Posted on 06/30/2006 8:26:43 AM PDT by DannyTN
Team believes it found Noah's Ark Returns from Iranian mountain with petrified wood, marine fossils
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: June 30, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
A 14-man crew that included evangelical apologist Josh McDowell says it returned from a trek to a mountain in Iran with possible evidence of the remains of Noah's Ark.
The group, led by explorer Bob Cornuke, found an unusual object perched on a slope 13,120 feet above sea level.
Cornuke, president of the archeological Base Institute and a veteran of nearly 30 expeditions in search of Bible artifacts and locations, said he is cautiously, but enthusiastically, optimistic about the find.
Some of the team's photos can be seen here.
Also on the team were Barry Rand, former CEO of Avis; Boone Powell, former CEO of Baylor Medical Systems; and Arch Bonnema, president of Joshua Financial.
The team returned with video footage of a large black formation, about 400 feet long – the length of the ark, according to the Bible – that looks like rock but bears the image of hundreds of massive, wooden, hand-hewn beams.
Bonnema observed: "These beams not only look like petrified wood, they are so impressive that they look like real wood – this is an amazing discovery that may be the oldest shipwreck in recorded history."
The team said one piece of the blackened rock is "cut" at 90-degree angle.
Sealed with pitch
Even more intriguing, they said, some of the wood-like rocks tested this week proved to be petrified wood.
It's noteworthy, they pointed out, that the Bible recounts Noah sealed his ark with pitch, a black substance.
When the retrieved pieces were cut open, a marine fossil was discovered. In the area around the object, the team found thousands of fossilized sea shells, and Cornuke brought back a one-inch thick rock slab replete with fossilized clams.
With the discovery of wood splinters and broken pottery at the remote 15,300-foot level, the team says it also found evidence that ancients considered it an important worship site for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Cornuke became involved in the search for the ark after meeting Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin, participating with him in several searches on Mount Ararat in Turkey, but with disappointing results.
Cornuke began looking elsewhere, after finding clues in the Bible such as Genesis 11's reference to descendants of Noah coming to the Mesopotamian valley from the east. Cornuke believes that would put the biblical mountains of Ararat somewhere in northern Iran.
He also points to ancient historians such as Nicholas of Damascus and Flavius Josephus who wrote, just before and after Christ, that timbers of the ark had survived in the higher mountains of present-day Iran.
Cornuke noted that during World War II, an American Army officer and road construction engineer in Iran named Ed Davis said he saw the ark on a high mountain in the country after being led there by Iranian friends. After the war, according to Cornuke, Davis passed a lie detector test affirming he saw timbers from an ark-like object.
Before his death, Davis gave Cornuke a map showing the way to the object.
"It was right where Ed said it was in his map," Cornuke said. "After seeing it from a distance, I thought it at first unimpressive, but once we stood on the object we were all amazed at how it looked just like a huge pile of black and brown stone beams."
Noah tours
Cornuke's is the latest of many expeditions – most of them at Turkey's Mount Ararat – in search of Noah's Ark.
As WorldNetDaily reported, a new travel website is promoting summer tours to a Turkish site near Mount Ararat believed by many to be the fossilized remains of Noah's Ark.
Many believe this is Noah's Ark, already found on a mountain next to Mt. Ararat (courtesy: wyattmuseum.com)
Noah's Ark Holidays, which bills itself as an "ethical travel referral website" is behind the offer, with a pitch for the location in Dogubayazit, Turkey.
The late Ron Wyatt, whose Tennessee-based foundation, Wyatt Archaeological Research, also believed the ark is located at Dogubayazit, some 12-15 miles from Ararat.
Meanwhile, as WorldNetDaily reported in March, others who believe the vessel is on Ararat itself became excited with the release of a new, high-resolution digital image of what has become known as the "Ararat Anomaly."
Satellite image of 'Ararat Anomaly,' taken by DigitalGlobe's QuickBird Satellite in 2003 and made public for the first time in March 2006 (courtesy: DigitalGlobe)
The location of the anomaly on the mountain's northwest corner has been under investigation from afar by ark hunters for years, but it has remained unexplored, with the government of Turkey not granting any scientific expedition permission to explore on site.
In both the Old and New Testaments, the Bible speaks of Noah and the ark, and Jesus Christ and the apostles Paul and Peter all make reference to Noah's flood as an actual historical event.
According to Genesis, Noah was a righteous man who was instructed by God to construct a large vessel to hold his family and many species of animals, as a massive deluge was coming to purify the world which had become corrupt.
'Noah's Ark' by Pennsylvania artist Edward Hicks, 1846
Genesis 6:5 states: "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."
Noah was told by God to take aboard seven pairs of each of the "clean" animals – that is to say, those permissible to eat – and two each of the "unclean" variety. (Gen. 7:2)
Though the Bible says it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, it also mentions "the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days."
The ark then "rested" upon the mountains of Ararat, but it was still months before Noah and his family – his wife, his three sons and the sons' wives – were able to leave the ark and begin replenishing the world.
it shouldn't give anyone heart burn.
just takes a little humility in our understanding of God's creation, and not assuming that speed of light and time, always behave(d) as we see it/or test it in a laboratory setting today.
that experiment would tend to support that we have very limited understanding of such things.
oh so the more similitaries among and across cultures in traditional oral histories, the more likely false?
game of telephone alway starts with the true and original statement. getting distorted along the way, doesn't mean the original never happened.
Nor can you explain it (or anything else) as a non-yec; so what?
We have no need to explain anything that is so far away, and only can be 'detected' but not even examined. Creation is the best explanation for all that we can touch (IOW fits best) and explanations of that which we cannot touch can never rise above the level of assumption.
How would one test time in a laboratory?
I don't have the knowledge to even speculate? let alone assume it has behaved that same way 'in the beginning'?
talk about a humbling sense of limited knowing!!!!!!
In that 2nd picture, on the right hand side, after the break in the "board," it seems like there are two nails in the board at equal distances from the top and bottom of the board. The nails are lined up with each other. Don't those look like nails?
Too bad it's not in Las Vegas. Gil Grissom of CSI could get Noah's DNA from those nails somehow.
The concept of the 'specious present' is as close as anybody has come to explaining the true nature of time. It is that famous 12 seconds (the pulse of attention) that Madison Avenue calls the attention span and which comedians and the MSM use in their famous one-liners and sound bites. Anything of longer duration is conjectural. Check TV commercials and see if any coherent segment is longer than 12 seconds. That would mean a series of five segments to make up a one-minute spot; any fewer segments mean an amateur produced the commercial.
You claim 'similarities', but ignore the important differences. For example, the sense of which gods are involved.
There are numerous common threads in human societies--fertility rites, rules of conduct, etc. but none of this shows the Bible to be in a unique place.
You seem to think that man's knowlege is inferior, and 'only God's knowlege' matters. This is an odd view. There is the little problem of just who knows what God says? Y'know, there are hundreds of sects and cults and self-appointed priests, preachers, and shamans who make that claim, and they all quarrel with one another, making schism after schism. So the likelihood that any one of them is right has a very small probability. You could do as well by casting dice.
Flapdoodle. I can explain SN1987 and the heartburn it gives YECs very nicely.
Do you mean the image "ark12?"
On the right side I see nothing, but on the left side, just right of a break, there are two 'dots' but they are definately not nails, just irregualrities in the surface. (I blew the image up to 400% to examine it)
Sorry, no heartburn.
If you're happy with your 'explanation,' then I'm happy for you.
Hi, that looks the same as the Painted Desert in Arizona or the Petrified Forest to me.
Gotta know when to hold, know when to fold ...
I long since abandoned this thread. :-)
That was my first thought too, but given the geologist's comments, (link in post 15) I got to believe it's petrified. And they had tests come back that indicated petrified wood.
It's surrounded by rocks, could rainfall generate enough mineralized water to petrify it? I've read of things being petrified quickly in stream water. Would wood at that height above sea level deteroriate quickly or is there a chance decay would be slow enough to allow a slower petrification process?
I'd love to see some independent verification. And maybe some excavation to see if they can determine what the structure really was.
Methinks your head is exponentially larger than your spectacles.
Unfortunately, that's always a possibility. But I don't have evidence yet that he is phony or incompetent or unduly biased. However, I have read some of your other anti-Bible comments and believe that you ARE unduly biased, regardless of whether you might have any qualifications beyond that of anonymous internet poster.
So between the two of you, he's definitely getting the benefit of the doubt for right now.
I obviously don't know the answers since I wasn't there and the Bible doesn't provide the details. Proposals that I've heard that make the most sense are:
Where did all the water go after the flood?
Prior to the Flood the Earth had a fairly mild terrain without high mountains and deep sea trenches. During/After the Flood - when "...all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened" - mountain peaks rose up, and sea trenches were created in the oceans beds -- thus allowing a recepticle for the water that covered the surface of the Earth.
What did Noah feed to the lions and tigers during his voyage? As I understand it both have hearty appetites.
One proposal is that most of the animals went into 'hibernate mode'... I know if I had been on board the last ship on Earth, while 'terra firma' was getting ripped up and covered with water I'd probably been in a 'wake me when its over mode' as well...
God Bless.
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