Noah’s Ark reportedly found by… Noah’s Ark Ministries?

Wow, if that isn’t lucky…

In an incident sure to pop up in guilt-trippy status updates from your older relatives until time immemorial (93% of people won’t have the courage to copy and paste this, will you?), Noah’s Ark Ministries claims to have located the remaining bits of Noah’s Ark in a mountain range in Turkey. The team who believes they’ve found the Ark included “evangelical explorers” from China and Turkey. Wing-cheung Yeung, a Hong Kong documentary filmmaker, told European press:

“It’s not 100 percent that it is Noah’s Ark but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it.”

Another member of the crew said at a press conference:

“The search team and I personally entered a wooden structure high on the mountain. The structure is partitioned into different spaces. We believe that the wooden structure we entered is the same structure recorded in historical accounts and the same ancient boat indicated by the locals.”

However, scientists with less of a confirmation bias have cautioned religious folk not to get too excited by the announcement:

“You have to take everything out of context except the Bible to get something tolerable, and they’re not even working much with the Bible,” said Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist and historian at Stony Brook University who specializes in the Near East – and especially the region around Ararat, known as Urartu.

While the “Arkers” have said that carbon dating “proves” this time the Ark finding is the real deal, and archaeologist interviewed by MSNBC called the findings a “crock” and says that archaeological records from the period in which the great flood supposedly occurred don’t reflect an interruption in local culture at the time. Cornell archaeologist Peter Ian Kuniholm also points out (as is evident in the name of the “evangelical explorers”) that the expedition was flawed from the start because the potential findings were expected in advance:

“These guys have already gotten the answer worked out ahead of time,” he said, “and then they go out to prove it.”

Sadly, most people who want to believe Noah’s Ark has really been found will probably buy the whole story until the next Ark pops up somewhere in a remote area in Turkey. (Seriously, how many Arks is Turkey concealing?)

[MSNBC]