Photo by Mfikretyilmaz - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link
Since World War II explorers have looked for Noah's Ark on one particular mountain, Agri Dagh, which has become known as Mount Ararat. The popular film and book, "The Quest for Noah's Ark", popularized this site. Yet even though millions of dollars have been spent and hundreds of explorers have searched for Noah's Ark at the traditional location, all that has been found is two hand-hewn timbers not dating back to Noah's time and three conflicting hearsay accounts of the Ark being in a location where it is not. Proponents of this site claim that the ark is buried beneath the ice, but there is another explanation.
It is possible that they have been looking on the wrong mountain.
In 1959 while examining NATO aerial photos of his country, a Turkish army captain, Llhan Durupinar, gasped at a huge boatlike shape. It was located 20 miles south of Mt. Ararat.
Soon an expedition was put together by televangelist, George Vandeman. Riding on horseback with a military escort, the team of prominent people reached the site on June 6, 1960. They found a clear, grassy area shaped like a ship and rimmed with steep, packed-earth sides. Its dimensions were close to those given in the Bible.
Yet, the team quickly declared the site showed no sign of being man made. Their verdict was no doubt influenced by legends from the residents of Agri Dagh that the ark was fully intact and preserved. They were not prepared to examine a buried, decayed, geological site located somewhere other than on the traditional Mt. Ararat.
The world accepted the findings of the group and all further study was abandoned.
But one of the members of the group, a professor of photogrammetry at Ohio State, did not agree. Dr. Arthur Brandenburger insisted that nothing in nature could create such a symmetrical shape.
This site would have been completely forgotten except that a young man, Ron Wyatt, read about the 1960 expedition and determined that someday when he could afford it he would visit this site. Seventeen years later he traveled to Turkey and located the boat shaped site. In the same vicinity he found huge anchor stones, tombstones with marking that seemed to show Noah and his family, and ruins of a house he believed to be Noah's.
Because digging at the site is not allowed by the government, other less reliable methods must be used to examine it.
Investigation through the years by Wyatt and others has uncovered petrified wood, metal rivets, discolored soil in the shape of beams, and evenly spaced underground metal and beams running the length of the structure.
The Turkish government brought in its own expert scientists who concluded that this was indeed the remains of Noah's ark. They were so convinced of its authenticity that on June 20, 1987 they opened the Noah's Ark National Park.
Despite the growing body of evidence confirming that this could be Noah's Ark, there are those who refuse to accept the evidence and blatantly criticize Ron Wyatt and anyone who has examined this alternate site. Because of this you probably have not heard of it.
Has Noah's Ark been found? Is this the evidence that proves yet another "fable" of the Bible to be true?