Forbidden History - In Pursuit of Noah's Ark

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Near Mount Ararat in Türkiye lies a mysterious boat-shaped feature in the hillside. Could this be historical evidence for the last resting place of Noah's Ark? In this episode, we follow amateur archaeologist, Andrew Jones, and his team as they use cutting-edge archaeological methods to investigate, while experts examine if these discoveries are hard proof of the Biblical legend. Cast List: Richard Felix: A historian and lecturer specialising in local and paranormal history Lynn Picknett: Historian and researcher specialising in exposing historical conspiracies. She is also the co-author of several notable works Andrew Jones: Amateur Archaeologist Dominic Selwood: Historian, barrister, bestselling author, novelist and frequent contributor to national newspapers including The Independent, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph Jeff Sohlstrom: Ground Penetrating Radar Analyst Klint Janulis: Archaeologist & Former Special Forces Operative Matt Daniels: 3D Imaging Analyst Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian  Dr. Sheila K. Hoffman: Art Historian, Iconologist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Professor David Montgomery: Author ‘The Rocks Don’t Lie’ and Professor of Earth Science at the University of Washington Andrew Gough: Writer, presenter and editor of The Heretic Magazine Zafer Onay: Local Guide Dr. Selena Wisnom: Assyriologist, The Queen’s College, University of Oxford Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. On a remote hillside near Mount Ararat in Turkey lies a huge and mysterious boat shape. Many scientists believe it's just an unusual rock formation, but some investigators claim that amazingly, it's the physical remains of Noah's Ark. Well, we made it, guys.

This is it. We are standing on Noah's Ark. If this was a natural rock formation, it would be a jagged, regular shape, or a jumble of just little rocks and boulders. Instead, you actually see the boundaries of the boat. I had to investigate it. According to the Bible,

it was here in the mountains of Ararat that the ark landed, with Noah's family and breeding pairs of all the world's animals on board. after surviving a great flood sent by God to destroy the entire world. What is the truth? Are there other more convincing geological explanations? Or are these really the remains of Noah's Ark? Despite what the Bible says, there is actually zero archaeological evidence for Noah, an Ark, or a flood.

Sometimes there is no truth, but I am a huge believer that there are usually some grains of truth in most myths and legends. On a hillside near Mount Ararat in Turkey, this mysterious boat shape is believed by some to be the actual historical remains of Noah's Ark. The world is fascinated by stories, myths, and legends from the Holy Grail to Noah's Ark, and we're forever trying to find proof that these things exist.

I think the hunger for the search is the fact that people are searching for God. And so if someone finds the ark, then it could be proof that God exists. Over the years, many religious explorers have searched the Middle East, hoping to prove that the story of Noah's voyage on the ark during God's great flood is the literal truth. It's been a big thing among adventurers for centuries. In fact, Marco Polo way back, said the ark is on Mount Ararat, but he said, unfortunately, the mountain is too snowy to climb. During the 1970s and 80s, astronaut James Irwin,

who'd become a born-again Christian after returning from the moon, made many expeditions up Mount Ararat in search of the ark, but failed to find any evidence of it. Today, the unusual boat ship discovered nearly 20 miles south of Mount Ararat, may be the best hope of proving that Noah's Ark actually existed, and that amazingly, its remains have survived to the present day. Today, the leading investigator of the site is devout Christian Andrew Jones. Accompanied by research teams, he's been visiting and studying the site for more than 20 years.

I first came here in 1997, and I was in college, and it was like a dream come true. It was the most exciting trip, because you're thinking you're working. walking on the remains of Noah's Ark. Now I've been here about 16 or 17 times since 1997. There's always something new that happens on each trip. And now, of course, this trip we're focused on radaring the site and getting a survey work done above ground. And so that's exciting.

We're just really wanting to see what's below the ground. And so that's why we are here today. Armed with the latest scientific equipment, Andrew Jones' mission on this trip is to finally gather enough evidence to convince skeptic that the boat shaped near Mount Ararat is more than just an unusual rock formation. He's hoping to prove it really is Noah's Ark.

So all of the Arrats in Turkey, it's a 16,000 or 17,000-foot volcano, it's a strato volcano, and it has a year-round glacier on top, and we're working across the valley from Mount Arrat at the Durupinar site. Back in the 1980s, the Durupinar site was declared

a national protected area by the Turkish country. area by the Turkish government. And as a result, today, Andrew Jones and his team are able to drive right up to the once difficult to access site. In fact, we have just arrived at the visitor center. Now, the Turkish government built this building in 1987 when they dedicated a national park here for the tourists.

So we have arrived. Once their equipment is unloaded, Andrew's investigation team heads straight out to the site to begin work. He's hoping that their latest state-of-the-art scientific equipment, including ground-penetrating radar, will enable them to convince even the most die-hard skeptics that Noah's Ark really has been discovered.

Christian archaeology is a weapon of faith in the arsenal of proving to this modern scientific world that the stories in the Bible are real, and the Ark has become a totemic part of that. If it is a boat, if it is an arc, we're hoping to see basically striations that would correlate to what would be the beams and the ribs of a boat. That would be one major indicator. To skeptics, however, the site has clearly been shaped by natural geological processes. When we look at a site like Durappina, and you look at the geology and the geologic history of the area,

we know that there was glacial movement there, making it very powerful. possible, a large rock fell off the side of a mountain, and it got surrounded by rocks that are different hardnesses. In this case, it just happens to be sort of the outline of what we think of as a boat shape. To me, if it is Noah's Ark, then that's a big plus for proving that, you know, that the Bible is true. If we start digging and find just natural layers of rock and dirt down there, it would be very disappointing. I mean, I've looked at this and studied it and investigated it for half my life. Can Andrew and his research team find sufficient scientific evidence

to convince skeptics that the site is the last resting place of Noah's Ark and isn't just an unusual rock formation? Detailed analysis and precise measurement of the boat shape will provide important clues. Noah is one of the great figures of Genesis. He is the righteous man. He is the man who was chosen out of everybody else because of his piety and his beliefs and his upstanding nature to save the world. If he really did what he did, and he saved mankind and, for want of a better word, animal kind as well, then you can't get any guy on the planet that's done more for us than Noah.

So, you know, hail Noah. Andrew Jones is convinced that this remarkable story isn't just a biblical legend. He believes it's factually accurate. According to the Bible, he was a great man of faith because God said he's going to destroy the world with water, the whole world, and Noah had to believe that. There was no evidence that this would happen, but God said build a boat, and so I can just imagine him being made fun of and ridiculed for building this giant boat on land. but ultimately by obeying God, he was saved. And at the end of the story, the Bible says that the ark landed in the mountains of Ayrratt, and so where is this boat?

And so that's what we're here looking for. Most scientists believe this unusual boat shape is simply a rock formation shaped by an ancient landslide. But Andrew is hoping his research team can gather enough scientific evidence to convince skeptics that it really is Noah's art. After fully surveying the site with the high-resolution mapping scanner, the team is soon able to build a preliminary 3D picture of the parts of the boat-shaped formation that are visible above ground. So the results we've gotten we're extremely pleased with.

We can't make the determination whether it's Noah's Ark or not. What we can do is provide archaeologists the details they need to plan and then be able to do that invasive excavation. of excavation, try to see what's actually under there. As excavation of the site is not yet officially approved, over the coming days, the team planned to build up a picture of the site below ground using ground penetrating radar. But their 3D mapping of the site above ground has already helped highlight one very significant fact.

Intriguingly, the boat shape very closely matches the dimensions of Noah's Ark, as described in the Bible. According to the Bible, Noah's Ark was 30 cubits high, 50 cubits wide, and 300 cubits long. In modern terms, roughly 50 feet high, 85 feet wide, and 510 feet long, which is vast. In modern times, the largest wooden ship ever built was the early 20th century American schooner, the Wyoming. And Noah's Ark, supposedly built thousands of years earlier, would have been even bigger. I think the idea that you could have fitted two of every animal from the tiniest insects through to giraffes and elephants onto a single ship, given the technology of that time,

you know, we're really stretching the imagination to breaking point here. Many scholars have looked into the feasibility of whether Noah or someone like him could have built an arc of the size and scope to do what it was supposed to have done. And the answer always comes back to a resounding no. It's not possible. In modern times, however, a complete, full-size replica of Noah's Ark has been constructed. The Ark Encounter is a Christian theme park opened in Kentucky in 2016. To build something like Noah's Ark would have had to happen on basically a military scale. You need organization, structure, hierarchy, logistics, planning, so Noah would have had to have been in charge of all of that.

The modern replica in Kentucky required over 3,300,000 board foot of timber. Over a thousand craftsmen were employed. And it is the largest timber frame structure in the United States. These people built the ark using modern tools, electricity, gasoline, vehicles. For Noah to do all that with Bronze Age tools. It basically mean he was like kind of a Superman. And then, on top of that, he has to become a sea captain of the life. largest vessel ever built and a zookeeper. Think of all that coming together, and it just

boggles the mind. Andrew Jones, however, believes Noah and his family could have built the ark, and remains convinced that the boat-shaped formation his team is investigating is the physical remains of Noah's Ark. If this was a natural rock formation, you would not get this shape of a It would be a jagged, a regular shape, or a jumble of just little rocks and boulders in a mudflow. Instead, you actually see this man-made object, the boundaries of the boat. Christian archaeological investigator Andrew Jones is at the Duruppinar site in eastern Turkey. He's trying to gather convincing scientific evidence that this mysterious boat shape is the physical remains of Noah's Ark, and isn't just an unusually shaped rock formation, as many scientists.

scientists believe. So we're standing on the pointed uphill end of the arc. What's really interesting about this boat formation is that the pointed end is uphill. Now you might be wondering why does that matter? Well, some critics believe that this site was formed naturally, and in that case, they say that there was a rock and a mud flow, and this mud went around this rock and formed the boat shape. Now, the problem with that theory is that this is the complete opposite. If that did happen, the rounded end would be uphill.

be uphill. In this case, the pointed in is uphill. And so we believe that this formation is actually because of the boat, because of Noah's Ark, and not because of any natural processes. One prominent geologist who's taken an interest in the Duruponar site and who strongly challenges Andrew Jones' interpretation of it is David Montgomery, Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Washington. I'm the kind of geologist that's known as a geomorphologist. That's somebody who's studies the evolution of topography, how earth's surface features are formed. Well, there's a report done by Turkish geologists that have examined that outcrop and concluded that the form is actually a piece of limestone that has been rafted down the mountain on what's

known as an earth flow, which is a major landslide, kind of like a glacier made out of mud, if you will. It's a piece of Miocene limestone, 10, 20 million years old, fossiliferous, so there's fossils in it. And it's, You know, it's a hard stretch to think that you would make an arc out of rocks. As a Christian creationist who believes that the Bible is the literal truth, Andrew Jones has many disagreements with mainstream geology, however. According to geologists, the Earth is nearly 5 billion years old. But according to creationists, the Earth was created by God in just seven days, around 4,000 BC.

So if you're going to take the Bible at just what it says, then the Earth itself would be around 6,000 years old. The boat would have been a lot, you know, 1,500 years after that. So we're looking at a 4,500-5,000-year-old object. And so that would be like the conservative creationism point of view on how old this is. Now, we haven't tested it. We haven't done excavations. And I believe in the Bible accounts.

I believe, you know, it would match. but obviously no exploration has been done yet at the sea. Andrew's beliefs about Noah's Ark and the creation rely on the assumption that the world's sedimentary rocks, among which the art now supposedly rests, were laid down just a few thousand years ago during the Great Flood. I respect the Christian faith, but the creationist narrative just does not match up to the science as we know it.

It just takes something like looking at the cliffs of Dover and realizing that every piece of chalk there is the skeleton of a once tiny microorganism that's slowly, slowly built up over millions of years. And when you look at something that's 500 foot tall and you realize that deposited at maybe a millimeter a year, you start to realize the scale of what we're talking about and how immense the scale of geologic history is. However, Andrew hopes that his new scientific investigations at the Deripanar site will prove that the creationist belief in the reality of the Great Flood and Noah's Ark is accurate. Since Andrew's team hasn't received official approval to excavate the site, ground penetrating radar is the next best option to try to find convincing evidence below ground to help prove that the site isn't a natural rock formation, but really is. Noah's Ark. Is it a boat? Is it not a boat? Is it a natural structure?

Is it not a natural structure? We're all hoping it's not a natural structure. But we got to get the data back and get it processed. The preliminary results of the ground penetrating radar survey will be ready in the next few days. If the survey does indicate boat-shaped features below ground, that will be a major step forward for Andrew Jones and his team. But until any subsequent excavation is able to prove what's underground, skeptics will still point to other perceived flaws

in the belief that the story of Noah's Ark could possibly be true. The most famous part of the story, of course, is that the Ark carried breeding pairs of all the world's animals. The logistics of running the zoo on Noah's Ark is impossible. I can't even imagine trying to do it. A lot of these animals are carnivores too. They need to eat meat. Others are herbivores, such as cattle, that go through hundreds and hundreds of pounds of food a day. Just the job of removing feces alone would take everybody, all hands on deck, almost all day. Do you really believe that all those

animals went peacefully into that arm without the lions having to go at the monkeys or the tigers killing the zebras. Oh, come on. Andrew Jones does believe it, but he recognizes that Noah's voyage in the ark with all the animals would have been a major ordeal. You could only imagine being Noah with these animals for the whole duration of the flood.

And I kind of picture Noah wanting that door open right away. You know, the Bible says it was one door. And so as soon as you open that door, I bet to everybody, including the animals, just ran off the ark. ran off the ark. There's a freedom, so I can catch you that happening right here. Andrew is now going to examine some mysterious ancient stones nearby in an effort to find corroborating evidence to support his belief that Noah's arcs survived the flooding of the world and its remains

have been found. But skeptics question whether there is any scientific evidence at all that there ever was a global flood. Andrew and his local Turkish assistant, Zafferone, are taking a short trip away from the site to investigate a group of mysterious ancient stones in a nearby village. Andrew hopes they'll provide another promising clue

that Noah's Ark did land in this region after the Great Flood. Remarkably, Andrew believes the group of heavy stones found here known as drogue stones were once hung over the side of Noah's Ark to stabilize it as it navigated the choppy waters of the Great Flood, sent by God to destroy the entire sinful world. I think so far they've found like 20-something, 26 or so of these. These drogstones have holes in them,

and so all the drogstones would have been tied to the ark. A drugstone is a large standing stone, a megalith with a hole in the top center. They appear to have been used as stormstones, anchors for you. ships who are going through turbulent waters. Now we find these around the Mediterranean. We have found them in the Nile River. The question is, what are they doing in the range of Mount Ararat in this part of southeastern Turkey, which is arid. There's no rivers, there's no bodies of water, giving credence to the fact that they could have been used on Noah's Ark, traveling across what is now southeastern Turkey.

But as almost all these stones have lots of Christian crosses carved on them, skeptics point to a more mundane explanation. They're simply Christian tombstones. Yet believers in Noah's Ark have another explanation. Some scientists, they say, OK, well, if it's anker stone, what the crosses are doing on it. And what I believe personally, and what I heard from the peoples who believe,

these are anchor stones, drug stones, which is, they say this is carved it later on by Christians that they still at the time, they believe this is something from Noah's Ark. Were these stones really used to stabilize Noah's Ark during God's Great Flood, and then later reused as gravestones by local Christians who revered their connection to the Ark? Skeptics refute the suggestion. One reason is because geologists say there is no evidence for a global flood at any time in history,

indicating that the story of Noah's Ark cannot be true. You really have to throw away the last couple centuries of geology and all the science and physics and chemistry and biology and paleontology that goes along with that to embrace the idea that the world was shaped by Noah's flood. Geologic history has a much longer and more complicated story told in the sediments of the rocks themselves

than could be recorded in a single global flood. So if there never was a global flood, are there geologically plausible explanations for the story of Noah's flood? A very reasonable explanation behind flood stories can be the idea of a regional flood that essentially took out the land that people considered to be the world, their home. evidence shows that one area of the world which suffered occasional massive and catastrophic regional floods in antiquity was the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, where civilization began over 5,000 years ago.

There is evidence within the Mesopotamian region of the flood of the Tigris River dating to about 2,900 BCE. So this we can date by pottery shards that are found just just before and just after this level, this geological level, that gives us quite a firm date for that. At the time, around 5,000 years ago, local people affected by this huge devastating flood in Mesopotamia could easily have believed that the whole world was flooded. If you're looking at a worldwide deluge,

when you consider what world means to a person who only has ever been within a couple miles, 10 miles, maybe even 100 miles of the place that they were born. That's a lot different than our global concept of the world today. The Bible story of Noah's Ark surviving a global flood was written a couple of thousand years after the Great Flood in Mesopotamia. But could the biblical account have been inspired by it? The remarkable discovery of ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets

bearing the world's oldest writing has provided some tantalizing clues. Clues. Amateur archaeologist Andrew Jones is in eastern Turkey near Mount Ararat, looking for decisive proof that these are the physical remains of Noah's Ark. His research team has almost finished their ground penetrating radar survey, which they hope will identify more boat-like features of the Ark buried underground. While waiting for the results, Andrew is heading to visit a nearby site, where the graves of Noah and his wife are said to have been discovered a few decades ago. Whatever Noah was, and I'm talking about what the Bible actually says, he wasn't a human

being in any sense that we understand. For a start, he was 650 years old, but also he, according to some accounts, was a mere 12 feet tall, possibly even taller than that. Andrew Jones hopes any evidence remaining at Noah's gravesite will support the idea that he was a giant. If this part of the story of Noah in the Bible is true, then it implies that the rest of the story may also be true, and that Noah's ark did land near here. Since its discovery a few decades ago, the site has been ransacked by treasure hunters. As well as the headstones, they're said to have taken away a huge sarcophagus.

Yeah, this 18-foot-long trench was created because in 83, Some locals with the help of, they say a foreigner, dug up this grave. And it was a 15-foot-long box they pulled out of it, a stone sarcophagus. And so that suggests that whoever was buried in there was a giant, just like we were thinking that says in the Bible. Skeptics are highly doubtful about this, however. I think it's important not to equate the size of the tomb with the physical size of a man, because after all, we have tombs of popes that lived in the Renaissance.

for example, and the massive of scale. But the Pope was just a regular-sized man, maybe even shorter than we're used to. To skeptics, Noah and his wife are just legendary figures, not real people who lived around 5,000 years ago. Today, the most credible evidence challenging the factual legitimacy of the Noah's Ark story

comes from the remarkable discovery of some ancient clay tablets, bearing the world's oldest writing. Dr. Selina Wisnham and a seriologist at Queen's College University of Oxford is one of a handful of experts able to read the mysterious writing on the tablets, which come from Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, where civilization began over 5,000 years ago. It's the earliest writing system we have anywhere in the world, so it gives us our older sources of information for all kinds of facets of human life, from the very invention of cities and

agriculture, right through to the Babylonian sciences, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, etc. Over the years, decipherment of a number of Mesopotamian tablets has provided dramatic evidence about the likely origins of the biblical story of the Great Flood and Noah's Ark. This tablet is a replica of an incredibly important tablet because it was the first one to be discovered that had any trace of a Babylonian flood myth on it. It was discovered in the 19th century by a self-taught scholar, George Smith. He was reading through these, working through it,

and then he came across the reference to the Universal Flood, and this was incredibly exciting at the time. Dating to around 1800 BC, and now known to be part of the world's first great work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. This tablet was the first of many Mesopotamian variations of the flood story. that have since been found.

In all of the flood myths, the plot is essentially the same. There is a hero. He's usually a good man, a moral man, a man that follows the decrees of God or gods. And he tries to save a bit of the world, save a bit of humanity and a little bit of the animals that were populated on it by putting them into a big boat to escape a great deluge.

The similarities between the original Mesopotamian flood story in the epic of Gilgamesh and the subsequent story of Noah's written in the Bible around a thousand years later are remarkable. In both, a God tells a human figure that the flood is going to come, tells him how to get around it, tells him to build a boat. In both versions, the God tells the person to take on board two of every kind of life, all of the food that they'll need.

In both cases, actually giving the very dimensions of the boat, really detailed instructions about how to construct it. The boats of the epic of Gilgamesh's hero, Utnapishdim, and another Mesopotamian flood hero, Arthrahesus, are also intriguingly similar in size, if not in shape, to the Bible's description of Noah's Ark. Utnapishtim's Ark was supposed to be a cube. Atrahesus had an ark that was a Kufa or a kind of a coracle, a round boat, which had multiple tiers as well. And then Noah's Ark was supposed to be like three stories, a long rectangular, We've got very specific size for that, big door at the end.

What's interesting about all of these is that if we take the understanding of the space that was given to create these in the stories, they all tend to be about the same cubic space, if you will, which is really interesting. It seems to suggest that the stories descend one from the other. There are many other details in the stories that match. For example, birds are sent out three times from both the Mesopotamian boat and Noah's Ark in order to search for land. To most experts, the numerous similarities between the Mesopotamian flood story and the biblical story of Noah's Ark, written over a thousand years later, are much too great to be just coincidental. Probably the reason why there are these similarities between these stories is that the Israelites were actually in Babylonia during the 6th century BC. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had sat Jerusalem and then deliberately moved the population around and resettled them closer to the Babylonian capital.

So the Israelites would have been coming into contact with these Mesopotamian flood stories. There is absolutely no evidence. evidence of the Ark existing in Eastern Turkey. None. I think it is just some form of rock structure that's formed and looked like a boat. Andrew's investigation team, however, has just finished surveying the Deripanar site with ground-penetrating radar. Taking a first look at the data, there's great excitement that it may show hidden features of Noah's Ark buried underground. When they get about eight feet down, eight and a half feet down, we're starting to see some parallel vertical structure. And then as we go down a little bit deeper, we get down to a bright up about nine feet.

We actually see an intersection of that parallel and a horizontal. So they're actually getting right angles. So is there no way this could be natural or what? Typically, you're not going to find straight lines and right angles in a natural environment. That's a great amount. That's a man-made item. It will take considerable time for the raw data to be. fully processed. So for now, the team's initial interpretation of the data is all there is

to go on. Well, this is just raw data. It's not processed yet. We can't tell what it is, but typically right angles don't exist in nature. So this kind of leads you to believe that there may be something man-made under there. I think it definitely gives enough to say, hey, let's investigate further. Let's start digging out. Let's see what this is. Skeptics, however, are concerned that Andrew Jones and his team are simply finding what they're looking for. There's a phenomenon called Paradoia, and really it means that you kind of see what you want to see. And if you've invested a lot of your personal identity into a faith that has an idea such as the Earth is 6,000 years old, there was a global flood,

it makes sense that people who are out looking to prove this are going to start finding evidence that other people aren't seeing, and that doesn't hold up to the science. Historically, throughout the history of archaeology, throughout the history of history, when people want to find something, they often mistake what they found for the thing they wanted to find. All in all, skeptics doubt there's any chance that the story of Noah's Ark is the literal truth.

The geological evidence from the Deripanar site, along with the similarity of ancient Mesopotamian flood myths, and the logistical challenges of building, building an ark and populating it with the world's largest zoo, leads skeptics to propose other explanations. Most likely, perhaps, the story of Noah's Ark derives from a catastrophic regional flood in Mesopotamia or elsewhere in the Middle East thousands of years ago, which was vividly remembered in myth and then passed down to biblical times.

One of the important things to remember with all these myths is that No matter how old they are, underlying them, there could be some element of truth. In Genesis, it says that he should take one pair of every animal. Now that's not even remotely feasible. But that doesn't mean that there may not have been some story that went down in myth that people remembered about some person or group of people saving some local animals from a particularly disastrous flood. And I suppose that some guy living on a farm in the remote part of wherever it happened to be at the time,

at the time, Mesopotamia. Could have been a huge flood to him and his neighbors. They probably never ventured more than 20 miles away in the whole of their lifetime. So that was the world to them. Andrew Jones, however, continues to search for proof that the biblical story of Noah's Ark is the literal truth. He remains hopeful that if he can get permission to excavate the Deripanar site, in the years to come, he'll be able to find sufficient. proof to convince even the most staunch skeptics that this unusual boat shape really is Noah's Ark. Ultimately, we hope to find a ship buried below the ground. This would include rooms, floors, that would match the biblical account. The Bible talks about having three decks and rooms for the animals.

So that's what we hope to find below the ground there. Whatever the truth may ultimately be, Andrew Jones' quest to find definitive proof for the existence of Noah's Ark, the smoking gun that could prove the Bible is literally true, will undoubtedly long continue.