Special Edition: The Search for Noah's Ark

Summary

A boat-shaped landform near Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, known as the Durupinar site, is back in the headlines after new ground-penetrating radar analysis suggested hidden tunnels, voids, and right-angled structures beneath it. Host Cliff Dunning traces the site's history from its 1959 aerial discovery through the expeditions of Ron Wyatt and David Fasold, including their claims about giant anchor stones and coded ancient coordinates. He then weighs those claims against Assyriologist Irving Finkel's cuneiform research, which describes flood arks as round or cube-shaped, and concludes the formation is a natural rock feature rather than Noah's Ark.

Key takeaways

• 1The Durupinar formation was spotted in a 1959 Turkish military aerial survey photo by army cartographer Captain Ilhan Durupinar, while Turkey was mapping its border with the Soviet Union after joining NATO.
• 2Ron Wyatt, an amateur archaeologist from Tennessee, scanned the site with metal detectors in 1977 and claimed 1984 soil samples showed decayed wood and man-made alloys. He brought Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin to the site.
• 3David Fasold, a marine salvage expert and author of 'The Ark of Noah' (1989), argued that Berossus's 'five by two stadia' measurement was a mistranslation of Egyptian 'tomer' triangle ratios and actually gave map coordinates about 17 miles south of Mount Ararat.
• 4Large stones with carved crosses and curved drilled holes near the village of Kazan were interpreted as drogue or anchor stones (Turkish 'gemitashi', meaning ship stone), some estimated at up to 20,000 pounds.
• 5Andrew Jones of Noah's Ark Scans says a 2019 ground-penetrating radar survey, reanalyzed by an independent geophysicist, showed a tunnel about 4 meters deep along the formation's center line and a central void about 13 meters deep. Geology professor Salih Bayraktutan considers the site the best candidate for the Ark.
• 6Irving Finkel's book 'The Ark Before Noah' discusses a 60-line Old Babylonian tablet featuring Atrahasis, describing a round ark. George Smith first read the Mesopotamian flood story in 1872 on a tablet from Ashurbanipal's library, which described a cube-shaped ark.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

We're back at 740 this morning on In Depth Today, the search for Noah's Ark. One of the Bible's most compelling stories, of course. Well, now, some American researchers claim they have found what they believe is evidence of the Ark buried in a remote part of Turkey. Well, it looks. Ark-shaped, doesn't it? NBC's Keir Simmons has made his way there for us with the shovel. Hey, Keir, good morning. Hey Savannah, good morning to you. It's a story we're told from childhood, isn't it? And take another look at that shape on the mountain there. A group of American Christians believe they have new evidence that that is the wreckage of Noah's Ark here in these mountains. And then look at this majestic live shot. That in the distance there is Mount Ararat. What that tells us is we're in the right place. Imagine these mountains millennia ago. Submerged by floods. And in this beautiful, biblical landscape, named in the Old Testament, the shape of a ship. The book of Genesis says Noah landed here, in the mountains of Ararat. So, could this really be Noah's Ark? New research, shared with Today, hints at that extraordinary conclusion. Believers have been drawn to this site in Turkey. close to the Iranian border since it mysteriously emerged after an earthquake in the 1940s. Christian researcher Andrew Jones from California says the dimensions match. In chapter 6 of Genesis it talks about a 300 cubit long boat. And that, if you use the Egyptian cubit, is 515 feet long or about 157 meters. And that's exactly the length of this boat-shaped object. ...

Excerpt from Earth Ancients, Oct 3, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.