Claim CH500:
There have been many sightings of Noah's ark, including the following:
- 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).
(Unless noted otherwise, references are to LaHaye and Morris 1976.)
Source:
LaHaye, Tim and John Morris, 1976. The Ark on Ararat, Nashville: Thomas
Nelson Inc.
Morris, John D., 2001. Noah's Ark remains in the news! Acts &
Facts 30(2) (Feb.): 1-3.
Response:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
Bailey, Lloyd R., 1989. Noah: The Person and the Story in History and
Tradition, University of South Carolina Press.
created 2003-4-9, modified 2004-6-22