now look at what this formation is made of. A 1996 geology paper on the site describes the boat’s supposed walls as concentrations of limonite and magnetite, both iron minerals. In other words, the material that draws the outline of the hull is the kind of material that muddies a radar picture. To pull detail from weak returns, operators boost the deeper signal during processing, and that boost amplifies the noise along with anything real.

Radar has a strange history here, too. Back in 1985, Fasold arrived with radar gear and a device he called a frequency generator, supposedly tuned to find iron inside the formation. His team reported a regular internal pattern. As you’ll hear later, Fasold himself ended up rethinking what caused it. The geologist Andrew Snelling, writing for a creationist magazine, later compared that gadget to dowsing rods, a method that has repeatedly failed controlled tests.

There is a trade-off built into every radar antenna. Higher frequencies give sharper pictures, but die out quickly with depth. Lower frequencies reach deeper but smear the detail. A survey hunting for rooms 10 m down in wet iron-rich clay is therefore working against the physics at every step which is why independent specialists usually ask to see raw data before they accept an interpretation.

Since 2019, the current team, a group called Noah’s Ark Scans, founded by Andrew Jones, has run modern radar and resistivity surveys, along with LiDAR and drone mapping. They report straight lines, right angles, and spaces they interpret as corridors and chambers. On October 1st, they released a preliminary report from a defense engineer named Khosro Bakhtiar, whose radar system, according to the release, has been used to map hidden tunnels beneath the border between the United States and Mexico. He told the team the structure beneath the formation is organized, not geological. He also says the same instrument found nothing similar in the surrounding valley. Comparing the formation to the ground around it is exactly the right kind of test. But in that same release, he said it could be a ship and it could be a spaceship. Think about what that admits. Even the strongest radar reading on this hill cannot tell a wooden ship from a spaceship because radar was never going to name a material. His full technical report is due in November. Until then, the only way to learn what made those shapes was to put a camera inside them. That was Gopher’s job.

**Chapter 5: The Gopher robot mission**

**[12:37]**
Gopher goes down. The robot’s backstory is better than most of the headlines. It was designed by Robert Ross, a roboticist at Latrobe University in Australia and adapted from machines he originally built for wildlife scientists. One called Wombot crawled into wombat burrows. Another, Armabot, went into armadillo burrows in French Guiana. This version is named after the gopher wood that Genesis says the ark was built from. That name carries a small irony. The word gopher appears only once in the entire Hebrew Bible. Translators have guessed cypress, pine, or cedar, but nobody truly knows what tree it was.

The plan sounded simple. Drill narrow holes to the spots the radar flagged. Lower the robot and let it drive into the voids to film what is waiting. On September 25th, they sent it down. The clip shows the robot in one of the core holes drilled to about 12 m. Its camera creeping along walls of loose sediment. There is no timber in the frame, no beams, no joints, no metal fittings, nothing with a straight cut edge that says a person made it. There is dirt and that ant. If you hope to see the hull of a boat, you get what you would expect from lowering any camera down any hole.

Robots have solved real mysteries before. In 2002 and again in 2011, small machines crawled through the narrow shafts of the Great Pyramid of Giza and revealed a second sealed door and red painted marks no human had seen in over 4,000 years. But those robots succeeded because they reached the target and filmed it, which is exactly the step Gopher has not yet completed.

To the team’s credit, they were open about what went wrong. Their own caption said Gopher struggled to move across the very loose sediment on the floor and that the robot needed modifications before it could even look around. The next attempt could still matter. If Gopher reaches a mapped void and films its walls up close, the difference between a natural pocket in mud and a built room should be obvious.

So, how much of the target did the camera inspect? From what has been released, very little. It filmed mostly the drill hole itself, the narrow tunnel the drill had just cut with a robot that could not yet drive out of it. That is why the caption saying “No rock or bedrock was found” doesn’t follow from the footage. A camera stuck in loose sediment at the bottom of one fresh hole cannot rule rock in or out anywhere else on the hill, and it cannot explain the hard layer that broke the drill bit in another hole.

When Newsweek covered the clip, it noted that the claim had not been independently confirmed. Even the team’s founder told the outlet that nobody had identified any material as ancient wood or established its age because no lab results were in yet. If the footage cannot answer the question, what evidence would it take to honestly call this a buried ship? Hold on to that. There is a real answer, and it will come from the drill cores, not the camera.

**Chapter 6: Drilling and core analysis**

**[15:56]**
The cores. Core drilling began in late September and on paper it is the most serious physical work the site has ever had. The project runs under official Turkish permits and is led on the Turkish side by archaeologist Şanker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University. Reports say about 20 researchers from five countries joined the field season which began at the end of June and wrapped on September 30th. For all the 100% headlines, Jones himself has been more careful in places, saying the evidence has not definitively identified the formation as the ark, even though he firmly believes it is.

The team pulled cores from as deep as 18 m, though some outlets report 20. Reporting from the region says they drilled 16 core holes in all, 12 inside the outline and four outside. Those outside holes are the part I want to give real credit for. They are control holes so the lab can compare the inside of the formation against the ordinary hillside next to it. That comparison may turn out to be the most useful thing the expedition produces.

It helps to know how the last attempt went. A drilling effort in 1988 managed only a few holes, nowhere near this depth. And according to the current team, those samples were spoiled by the water used to cool the drill bit. This time they drilled dry with no fluid going down the hole.

Then came the hard layer. On the second day, in a hole inside the outline, the bit hit something at 4 to 5 m and broke. The team raised the possibility of petrified or heavily mineralized wood and said samples would go to independent labs. Their press release even shows a piece of wood preserved in quartz that it says a tourist found at the site. In fairness, petrified wood is usually much harder than limestone, so the idea isn’t unreasonable, but a broken drill bit tells you the layer is hard. It doesn’t tell you what the layer is made of. This formation sits on the flank of a volcano, and dense volcanic rock is an ordinary thing to hit there.

There is also a timing problem worth naming. Wood generally turns to stone over very long spans of geological time. A vessel built a few thousand years ago in the story’s own telling is a strange candidate for petrification. Waterlogged or sealed wood can survive for millennia. Pharaoh Khufu’s 43-metre cedar ship sealed in a pit beside the Great Pyramid lay intact for about 4,500 years until it was found in 1954. But that is preservation, not fossilization, and those are different processes with different signatures.

The team has also reported cavities in the holes, including one that kept filling with water as they drilled. Keep that in mind every time radar voids are described as rooms. Water is one of the strongest things radar can bounce off. So, a soggy pocket in mud can light up a scan just as clearly as an empty chamber would.

Then there’s the soil chemistry. The team says that in 2024, it tested 88 soil samples from inside and outside the outline and found about three times as much organic matter inside with potassium roughly 38% higher. That is interesting because it means the ground inside the outline differs from the ground around it. But the lab work will have to explain the cause. A depression that holds water or a mass of volcanic debris with different mineral content could change soil chemistry just as well as decayed timber could.

A separate project that began in 2021 involving Istanbul Technical University reported clay, marine material, and mollusk remains and linked human activity in the region to somewhere between 5500 and 3000 BCE. Marine fossils high in mountains are usually explained by tectonic uplift. Old seabeds pushed skyward over millions of years as plates collide. And signs that people lived in this region thousands of years ago say nothing about what is buried in this particular hill.

Dating will matter too. Radiocarbon analysis can measure the age of organic material back about 50,000 years. So if the dark organic layers date to the right window, that would be notable. But a date alone proves very little. Any soil rich in plant matter will yield a date. And a layer that is the right age is not automatically a boat. The age has to be tied to worked wood, not just to old dirt.

Now the cores sit in refrigerated storage. Samples are headed to laboratories in Ankara and the team says results should be announced by late spring 2027. Reporting also notes that the project ran a fundraising campaign seeking $600,000 to begin drilling. That is not a criticism in itself since expeditions cost money. But it is worth remembering when you weigh the strength of a headline against the strength of the data.

The team has also announced its next big goal: searching for ancient animal DNA inside the voids the radar mapped. That plan runs straight back into Gopher’s problem. Before anyone can sample a room for DNA, something has to get into the room. And so far, the robot hasn’t made it past the bottom of its hole.

There is one more reason caution is warranted, and it has nothing to do with this team. Human eyes are built to find patterns, especially ships, faces, and animals in random shapes. Psychologists call it pareidolia. And a long hill with a pointed end invites it. That does not mean the shape is meaningless. It means the shape is where a question starts, never where it ends.

Which brings us back to the question I asked you to hold on to. What would count as proof? Archaeologists would want three things and in a specific order.

First, identify the material. Petrified wood is not identified by hardness or by a pattern that looks a bit like grain. According to Oregon’s State Geology Department, fossil wood can only be identified when it shows clear, undistorted cell structure. Specialists cut slices thin enough for light to pass through in three directions—one across the trunk and two along it—and examine them at magnifications from 30 to 400 times. If that hard layer is wood, those slices will show cells. If it is volcanic rock, they won’t.

Second, even real wood doesn’t make a ship. Logs can end up buried in a hillside through landslides, floods, or ancient forests that once grew there. A vessel needs evidence of human work. Cut and shaped surfaces, tool marks, joints, fastenings. Real ancient boats like the 3500-year-old Dover boat found in England in 1992 are recognized precisely because their planks carry stitching and carved fittings.

Third comes context. A few scattered fragments don’t add up to a hull. You would need worked material laid out in a continuous shape inside one undisturbed layer, clearly different from whatever turns up in the control holes outside the outline. Fail the first test and the other two never come up. And we already know what happens when material from this site goes under a microscope because it has been done.

**Chapter 7: Revisiting geological theories**

**[23:41]**
The story behind it is the strangest part of this whole saga. The man who changed his mind. David Fasold, the salvage expert who measured the hull at 164 meters, about 538 feet, was once the formation’s loudest champion. His training was in ships, not rocks, which made him a credible witness to ark hunters. He published a book, *The Ark of Noah*, in 1988, arguing that it was the Ark. After more fieldwork in the 1990s, including a 1994 visit with an Australian geologist, he began to doubt it.

In 1996, he co-authored a paper with the geologist Lorence Collins, who taught at California State University, Northridge. It appeared in the *Journal of Geoscience Education*, the peer-reviewed journal of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, under a title that called the supposed ark from Turkey a common geologic structure in disguise. The findings were just as direct. A supposed iron bracket turned out to be weathered volcanic minerals. The metal-braced walls were natural bands of iron minerals in steeply tilted rock layers, part of a fold geologists call a doubly plunging syncline.

That phrase is worth unpacking because it explains the ship shape. A syncline is a trough. Rock layers bent downward into a U. Doubly plunging means the trough also dips at both ends. So once erosion, the fossilized gopherwood bark was crinkled, metamorphosed peridotite, a rock that forms deep inside the earth and makes up most of the upper mantle. And gopherwood is a puzzle in its own right. The Hebrew word appears only once in the entire Bible in Genesis, and translators have never agreed on what it means.

The paper also pointed to fossil-bearing limestone that appears to cut across the fold. If that reading is right, the layers people call flood deposits would be younger than the ark they supposedly buried, which turns the whole timeline upside down. Geologists lean on a rule from the Danish scientist Nicolas Steno. Whatever cuts across a rock body must be younger than the rock it cuts. And those standing stones in Kazan, the supposed storm anchors, turned out to be made of local volcanic rock, not anything carried up from Mesopotamia where the ark was supposedly built.

A year later, testifying under oath in an Australian court case, Fasold described the claim that the ark had been found as absolute nonsense, though he used a ruder word. And yet, his friend and biographer later wrote that he never fully let go of the idea. I find that the most human part of the entire story. Here was a man who could see the evidence clearly and still feel the pull of that shape on the hillside. Seeing patterns in randomness is not a flaw reserved for the gullible.

He wasn’t the only one who walked away. Snelling, the creationist geologist, had reached the same verdict back in 1992. And in 2025, a geologist at Turkey’s General Directorate of Mineral Research and Exploration published a report concluding that the formation was shaped by a landslide. That means the people who have rejected this as the ark include believers, skeptics, and Turkey’s own state geologists.

There is a pattern here, too. Announcements of ark discoveries are almost a genre. In 2010, a Chinese-Turkish group announced it had found wooden compartments high on Ararat itself at roughly 4,000 m on a mountain that rises to about 5,137 m and the claim was widely doubted by other researchers. Each one arrives with a confident headline and each one has so far dissolved under scrutiny. None of that proves the new cores will come back as rock, but it sets a high bar, and the place that bar gets cleared is a lab bench with slices under a microscope.

**Chapter 8: Evidence-based conclusions**

**[27:52]**
So, what did Gopher’s camera actually reveal? What to watch for. It revealed a freshly drilled hole in loose sediment, a robot that could not yet drive into the spaces it was sent to film, and an ant. That is the honest answer, and I don’t think it is a disappointing one. A borehole is only a few inches wide. So, a camera lowered down it sees a narrow tube of dirt, a keyhole view of a very large room. What the footage really exposed is the gap between what each tool on this hill can do and what the headlines said it did.

The photographs gave everyone a shape. The radar gave them echoes. The camera gave them dirt. The only things on this site that can name a material are sitting in refrigerated core boxes right now until they are examined. The honest position is the one a careful investigator would hold. Interesting, unproven, and waiting on evidence that no headline can supply.

The first thing to watch arrives in November when Bakhtiar’s full radar report is due. What matters is whether it includes the raw data so other specialists can check whether those corridors hold up. If a second team can run its own filters on the same measurements and still see the straight lines, the corridors become far more credible.

When the lab results land next spring, look for three things. Look for thin slices from that hard layer showing actual wood cells. Geologists grind rock into slices thin enough for light to pass through. And even petrified wood can preserve its cell walls in fine detail. Look for signs of shaping such as cut faces or joints rather than natural breaks. Under magnification, rock splinters vary differently from timber that human hands have cut. And look for the cores from inside the outline to differ from the control holes in a way that points to something built. Without control holes, nobody can say whether a result is unusual or simply what this hillside always looks like.

One caution: fully mineralized wood could not be radiocarbon dated, so the team would need other evidence. If all three show up, this hillside earns a serious place in archaeology. If the slices show volcanic rock, the verdict of that 1960 dynamite crew will look very good 67 years later.

When those lab results come out, I’ll go through them here, line by line, along with more investigations like this one into the machines and expeditions chasing history’s biggest claims. Subscribe so you’re here on the day those cores finally come.