There is a lot of skepticism about Chinese filmmaker Yeung Wing-Cheung’s claim that he found Noah’s Ark atop Mount Ararat. For one thing, we’ve heard this before.
As the Christian Science Monitor headline said: “Noah’s Ark discovered. Again.”
Here’s how Benjamin Radford, LiveScience’s Bad Science columnist, framed the discovery on the Monitor’s op-ed page:
Yeung Wing-Cheung says he and a team from Noah’s Ark Ministries found the remains of the Ark at an elevation of about 12,000 feet (3,658 meters). They filmed inside the structure and took wood samples that were later analyzed in Iran. He claims the wood was carbon-dated to around the reputed time of Noah’s flood, which would be remarkable since organic material should have long since disintegrated in the last 5,000 years.
Yeung said that he is “99 percent certain that it is Noah’s Ark based on historical accounts, including the Bible and local beliefs of the people in the area, as well as carbon dating.”
While news of the find is making headlines around the world, there’s one part of the story that Yeung is conspicuously silent about: He is only the latest in a long line of people who claim to have found Noah’s Ark. In fact, there have been at least half a dozen others — all of them funded by Christian organizations — who have claimed final, definitive proof of Noah’s Ark. So far none of the claims have proven true.
One of those news headlines from around the world was from ABC News:
“I’m not quite 99.9 percent sure it’s Noah’s Ark, but they’ve got something,” George Washington University’s Eric Cline told “Good Morning America.” “I’m waiting for them to convince me.”
He suggested it could even be a very old shepherd’s hut.
“I would want to first of all try to figure out their data, verify it,” he said.
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