Ron Wyatt

Ron Wyatt was a nurse anesthetist who claimed to have found several places and objects connected with the Bible, beginning with Noah's Ark. He was a Seventh-day Adventist. He died in 1999.

Durupınar

From 1977 Wyatt investigated the formation at the Durupınar site in Turkey, and he came to contend that it was the remains of Noah's Ark. John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research described him as a nonscientist who had "tirelessly surveyed the area" and gathered several lines of evidence for that contention. Wyatt maintained that rock at the site was the Ark's gopher wood, now petrified, and in 1994 he said the mound held "trainloads" of gopherwood. In 1985 David Fasold and John Baumgardner joined him in the work. In 1991 Wyatt and his companions were taken hostage by Kurdish guerrillas. By 1992 Fasold had parted company with Wyatt and disagreed with him about many details.

Other claims

In 1984 Wyatt visited Jabal al-Lawz in Saudi Arabia and claimed to have located Mount Sinai there. He also claimed to have discovered the site of the Red Sea crossing, saying that he had found, on a scuba dive in the Red Sea, the remains of gold-veneered chariot wheels. He further claimed to have found the Ark of the Covenant and to have discovered Sodom and Gomorrah.

Reception

Morris concluded that the Durupınar formation is an unusual geological feature rather than Noah's Ark, and said that almost every other team had reached the same view. Answers in Genesis reported that Baumgardner, who had worked on the site with Wyatt, came to judge his claims "bogus." Fasold, writing with Lorence Collins in the Journal of Geoscience Education in 1996, concluded that the formation near Doğubayazıt is a natural rock structure wrongly identified as Noah's Ark. Gordon Franz, writing for the Associates for Biblical Research, notes that the archaeologists of Wyatt's own denomination, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, do not support his views.