Noah's Ark Researchers Claim Normal Geological Scan Is Proof Durupınar Is Ark

For much of the past year, the group of evangelical Christians working to prove that Turkey’s vaguely boat-shaped Durupınar Formation is the remains of Noah’s Ark has been on a media tour, spreading their inconclusive claims across major media outlets, including the Today show. They also made some bizarre claims recently about petrified trees and early modern maps. This week Noah’s Ark Scans released yet another in an endless series of nearly identical claims, garnering more media coverage for alleging to have new evidence in favor of their belief. This, however, was little more than hot air aimed at the media, since their own findings proved nothing of the sort, as they themselves admitted.

​Noah’s Ark Scans and its founder and lead publicity hound, Andrew Jones, have repeatedly claimed that there are hollow spaces beneath the surface, suggesting the site is a petrified boat. They have conducted multiple scans to map these gaps, and this time they turned to Khosrow Bakhtar of Bakhtar Research and Engineering, who scans objects beneath the ground with his modestly named proprietary BakhtarRadar system. His company was originally funded through a U.S. Air Force program, and he completed several contracts with the Air Force, leading Jones to describe him as a “U.S. Defense scientist.” (His contracts revolved around sensors for IEDs and systems for ammunition storage, not Ark scanning.)
 
Bakhtar scanned the formation and found what Noah’s Ark Scans described as “subsurface anomalies,” though the results have not been published in a scholarly journal and cannot be independently evaluated. The team claims that the findings are “challenging the decades-old claim that the site is nothing more than a natural mass of rock.” This claim is untrue since the group itself noted on its website that anomalies consistent with either empty spaces or radar reflections from moisture and clay pockets have been seen consistently since 1985.
 
Given that the Durupınar Formation was likely formed from geological processes that would be expected to produce empty spaces, fractured zones, and mixtures of different layers and materials (known as the Great Telçeker Earthflow), the anomalies appear at first glance to be exactly what one would expect. Noah’s Ark Scans discusses this itself on its own website, despite ignoring this evidence in their latest news release.
 
Bakhtar, who is not a geologist, claimed to be surprised that site was not simply one massive rock and that the ground beneath it was composed of layers with different geological composition—you know, basic geology.
 
But the key finding, which Noah’s Ark Scans minimizes, is the most important: “In the deeper data processed so far, no clear bedrock boundary has yet been identified beneath the formation.” In other words, there is no geological boundary between the formation on the surface and the bedrock below, meaning that it is not a petrified boat that landed on a preexisting mountain but is instead simply a natural part of the local geography.
 
The scan received media coverage across the tabloid press, including in such usual suspects as The Daily Mail and The New York Post.