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Grifters of the Lost Ark (again)

Grifters of the Lost Ark (again)

Last updated on: October 21, 2026 at 5:27 pm by Fred Clark

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Grifters of the Lost Ark (again) 2026-10-21T17:27:19-04:00 Fred Clark

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Here is an item from two weeks ago: “Lauren Witzke Promises an ‘Exciting Announcement’ About the Discovery of Noah’s Ark in Two Weeks.”

We already know what this “exciting announcement” will be. It will be that the pious-sounding “researchers” now believe they’re closer than ever to finding Noah’s Ark and that they just need some more money to finish the job. Every “Exciting Announcement About the Discovery of Noah’s Ark” always turns out to be “Give us more money.”

This is a scam. It is an old scam and it is an evergreen, perennial one, because it still works.

And it still works, in part, because news outlets reporting on it can never seem to resist piggy-backing off of the scammers and seeking to gobble up attention by elevating the same dubious claims the scammers are using to siphon money from their marks.

Thus we get headlines like this one from the Forward, “Christian archaeologists are hell-bent on finding Noah’s Ark. Do they have a chance?”

That piece focuses on Durupinar, a rock formation near (near-ish — about 20 miles away from) Mount Ararat in Turkey that is exactly the same size (well, OK, roughly close to something like the same size) as the dimensions of Noah’s Ark in the biblical stories patched together by the redactors of Genesis.* From certain angles, pareidolia and wishful thinking can make Durupinar look vaguely boat-shaped. Or barn-shaped. Or rock-formation-shaped. But, yeah, I can kind of see a boat, I guess.

It looks boat-like or building-like enough that Ilhan Durupinar, the Turkish military officer who first discovered the formation in 1959, took part in an expedition to see if it might be the petrified or buried remains of some man-made construct. They did a lot of digging and a little dynamiting and disappointedly concluded that, nah, it’s just rocks.

I don’t begrudge any of the Turkish archaeology grad students now working the same site. They were hired on to take soil samples and mess around with ground-penetrating radar and such at this site within sight of Mount Ararat. Work is work and a job’s a job and research is research, and if the guy signing the checks is some kooky American fundamentalist “in search of Noah’s Ark,” then well, whatever, it’s still potentially meaningful work on a weird little geologic feature that it would be good to better understand.

But I do begrudge the reporters and news publishers who write teaser headlines asking if “Christian archaeologists … have a chance” to find Noah’s Ark before belatedly explaining, a dozen paragraphs down, that no, no they do not.

That Forward article is pitched as click-bait, but it’s a model of journalistic decorum compared to the tabloid sleaziness of the Daily Mail piece Hemant Mehta discusses here. The headline to that article says “Noah’s Ark resting place ‘100% confirmed'” and “Astonishing ‘man-made’ structure is detected buried deep underground.” That’s what the folks asking for money are claiming about their “research,” but none of it is true. The Daily Mail, being the Daily Mail, doesn’t admit that until way down in its story — below the pay wall.

Headlines like that may get clicks, but they also help the scammers keep the scam going.

The headline on this RNS story is more accurate and appropriate: “Why people keep looking for Noah’s Ark in a natural rock formation in Turkey: A scholar of early Christianity explains.” That headline doesn’t mislead in an effort to attract attention and instead simply restates the conclusion of the half-dozen or so previous examinations of the Durupinar site, all of which confirmed this to be a “natural rock formation.” (“Scholar explains” might be the polar opposite of a click-bait headline.)

The author of that piece, Eric Vanden Eykel, is gently charitable toward the various Ark-seekers and independent “researchers” who have taken up this cause over the years. He focuses on the religious and spiritual impulses that drive support for this quest:

The current search at Durupınar, like those that came before it, assumes that behind the biblical story there is tangible evidence just waiting to be found. For nearly 70 years this boat-shaped formation has kept that possibility alive.

Ancient flood stories and how they changed across cultures can reveal how people made sense of catastrophe, human violence and the possibility of starting over. A boat-shaped formation in eastern Turkey probably cannot.

Vanden Eykel, like the editors of this Wikipedia page on “Searches for Noah’s Ark,” seems to be working from the commendable principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” That’s fine, but it shouldn’t require us to pretend that we cannot see a pattern here. It should not require us to treat each discrete new instance of a “Search for Noah’s Ark” as wholly separate from the long tradition of Barnum-esque hype and flim-flam that has, for generations, bilked people out of money in support of outlandish, insupportable claims.

At this point in time, no matter how devout and sincere any self-proclaimed seeker of Noah’s Ark may appear to be, I think the established pattern should be respected and, out of prudence and parsimony, we should presume them guilty until proven innocent.

We should presume that they’re no more credible than, say, John Joseph Nouri,** who referred to himself as”His Pontifical Eminence, the most Venerable Prelate, Monseignior. The Zamorin Nouri. John Joseph Prince of Nouri, D.D, LL., D. (By Divine Providence.) Chaldean Patriarchal Archdeacon of Babylon and Jerusalem, Grand Apostolic Ambassador of Malabar, India and Persia. The Discoveror of Noah’s Ark and the Golden Mountains of the Moon.”

As credible, in other words, as Lauren Witzke.

It’s a scam. It’s always a scam. It has always been a scam. So treat the next one as almost certainly also a scam.

I feel like I’m repeating myself here because I’m repeating myself, but it turns out the last time we discussed this scam was actually nine years ago. Here’s some of what I wrote back in 2017:

Every year we get yet another recycling of this evergreen story. These stories all have several features in common: 1) The “explorers” in question have not, in fact, found Noah’s ark; 2) They claim to have new “evidence,” but will not allow anyone else to see this alleged evidence just yet; and 3) The “explorers” desperately need more money to continue their “research,” and are asking good Christian people to send them some. To send them quite a bit, really.

This is an evergreen story because it is an evergreen scam, and it’s an evergreen scam because it never fails to prod the rubes into writing checks for the pious “research” of “ark hunters.”

The idea that a “literal” Noah’s ark is resting somewhere atop a 13,000-foot mountain in Turkey is another example of how so-called “biblical literalism” often crosses over into sheer illiteracy. These are people who don’t know how to read. They may understand words and letters, and possibly even a few sentences, but they’re incapable of understanding what it is they’re reading. Thus for them all sentences are the same and all stories are the same. The story of the (lesser, male) Noah is there in the Bible so it must be a “true” story — it must be a historical, factual, journalistic account.

This is the same kind of basic illiteracy that leads countless American Christian tourists every day to ask the proprietor of the “Good Samaritan Inn” if it’s “really” on the site of the “real” inn from the “real” story of the “real” Good Samaritan. (The “Good Samaritan Inn” is not an inn, but a souvenir stand selling olive wood tchotchkes and the like. And also the text never claims there was an actual inn and/or Samaritan.) If you’re looking for “evidence” of the “real” Good Samaritan, then you’re missing the whole point of the story.

That’s a feature, not a bug. Missing the point is the point — both for those simoniously filling their shopping bags at the “Good Samaritan Inn” and for those sending money to “support the vital biblical research” of hucksters like Ken Ham and like the folks from the “Geoscience Research Institute” whose bogus claims sparked this Newsweek report. This is what “biblical literalism” does for its illiterate “readers.” This is the service it provides them.

* Look, if you claim to have a “high view of scripture,” then you need to also have high standards for it, and that means acknowledging that what we have there in Genesis 7-9 is some sloppy, poorly executed editorial work. The editing of that passage makes the editing of the book of Proverbs look careful by comparison and the compilation of that book is an unholy mess.

Granted, it would not be fair to judge either of those texts by modern standards. The people putting them together were basically struggling to invent texts and written language on the fly with very few existing models to work from. We should cut them some slack. Sure, the redactors putting together an anthology of “proverbs” just kind of grabbed every collection they could find and stuck them together end to end without worrying about all the overlap and repetition, but on balance the collection still mostly works. But the redactors of Genesis pieced together their Noah story from distinct versions that did not overlap, so they give us not just repetition, but contradiction. It’s kind of a mess.

Contrast this with the story of the other Noah in the Bible — the story of Noah, the daughter of Zelophehad, who along with her four sisters challenged Moses and sued God Almighty, won her case, and thus changed God’s mind and thus changed God’s unchangeable commandment. That story is repeated multiple times in the Bible. This repetition introduces some variation in detail and emphasis, but the variants all cohere. We encounter the same story several times, but it’s always the same story. The different stories smooshed together in Genesis 7-9 overlap, repeat, and don’t quite manage to fit together. The seams show.

Again, we can and should be charitable about this. The redactors adapting these stories and piecing them together had very few resources to work with or models to work from. The end result is something like my old blue ’83 Chevette which had a rear right bumper from an old gray ’82 Chevette. I made it work because I had to with the constraints I was under at the time. And it kind of did work, but there was still no point in pretending it looked good.

** Nouri impersonated a Chaldean priest and spoke at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions as part of his Barnum-esque tour of America and eventually actually got himself ordained “by a faction of the Syro-Chaldean Church in Malabar, India.” It seems like Philip Jenkins must have written a multi-part series of posts about this guy at some point but if he did, sadly, I missed them.

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