Archaeological Discoveries
Noah's Ark Found! Resistivity Scans Reveal a Ship
On 11 September 1959, while studying around 10,000 aerial photographs, Captain Ilhan Durupinar of the Turkish army noticed a boat-shaped object in a photograph taken above the Ararat Mountains in Eastern Turkey. He believed the shape could not have been formed by nature, and after calculating its length and width, concluded it was possibly the remains of Noah's Ark. An expedition was sent the following year, and the object was located and reported in Life Magazine on 5 September 1960.
Having read that article, Ronald E. Wyatt, an anesthetist from Tennessee, believed the site required further investigation. Using ground-penetrating radar and metal detectors on several trips during the 1980s, Wyatt's scans revealed what appeared to be vertical wall structures within the hull shape — symmetry and layout he believed was evidence of a man-made object. A square-shaped object identified by the radar was dug up by the Turkish military and later analysed by Galbraith Laboratories in the United States, which confirmed it contained organic carbon — consistent with petrified wood rather than rock. A metallic object close to the side of the Ark, shaped like a large rivet head surrounded by a washer, was tested by Teledyne Allvac Laboratories and found to be a complex alloy including aluminium and titanium — neither of which occurs in pure form in nature, and both of which require complicated refining processes to produce. Repeated metal-detector surveys found this metal distributed in a uniform, grid-like pattern across the top surface of the ship, with none found in the ground outside the vessel.
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