The Noah Arc and the CIA Investigation
The American military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been searching for Noah's Ark in top-secret operations for over 51 years in the hard-to-reach Mount Ararat, but to this day everything about their expeditions is deeply secret. However, a new discovery at the foot of the mountain in Turkish Anatolia has renewed the fever to find the shrine with terrible force. In fact, it has not subsided for nearly two thousand years, perhaps because according to the Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the same global flood, the place where the ship has been docked is heaven. And the old man living there and the family that survived the Flood kept the secret of eternal youth. From this point of view, the stakes for finding the sacral area are raised immeasurably and the interest is less about archaeological or scientific curiosity than about finding the key to immortality. You need only to be serious about it, if you can have this type of faith. And some people have it. That is why the geological formation in the Durupinar area and the recently discovered traces of human activity and REMAINS OF MARINE SEDIMENTS AND INHABITANTS in Ararat turned out to be a world sensation. There are several clues that this could be the ark that preserved life on Earth. The first is that the dimensions of the natural phenomenon are the same as those of the ark described in the Bible - it is 300 cubits long, 50 wide, and 30 high, which is approximately 134x22x13 meters. It is also located in the mountain where the ship is described as touching land.
The fever for the ship kept life because it shelters Noah in a corner of paradise and there it grows the herb of eternal youth.
On the other hand, archaeologists have repeatedly established over the years that the geological formation is a natural entity. As well as that there is no evidence of a flood on the scale of the biblical one in the area. At the same time, the remains of marine species found during the above-mentioned expedition testify to the opposite. In parallel, based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, some scholars believe that there was a localized flood in the Mediterranean and Black Sea region about 7,500 years ago. In confirmation of this theory, recent years have been discovered AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BLACK SEA quite a few Chalcolithic settlements, testifying that a natural cataclysm has significantly expanded its borders. The remains of the coffin have also been searched in the sea, but so far without results. The fact is that the obsession to find Noah's Ark has been going on for over 2,000 years. First James of Nisibis testifies that he received a piece of wood from an angel during a dream. Later, the Jewish holy book Talmud developed the theory that the Assyrian king Sennacherib came upon the beam and fashioned it into a pagan idol. The Torah states that the Ark touched land on Mount Ararat. According to Josephus, it was precisely in this mountain, located in the then territory of Armenia, where there were relics and evidence. This coincides with the sources in which Jerome of Stridon is also quoted, who believes that the biblical Urartu is Ararat. Armenian legends and myths until the 11th century are identical in the accounts that the Ark is in the Corduen area. And since the territory was once inhabited by Kurds, to this day PKK fighters roam the mountains, thinking that they are the heirs of Noah, called to guard the ark.
Over the years, skeptical archaeologists have always asked one troubling question - how would the wooden hull of Noah's ark have stood up to the vagaries of time? The optimists answer that it was well protected. However, the Bible states that after Noah completes the assembly, God tells him to use pitch to coat it inside and out to make it waterproof. Therefore, many ask whether Noah's ark is not actually an allegory of some corner of a paradise earth, where Noah's family, together with the animals and birds, took shelter to survive the global disaster. It is not by chance that this hypothesis creeps in since the similarities between the biblical story of Noah and that of the Epic of Gilgamesh are striking. In the Sumerian story, the old man is called Utanapishtim and he also builds a ship in which he embarks with his relatives, taking with him all kinds of birds, animals, and plants. In the epic GILGAMESH KNOWS THAT HE SHOULD DISCOVER THE SAGE and this heavenly place, and reaches them after a series of vicissitudes. When he finally finds him and his wife, he feels sorry for the woman and asks her husband to give him something so that he can go home "with honor" to his family. After a short thought, Uttanapishtim says that he can reveal to him the secret of a plant with which he can regain his youth again. Left with no strength, Gilgamesh embarks on a new journey and finds it. But he decides to first give the herb to the oldest man in his town to eat. If he survives and rejuvenates, then he will try it too. So Gilgamesh ignored Utanapishtim's instruction that only one stab was enough. Unfortunately, while one day he was bathing in the river, a snake crept in and took away the precious plant that hides the secret of eternal life.
It is for this reason that for the past 2,000 years, Noah's Ark seekers have not sought it out for the thrill of touching its wooden hull, but rather to obtain the thorny plant in question and locate "paradise." The craze to find the ship began a long time ago, but between 1700 and 1800 appeared some more concrete historical chronicles and it is clear nowadays that over 40 expeditions were carried out in this period and more than 120 after 1900. But the real boom came afterwards when George Hagopian stated that while he was a boy in 1908, his uncle took him to Mount Ararat in the Ahora Gorge region. It is a canyon carved as a result of a volcano erupting in 1840, with a depth of about 400 m. THE PLACE IS ALWAYS COVERED WITH THICK ICE and it was there, Hagopian claims, that they found a large ship and he walked on its roof. His words provoked many adventurers, but also the American military, who undertook their first expedition in 1943. Warren Gray, a retired intelligence officer from the US Air Force who served in Europe, Turkey and the Middle East, tells about their journey and breathtaking adventures in his memoirs. He himself has tried to document them, and summarizing the information, he claims that a better place to shelter and conceal Noah's ark is hard to find. According to Gray, it is guarded by a deadly avalanche-prone mountain, with unrelenting border tensions, with fogs, strong earthquakes creating deep fissures, periodic volcanic eruptions, crumbling rocks and massive ice blocks, roaming bandits and PKK fighters, raging winds with speeds of up to 160 km per hour, hungry brown bears, rabid dogs, vipers, scorpions and ferocious wolves. Gray traces the chronology of the search for the coffin from 1957, when the U.S. Air Force UNDERTAKES THEIR FIRST SEARCH WITH A RECONNAISSANCE PLANE U-2 Dragon Lady. In 1973, through the KN-9 Landsat satellites, the CIA began observations in Ararat, and a year later, two high-speed SR-71A Blackbird aircraft took pictures over the mountain.
The research seems to be paying off because on December 31, 1977, it was reported that Noah's Ark was spotted by both President Jimmy Carter and many eyewitnesses who were with him aboard Air Force One. Photographer Ronald Bennett is also quoted on this occasion as saying: "We were on our way from Poland to Tehran to attend a New Year's celebration given by the Shah... We looked down, we should have seen Noah's Ark... There, clearly visible was a large, dark boat. It was partially covered with ice and snow. I am convinced, based on what I saw there, that it is Noah's Ark.' Another colleague of Warren Gray's, Ed Belling of the US Air Force, also climbed the mountain in 1973, reporting that he saw a giant structure in the gap, as THE FRONT END OF THE COFFIN HAS BEEN BROKEN OFF. Its roof had a 10-degree slope and looked like a huge box. A year later, a U.S. special operations team code-named "Stern Copy" went on a secret mission to the Armenian section of the Soviet border. While the military was trying to capture the enemy's radar, they came across a huge wooden structure. In their conclusion, they assume that this should be Noah's Ark. The boys were so impressed that they sent a report describing what they saw to the White House, Gray added. According to him, the fever for the Ark continued in 1974, when a pilot codenamed Al Chappell flew on a top secret mission to Ararat to take pictures of an object "buried in ice, overhanging a cliff." He described it as something like a man-made boat. However, the report with the film taken by the military aviator was classified. A few months later, the plot got complicated because the world-famous Noah's Ark finder, Dr. John Morris, entered the game. In 1975, the scientist wrote to Congressman Robert Wilson that the aerial photographs taken in August at his request had not yet been given to him. Wilson took this to heart and turned to the CIA but in March frustrated wrote back to Morris that THE SHOTS ARE CLASSIFIED INFORMATION and cannot be given even to Congress. After hitting rock bottom, in 1983 Dr. John Morris secured a permit from the Turkish government to extensively circumnavigate the Ahora region of the formidable Ararat with climbers. In his article, he says that his goal was to penetrate the caves and possibly find inscriptions pointing to the location of Noah's Ark. The reason was that local Kurds told him that they had seen ritual objects in some of them, but they did not dare to touch them, as they were superstitious. Morris and his associates made several attempts, but luck failed them - as always THE WEATHER HAS BEEN A NIGHTMARE some of the expedition were seriously injured, others refused to risk their lives and abandoned the attempt . Morris was disappointed because some caves remained untested as a result. Two years later, in 1985, Maj. Gen. Ralph Havens told researcher Alfred Lee that the Air Force had seen and photographed an object resembling Noah's Ark. Later, in 1989, the French SPOT satellite managed to image a huge wooden object on Ararat, and Dr. Ahmet Ali Arslan climbed the ridge to photograph it as it sank into the deep beds of Ahora Canyon. The adventurer later relates that the coffin was broken in two during an earthquake, with part of it stuck in the gaping crack. The investigator also testified that he could clearly see part of the roof and even gives its approximate dimensions in feet. James Irwin, the Apollo 15 astronaut who set foot on the moon, was also addicted to the search for the Ark. He could not resist the temptation and organized as many as 6 expeditions. Finally, shortly before he died, he said that someone else had to take over the baton. He was amazed that he did not see a single tree anywhere in Ararat. That is, if a wooden structure is ever found, it will be something quite unusual. Whether the Pentagon and the CIA subsequently gave up their pursuit is unclear, but in 1994 the intelligence community officially refused to declassify the data and footage it had. A rather inexplicable behavior that further strengthens the conspiracy theories - has something been uncovered after all?