That Unending Search For Noah’s Ark

By James Donahue

September 2004

It seems there is always a new expedition getting organized to climb Mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey because some aerial or satellite surveillance photograph has caught an image of a ship in the ice.

The purpose of these climbs . . . and there have been many . . . has been to prove an ancient Biblical myth that a man named Noah and his family built a wooden ship that carried them and a horde of world animals through a destructive world-wide flood that lasted 40 days and 40 nights.

There have many claims that remnants of the ark were found, but then lost again in the ever shifting ice and snow atop the mountain where the Genesis account claims the ark came to rest.

This summer a 30-member U.S. and Turkish team is poking around in the mountain ice on a $900,000 expedition, led by Roman Catholic entrepreneur Daniel McGivern, because McGivern wants to investigate another suspicious dark patch caught by a satellite photograph.

He says a close examination of that picture revealed to him what looked like three beams and a crossbeam, suggesting the remains of a wooden ship. He believes global warming is causing a lot of the ice and snow on the mountain to melt away, and that the remains of the ark may finally be exposed.

The expedition received quite a bit of coverage, especially in places like Christianity Today. And small wonder. A sweeping paradigm shift in world philosophies coupled with exposure of church sex scandals has caused a major drop in church membership.

It is as if the Christian world badly needs a miracle, like proving the existence of an ark on Mount Arafat, to bring a halt to this looming landslide that threatens its own future.

McGivern expressed it all in a press conference at Washington before launching his expedition. He said the discovery of the ark would be “the single greatest event since the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” He said such a discovery would “solidify the faith of many Christians” and hopefully draw new converts.

Indeed, that is what a dying church desperately needs just now.

Unfortunately, all this team will prove if it finds the remains of a ship on the mountain is that a world flood happened, and that a number of humans may have used it in an attempt to escape.

Chances are, however, that if they used a wooden man-made ship, they didn’t survive. The collapse of the vapor canopy that caused the world flooding brought extreme upheavals, plate movements, volcanism and other disasters that made it difficult for all life to survive for more than a mere 40 days and 40 nights.

And any biologist or geneticist can tell you that it takes more than the genes of a single family of both man and beast to carry the genetic diversity necessary to continue the species once the ship has landed on dry ground. Thus Noah, his wife, and their three sons and the son’s wives, were not enough to keep the human race going. It took an estimated 150,000 humans to do that.

The Christians will argue that God can work miracles and that he manipulated the seeds of these few humans. But so might an alien like Lucifer.

In fact, Aaron C. Donahue’s story about a Luciferian ship carrying Noah and the DNA of an estimated 150,000 humans and a broad variety of animals into the future is much more plausible than the Bible story about a wooden boat.

Donahue sees Noah and his family living in a world of grass. There are no trees, although the seeds are in the ground and the trees are beginning to grow, as civilization begins all over again.

That suggests that it took hundreds, if not thousands of years for the Earth to settle down again after the disaster caused by the canopy collapse. There was no way for a small family and all those animals to exist for that long on a 600-foot-long floating wooden craft.