Ron Wyatt

Ron Wyatt was a nurse anesthetist from Madison, Tennessee, who claimed to have found Noah's Ark and a number of other places and objects named in the Bible. He was a Seventh-day Adventist, and he died in 1999.

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The Durupınar claim

From 1977 Wyatt studied a boat-shaped formation at the Durupınar site in eastern Turkey and promoted it as the remains of Noah's Ark. In a 2016 article in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Lorence Collins places the formation near Doğubayazıt, 17 miles (27 kilometers) southwest of Mount Ararat (Ağrı Dağı), and gives its length as 515 feet (157 meters). The site is named after a Turkish Army captain who first saw its boat shape in 1959, on an aerial photograph from a Turkish mapping survey. A joint Turkish-American expedition first examined it in 1960, found nothing man-made and, after two days, left the site for the time being for lack of evidence. Genesis says that the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat (Genesis 8:4), and it names no specific mountain.

Wyatt said that the rock there was the Ark's gopher wood, now petrified, and in 1994 he said that the mound held "trainloads" of gopherwood. In 1985 he was joined by David Fasold, a former merchant marine officer, and by a geophysicist. Fasold made nine trips to the site, and by 1992 he had parted company with Wyatt and disagreed with him over many details.

In 1996 Fasold and Collins concluded, in the Journal of Geoscience Education, that the formation is a natural rock structure mistaken for Noah's Ark. Their paper reported that no fossil wood, carbon, or fragments of wood or reed had ever been found there in trenching or core drilling, and that under the microscope a supposed iron bracket turned out to come from weathered volcanic minerals. John Morris, writing for the Institute for Creation Research in 1992, judged it an unusual geologic feature rather than Noah's Ark, and said almost every other team had reached the same conclusion. Morris also wrote that Wyatt and Fasold both relied on metal detectors and above all on a "molecular frequency generator", a device whose two brass rods, held in the hands, cross over a target below the ground. Creation magazine reported in 1992 that the geophysicist who had joined Wyatt, at first cautiously enthusiastic, had become adamant that the site does not contain the Ark. Turkey's Ministry of Cultural Affairs and its High Commission on Ancient Monuments declared the area a national park.

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His other claims

Wyatt also claimed to have found the place of the Red Sea crossing, and he said that while diving in the Red Sea he had found the remains of chariots. Gordon Franz, writing for the Associates for Biblical Research, answers that apart from Pharaoh's own gold-plated chariot the chariots were made of wood and leather with a few copper parts, so nothing would be left to find but some pieces of copper.

In 1984 Wyatt proposed Jabal al-Lawz in Saudi Arabia as Mount Sinai; he and those with him were captured and jailed there for 78 days. Franz judges that there is "no credible historical, geographical, archaeological, or biblical evidence" for the identification, and he dates the so-called altar of Moses at the site to the Nabatean period.

He also claimed to have found the Ark of the Covenant. In the 1980s he dug at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, just north of the Damascus Gate, opening a number of underground cavities. A season of excavation there in 2005 cleaned and documented those cavities. Further seasons in 2006 and 2007, directed by the archaeologist Yehiel Zelinger and funded by the Tennessee-based Wyatt Archaeological Research Foundation, exposed sparse remains of farming installations from the Roman and Byzantine periods, with a building from a later period above them.

He further claimed to have discovered Sodom and Gomorrah.

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Later years

In 1991 Wyatt and others with him were taken hostage by Kurdish guerrillas. Franz writes that archaeologists within Wyatt's own Seventh-day Adventist denomination do not support his views.