The Local newsletter is your free, daily guide to life in Colorado. For locals, by locals. Sign up today!
The Old Testament tells how God became angered by the wickedness of men and sent a great flood to cleanse humanity for a fresh start. But before the flood came, God instructed the righteous Noah to build a great ship—an ark—that would preserve his family and representations of the world’s diverse array of animals. From there flows a story of doom and redemption, and, for modern men, a question: Do remnants of the ark that Noah built still exist?
For decades, there have been claims the ark has been found in the Middle East. The latest comes from Yeung Wing-cheung, a filmmaker working with a team of Christians exploring Turkey’s Mount Ararat. Citing the discovery of what could be an ancient wrecked ship, “It’s not 100 percent that it is Noah’s Ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it,” he tells Britain’s Daily Mail. Monument, Colorado, adventurer Bob Cornuke is unimpressed, calling the find on NoahArkSearch an “elaborate hoax,” according to The Colorado Springs Gazette’s Pulpit blog.
Since the late 1980s, Cornuke, a former crime-scene investigator, has made his own expeditions to Mount Ararat and Iran’s Mount Suleiman in search of the ark. Upon examining photographs by Wing-cheung’s team, he notes cobwebs in one of the pictures, which would not exist at 14,000 feet. And, the floor in one of the pictures shows concrete between stones, which Cornuke says wouldn’t have been found in Noah’s time.
He also claims to have a network of informants in Turkey who say people have been carrying old wood up the mountain for two years to assemble it into something resembling a wrecked ark. “We even have evidence of trucks coming in with wood,” says Cornuke, who runs a nonprofit from his home called the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute.