“Ark scholar” Eryl Cummings declares that the discovery of Noah’s ark would be the “greatest archaeological discovery of all time.” Physicist Roger Rusk says finding the ark would put modern, anti-religious science in doubt, and Dr. John Warwick Montgomery claims that the ark’s discovery would prove the Bible is “actual history.” Jewish, Christian, and Muslim children all over the world learn the story of Noah and his ark in the Book of Genesis: When God grows sick of mankind’s wickedness, he tells Noah to build a three-level boat with gopher wood and soak the wood with protective pitch, or tar. Noah, his wife, their sons, and daughters-in-law complete the vessel and, following God’s instructions, gather a male and female of every animal. Seven days after Noah shuts the door, rain falls for forty days and forty nights, lifting the ark upon a rising sea that covers the highest mountains. Eventually the ark comes to rest on Mount Ararat, a 17,000-foot mountain above the present-day Turkish border with Russia, and Noah’s family, along with the animals, “go forth” to repopulate the world. In 1929, English archeologist Sir Leonard Woolley claimed that he found traces of civilization during his excavations at the ancient city of Ur. There, mud had been laid down by a giant flood that covered the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Additionally, geologists found salt clusters formed from evaporating salt water on Mount Ararat, “proof” of a high flood. Roger Rusk suggests that a comet or an asteroid hitting the planet could have caused entire oceans to splash across continents. Civilizations dating back to the Babylonians and Egyptians left stories about God telling one individual to build a boat in order to save humankind from a deluge. The Greeks believed a previous civilization perished except for Deucalion, who similarly saved his wife and the world’s animals. Native American tribes pass similar stories down from generation to generation. To prove these stories are more than myth, however, archeologists must find Noah’s ark. Mount Ararat is a forbidding place, yet over the past couple of thousand years, countless climbers have returned with reports of seeing the ark. In 1829, German traveler Dr. Friedrich Parrot wrote in Journey to Ararat that at Echmiadzin, an Armenian monastery near Ararat’s base, monks displayed a reddish-brown cross made of wood retrieved from the ark. Further up the mountain at 7,000 feet, Parrot saw more relics at St. Jacob Monastery, but an earthquake buried St. Jacob in a mud slide several years later. Former missionary Harold Williams of Shreveport, Louisiana, tells a story about Haji Aram, a young Kurd who confided that he and his father once led three explorers up the mountain and found the ark, but the men were atheists and therefore swore silence. Williams had nothing to corroborate Haji’s story until years later, when he read about an Englishman’s deathbed confession that he was one of three men who saw the ark. In 1876, Sir James Bryce made a solo ascent and returned with a “partially petrified, hand-tooled timber” he found at 14,000 feet. The New York Times heralded the finding with the headline “Noah’s Ark Discovered,” but scientists scoffed. A team of Turkish climbers in 1883 found “a gigantic structure of very dark wood protruding from a glacier in a good state of preservation.” Four years later, Prince John Joseph Nouri, “archbishop of Babylon,” reported finding the ark “wedged in the ice.” Nouri wanted to send an expedition to retrieve a section of the ark and take it to the World Exposition in Chicago in 1893, but he was never able to raise the money, and when he died shortly afterward, his secret route to the ark died with him. In the spring of 1902, an Armenian boy named George Hagopian and his uncle found the ark while grazing their sheep on Ararat; George, who climbed to the boat’s roof, later described the vessel to illustrator Elfred Lee, who made detailed sketches. In 1916, after Russian aviators reported seeing the ark near a glacier pond, Czar Nicholas II dispatched soldiers to investigate; they sent measurements and photographs of the ark to St. Petersburg, but days later the czar was overthrown and the materials disappeared. Dr. Harry Morris, former professor of hydraulic engineering at the Southern California Marine Laboratory, says the dimensions of the ark given in Genesis—300 cubits by fifty cubits by thirty cubits—roughly translate in feet to 475 by seventy-five by forty-five. This “six-to-one ratio” of length to width, he claims, would make the ark difficult to capsize. Built on the banks of the Tigris River, it floated 900 miles in 150 days without a rudder or sail. He guesses that the family lived and stored provisions on the top floor, kept the roughly 30,000 birds and animals in cages on the middle deck, and used the bottom deck for ballast. Scholars estimate that the family—Noah and seven others—each would have to feed an animal every three minutes, but Dr. Morris, who wrote the 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, says most of the creatures probably hibernated. In 1933, a Los Angeles, California, radio reporter traveled to Echmiadzin Cathedral and photographed the cross that Parrot wrote about a hundred years earlier. Robert Ripley, whose Believe It or Not column was printed in hundreds of newspapers, found what may have been “Noah’s tomb” in Damascus, Syria, in 1938. During World War II, American pilots flying over Ararat reported seeing the ark locked in a glacier. In 1952, an American pipeline engineer named George Jefferson Greene photographed the ark from a helicopter, but the photographs disappeared when he was later murdered in British Guyana. During a 1955 expedition, French engineer Fernand Navarra filmed his son, Raphael, pulling a piece of “hand-hewn” timber from a crevasse at 14,000 feet. When they took pieces to America for carbon-14 dating, laboratories determined that the wood was no older than two thousand years, far short of Noah’s time, but Dr. Melvin Cook, former professor of metallurgy at the University of Utah, claims that Ararat’s extreme conditions and the partially fossilized state of the wood renders carbon dating useless. Further tests at four laboratories around the world, using other methods, established the wood’s age at nearly 5,000 years. Richard Bliss, “ad hoc professor” for the University of Wisconsin, says the piece of wood he studied came from a type of oak in the Tigris Valley whose tight rings make it waterproof. Scholars think the ark came to rest on the northwest side of Ararat at roughly 15,000 feet, but the same 1840 earthquake that buried St. Jacob’s broke the vessel in half and sent the rear section sliding down to 14,000 feet. In 1969, Navarra retraced his 1955 expedition with the Scientific Exploration and Archaeological Research Team and found five small pieces of wood. Experts believe the ark has moved continuously within a glacier, sometimes visible, sometimes not. The National Aeronautic and Space Agency (NASA)’s Landsat satellite took a photograph in 1972 that, when processed and magnified at the Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, displayed a “reflective pattern” at the point where the ark was thought to rest; that pattern was visible nowhere else. A 1974 photograph taken on Ararat by Eryl Cummings plainly shows a distant rectangular object that appears to be the rear portion of the ark. Later that year, a telescopic photograph taken with a 35mm camera from across the Ahora Gorge by climbers from the Holy Ground Mission of Frankton, Texas, shows a “plank” pattern in the rocks that could be the ark. Due to geopolitical “implications” along the Turkey-Soviet border in 1977, the Turkish government has banned any further treks up Mount Ararat.