Another Noah's Ark in Turkey

Let's get one thing clear. What this lens is doing is objective reportage. I am not making any of my own claims about Noah's Ark or whether the Bible story is true or not.

My OPINION - a very different thing - is that the whole Noah's Ark tale is a reaction to a natural event (the flood) that happened a very long time before the Bible story was written and like most traditional tales was changed many times by the tellers down the ages, making it impossible to separate truth from myth.

Of course this is going to annoy the people who believe every word of the Bible literally and choose to ignore science. That is THEIR choice and their opinion.

I am presenting links and information about the new claim and older ones, along with factual comments about the claims, and leaving it to others to make up their own minds.

If you are a believer in the Bible story, you still have something of a problem, because you have to decide among all the stories that have emerged over the years, which is true. While some Creationists claim that carbon dating is rubbish to back up their idea that the world is only about 60,000 years old, in the Drupinar Ark find, carbon dating is heavily relied on to back up the claims for the age of the find, matching the flood records.

Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East at Stony Brook University in New York State said on hearing about the latest claim "I don't know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn't find it"

Well of course, if you swan off into the wild blue yonder with a lot of other people's money to find evidence of an ancient myth, you are going to look a little stupid if you go home and tell them, 'Sorry we didn't find anything' . Britain's Sir Walter Raleigh was reportedly executed because he DIDN'T find Eldorado. The words "South Sea Bubble" come to mind.

In 2006, a Christian based expedition searching in Iran's Elburz mountains claimed to have found evidence of the Ark.

Two other expeditions in 2003 and 2004 also to Ararat were shown to be based on poor evidence and there were several other expeditions in the 1970's and 1980's producing equally flimsy results.

Wikipedia mentions a selection of hoaxes including one commissioned by Nicholas, the last Czar of Russia who was imprisoned or dead at the time it happened, and a wonderful April Fool's hoax with a collection of improbably named characters.

Another lens here on Squidoo closely examines the Drupinar find, and even shows the supposed cross section of the Ark, although there seems to be very little to support extrapolating such detailed evidence on the website quoted which also claims that dinosaurs existed alongside far more modern species and claims a total of just 16,000 species for the entire earth. Since new species are being discovered almost weekly, where do they come from if you believe that evolution doesn't exist? This website gives a scientific estimation of the number and breakdown of species. Remember that creationists insist that all the species ever created existed at the time of Noah and no new ones have evolved. How can they explain the difference?

Unfortunately if you built a ship with the cross section shown on the above website, it would be completely unstable and would very soon turn upside down!! The weight and movement of water sloshing about in the tanks on the outside edges would cause it to roll further each time(free surface effect ), helped by the poor animals being flung about in the open areas amidships. This is why the car ferry 'Herald of Free Enterprise' turned over off the Belgian coast and why highly specialised loading calculation software is used to ensure that container ships don't do the same. I worked for a container shipping company a few years ago on this software, which is based on the premise that the heaviest weights are kept close to the centre line and low down.

I don't know what the 'stone anchors' are supposed to do other than cause a severe imbalance in the Ark fore and aft. Usually a solid anchor sits on the bottom and holds a ship in one place, it does not just dangle in the water. A drogue, or true sea anchor is a light buoyant object trailed aft, used to slow a vessel down, not a huge lump of stone. See the photo above and follow the link. The ark as shown in Ron Wyatt's claim and the other websites quoted above, appears to have no means of propulsion., Perhaps poor old Noah and his sons were sent out in a rowing boat to tow it along.

On the lens quoted, the photo taken in 1960 by a Turkish military pilot shows a boat shaped formation on an almost vertical wall of rock, described as 'part of a landslide', yet later photos of the excavations show a much flatter plot, some distance from mountain peaks. Draw your own conclusions, but mine is that they are not even the same location.

The most absurd feature of this design is the premise that animals were kept in an open area, with nothing to stop them attacking and or/eating each other. One of the sillier ideas proposed to keep rabid meat-eating dinosaurs like velociraptors and T.Rex happy was that they would be happy with a diet of raw meat, something that they could probably not even have digested.

You cannot say that on the one hand you believe carbon dating if it gives you a dateline for matching flood evidence with artefacts found at any of the supposed Ark sites, but on the other hand it is nonsense and you don't believe in it when it comes to dating when the dinosaurs lived.