The Bible underneath it

Noah’s Ark, Found Again

The same hillside has been called the Ark, on and off, since 1960. Every geologic examination found rock. The newest proof is a press release.

The argument

In October 2026 a group called Noah’s Ark Scans announced that radar had found a man-made structure under a boat-shaped hill in eastern Turkey. It spread online as the Ark, found at last.

This hill has been called Noah’s Ark, on and off, for more than sixty years. Every independent geologic examination found natural rock. The newest announcement came before its own evidence, and that order of events is the real story.

Church leaders have taught that the flood covered the whole earth.So for many members, a found Ark would mean something.

This hill was tested decades ago.One of its leading champions ended up co-writing the paper calling it a common geologic structure.

The 2026 “report” is a press release.The conclusion went out first. The technical report and the lab results were scheduled for later.

The radar has a public track record.In a 2000 to 2001 military test, it could not tell squares with buried bombs from empty ones.

The certainty came first, and the evidence was scheduled to follow.That is the same order a testimony runs in.

1. Why a found Ark would matter here

I have not found an official Church statement that settles how far the flood reached. But the clearest teaching in its own magazine is not ambiguous.

Donald W. Parry, assistant professor of Hebrew at BYU, Ensign, January 1998

Taken altogether, these statements should convince every believer in the Bible that the great Deluge was a worldwide event, not a localized flood that filled only the Mesopotamian or some other region.

The same article quotes Elder John A. Widtsoe calling the flood “an immersion of the earth in water,” the earth’s baptism. Brigham Young taught the same in 1860: the earth “has been baptized with water.”

Read the Ensign article

The Book of Mormon goes further than the Bible. Ether 13:2 says that “after the waters had receded from off the face of this land it became a choice land above all other lands.” In the usual Latter-day Saint reading, this land is the Americas. In plain English: the flood was over America too, on the other side of the world from Turkey.

So when a headline says the Ark has been found, it does not land as trivia. It lands as a confirmation. That is why it is worth looking at what was actually found.

2. The hill, and the champion who changed his mind

The place is called the Durupınar site, after the Turkish army captain who spotted it in an aerial photo. It is a boat-shaped hill about 538 feet long (the group behind the 2026 announcement says 515), near the Iranian border.

1959

Captain İlhan Durupınar spots the shape in a Turkish Air Force photo taken for a NATO mapping mission.

1960

An expedition surveys it, including a professor of photogrammetry (measuring land from photos). The finding: no archaeological remains. A freak of nature.

1977

Ron Wyatt, an amateur explorer, revives it and promotes it as the Ark.

1985

David Fasold, a former merchant marine officer, joins Wyatt’s expedition and becomes one of the site’s leading champions.

1994

Fasold visits with Australian geologist Ian Plimer and reverses: “I believe this may be the oldest running hoax in history.”

1996

Fasold co-writes the paper calling the site a natural rock formation, with geologist Lorence Collins.

The paper is titled “Bogus ‘Noah’s Ark’ from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure” (Journal of Geoscience Education, 1996). It went through each piece of evidence people had pointed to:

Exhibit A

Collins and Fasold, 1996

The “iron brackets” were granules of limonite, a natural iron oxide that forms when volcanic minerals weather.

What it establishes: The metal fittings are a mineral that grows in the ground on its own.

Exhibit B

Collins and Fasold, 1996

The “metal-braced walls” were natural bands of limonite and magnetite in tilted rock layers, on the sides of a syncline, a fold where rock layers bend down into a trough.

What it establishes: The boat shape and the “ribs” are what a fold in the rock looks like from above.

Exhibit C

Collins and Fasold, 1996

The “petrified gopher wood” was crinkled metamorphosed peridotite, a rock from deep in the earth.

What it establishes: The wood is not wood.

Exhibit D

Collins and Fasold, 1996

The stone “anchors” said to have hung from the Ark were made of volcanic rock from the nearby mountains.

What it establishes: If they hung from a boat that floated in from Mesopotamia, they would be Mesopotamian rock. They are local.

One of this hill’s best witnesses was a man who had championed it, and he walked away from it.

What Fasold believed at the very end is disputed

Fasold died in 1998. Some Ark promoters say he came back to believing in the site before he died. Lorence Collins, his co-author, said he stayed skeptical. Neither claim is settled. What is settled is what he signed in 1996, and what he said under oath in a 1997 Australian court case.

3. What was released in October 2026

The group sent out a press release. Here is what the scientist who ran the radar said in it.

Dr. Khosrow Bakhtar, Bakhtar Research and Engineering, press release, October 1, 2026

It could be a ship. It could be a spaceship. What I can say from the radar is that it is organized, it is structural, and a solid geological mass would not have returned such a strong signature.

Read the press release

He also said why he is sure it is not rock: “If it was from geologic origin, we would have not seen it at all since we masked the subsurface geologic features.” In other words, his radar can switch off anything natural, so whatever is left must be man-made.

That is the whole claim. Now look at what the same press release says has not been released yet.

What came out, and when

From the group’s own press release, October 1, 2026.

Released on October 1

The conclusion: “not geological”
A handful of images and quotes
A link to donate

Still to come

The full technical report: expected November 2026
The raw radar data
The lab results on drilled samples: late spring 2027
Any independent or peer-reviewed check

The release mentions neither raw data nor peer review. The left column is what the headlines were written from

4. What the radar has done before

Bakhtar’s system has been tested in public before, under the name EarthRadar. In 2000 and 2001, the Institute for Defense Analyses, a research group that works for the Defense Department, put it through a test at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia: find buried unexploded ordnance in marked squares, without being told which squares held ordnance, which held scrap, and which held nothing.

Institute for Defense Analyses, evaluation of EarthRadar at Fort A.P. Hill, published in IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, May 2002

The EarthRadar showed no capability to distinguish squares containing emplaced UXO or clutter from empty squares.

UXO means unexploded ordnance: buried bombs and shells. The evaluators’ bottom line was blunter still: “In short, the EarthRadar provides no operational, technical, functional, or performance benefit to the unexploded ordnance detection problem.”

The published evaluation

That was twenty-five years ago, and the technology has been worked on since (more on that below). But the job at Durupınar is not finding one kind of object. It is sorting every echo from deep underground into two piles, natural and man-made, and then announcing which pile won.

The radar once could not tell a buried bomb from an empty square. Now it is said to tell a buried ship from buried rock, before anyone has seen the data.

5. The seashells on the mountain

Alongside the radar news, supporters shared photos of fossil seashells high on Mount Ararat as proof that a flood once covered the mountains. Seashells on mountaintops are real. They are on the very top of the world.

The summit of Mount Everest is limestone that formed on a seafloor about 450 million years ago. It holds fragments of sea creatures: trilobites, crinoids, and ostracods, tiny shelled crustaceans. The International Union of Geological Sciences lists it among the world’s first 100 geological heritage sites. It got up there when the plate carrying India crashed into Asia, beginning about 55 million years ago, and pushed the old seafloor into the sky.

A flood drops shells on top of a mountain. Shells inside the mountain’s own rock, layered the way a seafloor builds up, mean the rock itself was once underwater, and then it rose.

6. The story itself

Set the hill aside and take the account on its own terms. Genesis gives enough numbers to check it.

Eight people step off the Ark.Noah, his three sons, and their four wives (Genesis 7:13). Every human alive descends from them.

Within a century or two, the earth is divided.Add the ages in Genesis 11:10–16 and Peleg, in whose “days was the earth divided” (Genesis 10:25), is born 101 years after the flood. That division is commonly read as the scattering at Babel.

Babel produces the world’s languages.Ethnologue’s 2026 edition counts about 7,170 living languages.

And the flood has a date.The ages in Genesis 5 put the flood 1,656 years after Adam. The Church’s own Old Testament Student Manual chart does the math: Adam born about 4000 BC, and the “Flood commenced at approx. 2344 B.C.”

By 2344 BC, the Great Pyramid of Giza had already been standing for about two centuries. It was finished around 2560 BC, and Egypt’s Old Kingdom, its records, and its pyramid building carry on through the flood date without a break (the Old Kingdom runs until about 2181 BC), as if nothing happened. Because, by every record they left, nothing did.

For Latter-day Saints, Babel is not an optional detail. The Book of Mormon’s Jaredites begin there: Jared and his brother “came forth … from the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people” (Ether 1:33). The flood, the eight survivors, and the tower are one connected story, and the Book of Mormon is built on the end of it.

Eight people, one century, seven thousand languages, and a pyramid that kept standing through the whole thing.

What is true on the other side

The length is close. Genesis 6:15 gives the Ark as “three hundred cubits.” With the ancient Egyptian royal cubit of about 20.6 inches, that is about 515 feet, near the hill’s 538. That match is why people still take it seriously. With the more common 18-inch cubit, it is 450 feet.
Many members read the flood as local. FAIR, the volunteer group that defends the Church, notes that Church leaders “typically treat the Flood as global,” but it also lays out a reading in which the flood was limited to one region, and argues Genesis was not written as a science text. The 2026 Come, Follow Me lesson on Noah does not address the flood’s size. Nothing on this page asks anyone to give up a local or symbolic reading.
The radar has improved since 2001. Bakhtar’s company reported to the California Energy Commission in 2024 that, in blind field tests, it found buried gas pipes and identified their material correctly every time. That is a real result. It is also a different job: finding a buried gas pipe, from a few inches to about fifteen feet down, with the frequency tuned for the job. The same report says that outside its tested range, “ground characterization should be conducted” first.
Even many people who believe in a literal Ark reject this hill. Answers in Genesis, the creationist group that built the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, has doubted it for years. Its geologist Andrew Snelling pointed out that the site sits in a valley, not on “the mountains of Ararat” where Genesis 8:4 puts the Ark, and that the group’s geophysical imaging is “subject to interpretation based on the bias of the interpreter.”

The common rebuttals

“It’s only preliminary. Wait for the full report before you judge it.”

That is exactly right, and it is the whole point of this page. The group did not wait. It announced “not geological” and asked for donations before the report, the data, or the lab results existed for anyone to check. Waiting for the evidence is the standard. It is the standard the announcement skipped.

“He’s a defense scientist with forty years of experience. Who are you to second-guess him?”

His experience is real. So is his record, and it is public. When defense evaluators tested his radar in 2000 and 2001, they found it “showed no capability to distinguish squares containing emplaced UXO or clutter from empty squares.” Experience tells you someone has done the work. A test tells you whether the work finds what it claims to find.

“Maybe this hill is not the Ark, but that does not mean there was no flood.”

True. One wrong hill does not settle the flood. The rocks do that, all over the world, the same way they do on Everest. And a believer who answers by shrinking the flood to a local one is back in Ether 13:2, where the waters “receded from off the face of this land,” an ocean away from Mesopotamia.

What this means

The hill was examined in 1960, and it was rock. It was tested again in the 1990s by the man who had championed it, and it was rock. In 2026 it was announced again, with the conclusion released first and the evidence scheduled for later.

The people sharing that headline were not stupid, and they were not lying. They already knew the Ark was real. The headline did not make them certain. It agreed with them.

When the certainty arrives first and the evidence is scheduled for later, the evidence was never what produced the certainty.

That is not only true of a hill in Turkey. It is the same order a testimony runs in: feel it first, then go looking for what confirms it. The first page on this site is about that order.

This page is part of a 76-topic library. Every claim links to its source, most of them the Church’s own. Read it on the full site or browse every topic.