Why do some people believe that Mount Ararat is the resting place of Noah's Ark?

Answer 1

For some people, the fact that Noah and his Ark are mentioned in The Bible is proof enough that they were real, and when the Bible mentions the mountains of Ararat, this then must be the true resting place of the Ark. For others, the failure to find evidence of the Ark on Mount Ararat could even place their entire faith at risk. For them, the Ark must have landed on Mount Ararat and all we have to do is look and we will find the evidence. Some even believe that this site was the resting place of Noah's Ark because there are those who claim to have seen evidence of it, such as:

Navarra

According to Fernand Navarra, a French industrialist and amateur mountaineer, (J'ai trouvé L'Arche de Noé ) on negotiating a gully on slightly sloping terrain high up on the Mount Ararat he saw "through the thickness of ice, some dark and intermingled outlines. These could only be fragments of the Ark." Digging his way through the ice, Navarra claimed that he "touched with numbed fingers a piece of wood, not just something from a tree branch, but wood that had been shaped and squared off." By way of 'proof' of this, Navarra brought down with him a broken-off spar. Radio-carbon dating by the University of Pennsylvania's Radiocarbon Laboratory dated this to approximately 650 CE, while the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington in Britain, arrived at approximately 760 CE. In other words, the timbers were probably from the hut of a Byzantine hermit.

Institute for Creation Research

In 1971, expeditions to Ararat were mounted under the auspices of the Institute for Creation Research. Although one such expedition, led by John Morris, investigated several claimed sightings of their supposed ark, they returned with nothing to show.

Wyatt, Fasold and Roberts

In 1960 a Turkish army captain named Ilhan Durupinar, in the course of examining aerial photos of the Ararat region that had been taken for NATO's Geodetic Survey of Turkey, happened to notice on these what appeared to be a large boat-like object lying at an altitude of some 1,900 metres. In 1977, 'biblical archaeologist' Ron Wyatt flew to Turkey to investigate. Convinced by what he saw, Wyatt published Discovered: Noah's Ark, in 1989. The same year also saw the appearance of a book by former merchant marine officer David Fasold, The Ark of Noah, following much the same argument.

A year later Australian 'Dr' Allen Roberts visited the site. In collaboration with Wyatt, he then founded an organisation called Ark Search, and like Wyatt and Fasold began widely publicising that the Akyayla boat-shaped feature was rhe true Noah's ark.

Fasold, Wyatt and Roberts have also made much of "subsurface radar surveys" of the Akyayla feature, purportedly showing it to have a ship-like structure in the interior parts to which no one has yet gained access.

Ian Plimer, Professor of Geology at Australia's Melbourne University, visited the Akyayla site with Fasold in 1994. He found it impossible to repeat any of the various radar, seismic, magnetic and electromagnetic tests claimed by Wyatt. According to Plimer's professional judgement the Akyayla boat is simply an outcrop of 120 million year old sea floor rocks (ophiolite), around which a more modern (and still moving) mud slide has flowed, this slide even having bits of plastic embedded in it. Apparently Fasold himself came to recognise that what Wyatt had argued to be "boat ribs" were no longer evident, concluding that these must have been deliberately scraped into the soil to appear as they did in Wyatt's photographs. He no longer accepts that the outcrop is really Noah's Ark.

Answer 2

They mistranslate a plural into a singular...it is the "mountains" of Ararat (the later Babylonians called them the gordyan Alps....