YT YouTube2Text

YouTube2Text → Transcripts → Did They REALLY Find Noah's Ark? (The Truth)

Did They REALLY Find Noah's Ark? (The Truth) — Transcript

by True Mystery Archives · 2,652 words · 448 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

Open in transcriber Summarize with AI Download SRT/VTT

Full transcript

0:04Somewhere in a laboratory in Ankara,
0:07there are tubes of soil that could
0:08answer one of the oldest questions
0:10people have ever asked.
0:11>> A team of archaeologists have begun
0:14drilling at a site in Turkey which they
0:16believe might contain the actual Noah's
0:19Ark.
0:20>> They were pulled out of a hillside in
0:21eastern Turkey this September from
0:23underneath a shape 515
0:25ft long, a shape with a pointed bow and
0:28a rounded stern, lying on a mountainside
0:31more than 50 mi from the nearest large
0:33body of water.
0:35That is almost exactly the length the
0:37Bible gives for Noah's Ark.
0:39>> The story of Noah's Ark is told in the
0:41biblical book of Genesis. After God
0:44creates the universe and mankind begins
0:46with Adam and Eve, they go on to
0:48populate the earth. 10 generations
0:50later, Noah's born.
0:52>> For nearly 70 years, people have argued
0:54about this hill from the surface. This
0:57year, for the first time since 1988,
1:00someone drilled into it. And this story
1:02has a twist most people never hear. The
1:05harshest critics of this site are not
1:07atheists.
1:08Many of them are Christians who believe
1:10the Ark was real,
1:11who traveled to this hill hoping to
1:13prove it,
1:14and who came home convinced it was the
1:15wrong place.
1:17In this video, the army captain who
1:19spotted it from the air,
1:21the ship expert who staked his life on
1:23it and then turned against it, what the
1:252026 expedition says it found
1:27underground, [music]
1:28and the four tests that will decide
1:30whether this is Noah's Ark or one of the
1:32most convincing tricks geology has ever
1:34played. One hillside, 70 years of
1:38argument,
1:39and an answer that may already be
1:40sitting in a laboratory. Start with the
1:43place. Near the town of Doğubayazıt in
1:46the far east of Turkey, a long ridge of
1:48earth rises [music] from a barren slope
1:50about 6 and 1/2 thousand feet above sea
1:52level. Mount Ararat towers roughly 18 mi
1:56to the north. The border with Iran is
1:58less than 2 miles to the south. One
2:00detail matters more than [music] people
2:02realize.
2:03Genesis does not say the ark landed on
2:05Mount Ararat itself. It says the ark
2:08came to rest on the [music] mountains of
2:10Ararat, a whole region rather than a
2:13single peak. The Quran names the resting
2:15place as Al Judi, which many traditions
2:18identify with Mount Cudi, far to the
2:20south.
2:21Searchers have combed these mountains
2:23for centuries. For most of history, this
2:25particular ridge was hidden under mud.
2:28In 1948, heavy rains and earthquakes
2:31stripped some of it away. In 1959, a
2:34Turkish army captain named İlhan
2:36Durupınar was studying aerial survey
2:38photographs when he noticed the outline.
2:41The formation has carried his name ever
2:43since. Then people measured it and the
2:46numbers took over. Genesis gives the
2:48ark's length as 300 cubits.
2:51A cubit was an ancient unit based on the
2:53forearm, and its [music] length varied
2:55from culture to culture. Use the
2:57Egyptian royal cubit, about 20 and 1/2
2:59inches, and 300 of them land within a
3:02whisker of that 515 foot figure from the
3:05start of this video. That one
3:07coincidence has powered nearly every
3:09claim about this hill for 40 years.
3:12In the 1980s, the site exploded into
3:14[music] public view. An amateur explorer
3:16named Ron Wyatt promoted it heavily
3:19alongside a long list of other claims
3:21that drew [music] fierce criticism from
3:23trained archaeologists, including many
3:25who share his faith. [music] The 2026
3:27team says plainly that it has no
3:29connection to him. The more serious
3:31champion was David Fasold, [music] a
3:34marine salvage expert, a man who
3:36understood ships. From 1985, he worked
3:39the site alongside geophysicist John
3:41Baumgardner and a Turkish geologist
3:44named Salih Bayraktutan.
3:46Fasold made nine trips [music] to this
3:48hillside and, in 1988, published a book
3:51called The Ark of Noah.
3:53Nearby, in the village of Kazan,
3:55>> [music]
3:55>> lie enormous standing stones, each with
3:58a hole bored near the top. Fasold and
4:00Wyatt suggested they were drogue stones,
4:03[music] heavy weights hung from ropes to
4:05keep a drifting ship steady in rough
4:06water.
4:07>> [music]
4:07>> The current research team says it has
4:09counted at least 26 of them across the
4:11landscape. [music] Some carry crosses
4:13carved centuries later. In 1987, the
4:17Turkish government declared the site a
4:18national park. A visitor center went up.
4:21Pilgrims and film crews followed.
4:24Bayraktutan has never stopped believing
4:26there is more here.
4:28When earthquakes shook the region, he
4:29argues, the surrounding landslide
4:31terrain sank.
4:33Ship-shaped mass stayed raised.
4:35In his words, there is something
4:37anomalous there. For a few years, it
4:40looked as if this hillside might rewrite
4:42history. Then the man who had done the
4:43most to promote it began to doubt it. In
4:461996, David Fasold co-wrote a scientific
4:49paper with a geologist named Lawrence
4:51[music] Collins.
4:52Its conclusion was blunt.
4:55The formation, they wrote,
4:56>> [music]
4:56>> was a completely natural rock formation.
4:59Collins had a precise explanation.
5:02The ridge [music] is what geologists
5:03call a doubly plunging syncline.
5:06Rock layers folded downward into a long
5:08trough that dips at both ends. Erosion
5:11carved that fold into a pointed [music]
5:13oval, a shape that happens to look like
5:16a hull. The paper then went through the
5:18famous evidence piece by piece.
5:21The supposed iron fittings were [music]
5:23natural iron minerals in the rock.
5:25The fossilized timber was a naturally
5:27altered rock. The anchor stones in Kazan
5:30were carved from andesite, [music] a
5:32rock found right there in the local
5:34hills. A year later, Fasold went
5:36further.
5:38As a plaintiff in an Australian court
5:39case in April 1997,
5:42he publicly rejected the site he had
5:44spent years promoting.
5:4612 months after that, he was dead.
5:49Fassold died of cancer in April 1998,
5:53financially ruined by years of
5:54expeditions.
5:56And even his final opinion is disputed.
5:59His biographer, June Daws, reported that
6:02near the end, he came back to believing
6:04the site was the ark. Collins has
6:06insisted that was never true,
6:08>> [music]
6:08>> and that Fassold held his rejection to
6:10the last. The people who knew him still
6:13disagree about what he believed when he
6:15died.
6:15>> [music]
6:16>> By then, someone had already drilled. In
6:191988, Baumgardner and Bayraktutan bored
6:22four holes into the formation, the
6:25deepest reaching about 33 ft.
6:27>> [music]
6:27>> They brought up mud flow clay, then
6:30solid bedrock. A few nodules of a yellow
6:32iron mineral that Baumgardner briefly
6:35wondered might be rusted metal, and not
6:37[music] a trace of wood. Baumgardner
6:40added an honest warning at the time.
6:42A drill is a poor tool for finding a
6:44structure that has decayed and
6:46scattered. Even so, he concluded the
6:48formation was natural. [music]
6:50Bayraktutan disagreed, and has kept
6:53working at the site ever since. Here is
6:55the part almost nobody expects.
6:58Some of the sharpest attacks on this
7:00site come from Christians who are
7:01convinced [music] the ark was real.
7:04Andrew Snelling, a geologist from within
7:06the creationist movement, [music]
7:08published a detailed takedown. John
7:10Morris of the Institute for Creation
7:12Research, who has made more than a dozen
7:14trips to Turkey hunting for the ark,
7:17surveyed Durupinar twice, and concluded
7:20everything there has a simple geological
7:22explanation. Another believer, the
7:25researcher Gordon Franz, [music] called
7:27the claim bogus. Snelling's strongest
7:30point is written into the rock itself.
7:32A bed of limestone packed [music] with
7:35the fossil shells of tiny sea creatures
7:37runs right through the formation and
7:39continues out the other side,
7:41>> [music]
7:41>> straight across the boat shape. A
7:43petrified hull cannot contain a rock
7:46layer that extends beyond its own walls.
7:48[music]
7:49Snelling also pointed to a Turkish Air
7:51Force photograph showing three more
7:53boat-shaped forms [music]
7:54in the mud flows on the lower slopes of
7:56lesser Ararat. The radar evidence took a
7:59hit, too. In 1987, [music]
8:01a professional radar operator named Tom
8:03Fenner spent a day and a half trying to
8:05reproduce the scans made the year
8:07before. According to Snelling's account,
8:09[music] he could not. His [snorts] own
8:11readings showed a flat layer of bedrock
8:13under the mud. Even the famous
8:15measurement wobbles. Fassold's own team
8:18once measured the ridge at 538 ft, and
8:21Genesis never says which cubit it means.
8:24A match that only works if you choose
8:26the right ruler is intriguing. It is not
8:29proof. By the late 1990s, most
8:31scientists considered the case closed.
8:34There was just one problem with closing
8:35it. Nobody had ever looked deep enough
8:38to be certain. The deepest hole drilled
8:40into this formation was 33 ft, and
8:43nearly 30 years later, a software
8:45developer decided that was not good
8:47enough. Andrew Jones is a software
8:49developer and independent researcher. He
8:51is not an archaeologist, and he says so
8:53himself. In 2019, he founded a project
8:56called Noah's Ark [music] Scans, and
8:58started surveying the formation with
9:00ground penetrating radar and electrical
9:02[music] imaging. His team reports
9:04straight lines meeting at right angles
9:05about 30 ft underground. A central
9:08corridor roughly 13 ft wide running down
9:11the middle, and layered structures they
9:12interpret as possible decks.
9:14>> [music]
9:14>> Jones also answers the geologist
9:16directly. If the ridge were a solid
9:19block of rock that slid down the
9:20mountain, he says,
9:22>> [music]
9:22>> the scans would show rock. Instead, they
9:24show soil, which raises a question he
9:26likes to ask. Why is the soil stable?
9:29And if mud simply flowed around a buried
9:31boulder, he argues, it would pile up
9:33rounded on the uphill side and taper to
9:36a point downhill. At Derupenar, he says,
9:39the pointed end faces uphill. His team
9:42took on the bias problem, too. They
9:44collected 88 soil samples from 22 spots,
9:47inside and outside the shape, labeled
9:49them with codes, and sent them to
9:51Atatürk University in Erzurum, without
9:54saying which was which. The team reports
9:56that the soil from inside held nearly
9:58three times more organic material, and
10:01calculates less than a 5% chance of that
10:03being random. The pushback was
10:05immediate. The New Testament scholar,
10:08Jeremiah Johnston, argued that radar is
10:10notoriously unreliable in mountain
10:12terrain. The Christian apologist, Wesley
10:15Huff, pointed out that no formally
10:17trained archaeologist was on the early
10:19scanning team, and summed up the problem
10:22in one line: "A shape that looks like a
10:24boat is not evidence." The filmmaker,
10:27Joel Richardson, answered that nobody
10:29could call it real or fake until it had
10:31been properly examined. So, in 2026, the
10:35project changed. In June, Turkish
10:38government agencies approved permits for
10:40what the project calls the most
10:42extensive scientific investigation ever
10:44carried out at the site. The work now
10:46runs under Professor Çenker Atilla, an
10:49archaeologist at Sivas Cumhuriyet
10:51University. About 20 researchers from
10:53five countries spent roughly 90 days in
10:56the field, collecting close to 1,000
10:59soil samples from around 150 locations,
11:02and mapping the formation in two and
11:05three dimensions.
11:06>> [music]
11:06>> The published plan is ambitious.
11:08Continuous core samples from between 250
11:11[music] and 330 ft down, roughly 10
11:14times deeper than the 1988 holes. Deeper
11:17electrical surveys to trace the roots of
11:19the formation nearly 1,000 ft
11:21underground. And robotic cameras lowered
11:24into any open spaces the scans find. In
11:27August, the university reported new
11:29radar readings, possible empty spaces
11:31beneath the formation with fairly
11:34regular edges, some meeting at right
11:36angles. Early soil tests suggested
11:38carbon levels about 40% higher inside
11:41the shape than outside. Listen closely
11:44[snorts] to those two soil [music]
11:45figures. Three times more organic
11:48material from the earlier survey, 40%
11:51more carbon from the university.
11:53Different measurements made by different
11:55teams and neither one independently
11:58confirmed yet. Then in September, the
12:01archaeologists recovered pottery. They
12:03believe some fragments may come from a
12:05time before the flood described in
12:08religious tradition. No laboratory has
12:10dated them yet and pottery proves that
12:12people were here. It does not prove a
12:15ship was. Jones has also told reporters
12:18that the new drilling hit neither
12:19limestone nor solid bedrock inside the
12:22formation. [music]
12:23If that [snorts] holds up, it would
12:25cause serious trouble for the
12:27explanations that place a block of rock
12:29at the heart of the ridge.
12:31>> [music]
12:31>> For now, it is his statement, not a
12:33published result. Tellingly, the
12:35university describes its own work far
12:38more cautiously than the headlines do.
12:40It is not assuming there is a ship
12:42underground. It is asking a simpler
12:44[music] question. Is this shape entirely
12:46geological or does any trace of human
12:49activity survive inside it? So, where
12:51does it stand right now? Nothing
12:53recovered in 2026 amounts to a discovery
12:56of Noah's Ark and the research team has
12:58not claimed one. What exists are samples
13:01waiting. The cores are in Ankara.
13:03Professor Atilla says the team will
13:05focus on organic material and possible
13:07wood with radiocarbon dating wherever
13:10suitable material turns up. He expects
13:12important laboratory results this
13:14winter. A published volume of this
13:16year's findings and three papers at
13:18international conferences will follow
13:20with the full investigation due to wrap
13:22up in 2027. When those results arrive,
13:25the headlines will be loud in both
13:27directions. Here is how to judge them,
13:30four tests.
13:31Test one, wood. Is there timber
13:34>> [music]
13:35>> or the unmistakable chemical fingerprint
13:37of rotted timber deep inside a
13:39continuous core? Organic material near
13:42the surface can come from plants,
13:44animals, and centuries of grazing.
13:46Worked wood found far below the surface
13:48would be something else entirely. Test
13:51two, the rock layers. Collins' folded
13:54rock explanation makes a specific
13:56prediction about which layers should
13:57appear in which [music] order as the
14:00drill goes down. The cores will either
14:02match that sequence or they will not.
14:05This may be the cleanest test in the
14:06entire project
14:08>> [music]
14:08>> because it can break the natural
14:09explanation outright or confirm it.
14:13Test three, the dates.
14:16Any organic material will be radiocarbon
14:18dated. What matters is not one dramatic
14:21number, but whether several samples,
14:23tested by separate laboratories,
14:25>> [music]
14:26>> tell the same story.
14:28Test four,
14:29independent review.
14:31Will the raw data be handed to outside
14:33experts who are not told what they are
14:35looking at?
14:37Will the results appear in a peer-review
14:39journal or only in press releases and
14:41documentaries? Notice what is missing
14:44from that list.
14:45Aerial photographs, radar images, a
14:49ridge that happens to resemble a hull.
14:52Those made the headlines. They will not
14:54decide anything. Maybe the strangest
14:56thing about this story is who is on
14:58which side.
15:00A Christian apologist says the site is
15:02almost certainly not the ark.
15:04A Christian filmmaker says nobody can
15:06know until the ground is opened.
15:09A creationist researcher who spent years
15:11hunting for the ark says it is ordinary
15:13geology.
15:15And a software developer has bet years
15:17of his life that it is something more.
15:20If the cores show folded rock and marine
15:22fossils, this hillside becomes one of
15:25the most spectacular accidents of
15:27geology on Earth, a mountain that shaped
15:29itself into a ship. If they show timber,
15:32deep down and datable, every argument in
15:34this video changes overnight. For 70
15:37years, this question was argued over
15:39from above. Now, it is sealed inside
15:41tubes of soil in a laboratory in Ankara,
15:44and the answer is already there. We just
15:46have not read it yet. If a lost world
15:48swallowed by water is what pulled you
15:50into this story, this channel has
15:52covered two real ones. 8,000 years ago,
15:55a country the size of the United Kingdom
15:57disappeared beneath the North Sea, and
16:00fishing trawlers still pull its bones
16:01out of the water.
16:03And as the last ice age ended, the land
16:05bridge between Siberia and Alaska, the
16:08one that carried the first people into
16:10the Americas, vanished beneath the
16:12Bering Sea.
16:13Both videos are linked in the
16:14description, and both pick up exactly
16:17where this one leaves off.

About this transcript

This page contains the full transcript of Did They REALLY Find Noah's Ark? (The Truth) by True Mystery Archives, generated from the public captions YouTube serves with the video. The transcript has 2,652 words across 448 segments, with the original timestamps preserved so you can click any line to jump to that moment in the embedded player.

What you can do with it

Use the transcript to take notes, quote the speaker, build a study guide, generate a summary with ChatGPT or Claude via the YouTube Summary tool, or export it as a timed subtitle file with YouTube to SRT. You can also re-open it in the transcriber to translate the transcript into 100+ languages.

Free YouTube transcript tool

YouTube2Text is a free YouTube transcript generator — no signup, no daily limit. Paste any YouTube link and get the full transcript instantly, with timestamps, click-to-jump, translation to 100+ languages, AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and exports to TXT, SRT, VTT, or Markdown.