Posted on 04/16/2002 12:12:59 PM PDT by Good Tidings Of Great Joy
It may be exactly what millions of people believe that it is. If so, it is the greatest archaeological find in centuries.
Its official name is "The Ararat Anomaly".
An independent correlation of maps of the region with information released in 1995 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency places the Ararat Anomaly at "approximately 39 42' 10" N 044 16' 30" E at an elevation of approximately 14-15,000 feet and approximately 2.2 KM horizontal distance west of the summit".
It is located by the Ahora Gorge, near the summit of Mt. Ararat, in Turkey. Turkey, in turn, is bordered by the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
The October 2001 American Journal of Archaeology attested to massive flooding in the region 7,500 years ago, noting that the Black Sea was "abruptly filled by waters from the Mediterranean when the Bosporus was cut by rising world sea levels."
Mt. Ararat itself is of volcanic origin, glaciated and covered with ice and loose rocks. Expeditions, while not impossible, are dangerous due to frequent avalanches. Indeed, an avalanche in 1840 destroyed a 500-year-old monastery, which had in turn preserved many of the artifacts that had been discovered in the area.
The weather is also treacherous. Mt. Ararat is a magnet for thunderstorms. The resulting inclement weather often impedes progress towards the summit. On the other hand, locals say that the storms result in beautiful rainbows.
Kurdish rebels tend to shoot at foreigners seeking to explore Mt. Ararat, a not-unimportant fact which has dissuaded many from pursuing the facts about whatever it is up there.
On June 17, 1949, a United States Air Force plane flew a then-classified aerial photographic mission over Mt. Ararat. The pilot, to his surprise, recorded two images of the Ararat Anomaly — a linear, oddly symmetrical shape approximately 600 feet in length, with roughly 90 feet of that length protruding clearly from out of the snow and ice.
Whatever it was appeared to be damaged.
The pilot also recorded three pictures of a second anomaly, smaller, and similar in shape, nearby. It was speculated that something had been split in half, or more exactly into a 2/3 part and a 1/3 part by one or more of Mt. Ararat´s frequent avalanches. The smaller part may have, according to more recent United States Government satellite images of the Ararat Anomaly, slipped into the Ahora Gorge.
The Ahora Gorge is a full mile wide, and reportedly miles deep. It may hold quite a few answers.
These findings were accentuated by the pictures taken between October of 1999 and the summer of 2000 by the Ikonos 2 Satellite, which resolves images as small as one meter across.
From the 1949 pictures, per the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysis thereof released in 1995, there are from the front of the surviving 2/3, now known as the Ararat Anomaly, three giant, prong-like structures, akin to what might be found in an ancient marine vessel. Similar structures were similarly identified in images of the smaller anomaly, the 1/3 of the original that may be lost to the depths of the Ahora Gorge.
Nearby, on Parrot Glacier, French explorer Fernand Navarra found a five-foot long piece of carefully hand-crafted wood.
Published reports confirm that the hand-crafted piece of wood found by Navarra was submitted to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, the Forestry Institute of Research and Experiments of the Ministry of Agriculture in Madrid, Spain and the Department of Anthropology and Prehistoric Studies at the University of Bordeaux in France.
The age of the hand-crafted piece of wood was determined to be in excess of 5,000 years old.
The site where it was found was only a few hundred meters from the site of the 1949 U.S. Air Force pictures.
However, Navarra was unaware of those pictures when he submitted his discovery: those pictures remained classified until 1982. Navarra independently made his discovery in the same area on July 5, 1955.
And then, finally, there is the interesting report of proto-Sumerian pictographs found on a rock from a cave near Mt. Ararat´s Ahora Gorge, as reported in the National Geographic Society's publication, Research & Exploration, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1994, p. 484.
The pictographs refer to the covenant of the bright bow and add "let man and woman go forth and procreate".
The pictographs, collectively, are known as the "Ahora Covenant Inscription".
Notwithstanding all of that... the central question, of course, is whether what has been officially recognized as "The Ararat Anomaly" is — or was — a boat.
More specifically, a very, very ancient boat which set forth thousands of years ago, through torrential rains, into the deepening water of a great deluge, alighting on dry land after forty days and forty nights...
If you do get a chance, and the special comes back on Discovery Channel, give it a watch. It's rather interesting in a historical way. But I still want detailed pics. I am slightly curious. :-)
I'd go tomorrow if I could, tho...
besides, you're spelling it wrong.
that cools things down a bit.
I'm all atwitter. wonder if the "boss" would allow me a few weeks vaca to do some foreign travel...
ROFLOL
I know, but I did say it left more questions than answers. :-)
I also find it hard to believe that a wood structure over 2,000 years old and exposed to the elements would still be intact. Yes it happens. But what are the chances of this 1 particular structure surviving?
Although one question that was raised about how the structure could survive, if it was there to begin with, is if it was frozen in an avalanche. The possibility in that region is supposed to be fairly high for that sort of activity, avalanche/earthquake stuff.
Again, that came from the special, so I'd take it with a grain or two of salt.
1.) Mt. Ararat isn't actually mentioned in the old pre-biblical texts. IIRC, the literally translation is that the ark came to rest in "the mountains of Urartu"(sp?), which basically covers the (very large) entirety of that mountainous region.
2.) It is a very geologically active area and the mountain has violently "restructured" itself on numerous occasions in the last several thousand years, making it improbable that any structure on it would survive that long. More recent historical structures on the mountain have been routinely anihilated by this same geological activity.
3.) And perhaps most importantly, the continuous flow of glaciers scrapes the mountain clean from top to near the bottom on timescales that are measured in centuries, not millenia. Even if the ark was originally up there, it would be in a pile of toothpicks at the bottom of the mountain by now. Any structure up above the snow level would have to be young, on the order of a few hundred years old.
So I'm not holding my breath. The ark may be in that region, but the top of Mount Ararat isn't where you'll find it. The local conditions are dynamic enough that it wouldn't have lasted up there for several thousand years.
Dude! It's all part of the Satanic-Atheistic-One-World-Government-New-World-Order that's out to hide all evidence of GOD! You see, their souls are already DAMNED, and they want company in the fiery furnaces of Perdition! If you deny this is the truth your ONE OF THEM!!!
A truly good conspiracy theory posting can be discerned from the number of exclamation points and capitalized words used therein.
The linked photo sells real well in N.E. Thailand and Laos.
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