in
Turkey with the words
Nuhun Gemisi ("Noah's Ship") pointing the way to the Durupınar site and away from
Mount Ararat According to local reports, heavy rains combined with three earthquakes exposed the formation from the surrounding mud on May 19, 1948. It was discovered by a
Kurdish shepherd named Reshit Sarihan. It was subsequently identified by
Turkish Army Captain İlhan Durupınar—for whom it was subsequently named—in a
Turkish Air Force aerial photo while on a mapping mission for
NATO in October 1959. Durupınar informed the Turkish government of his discovery and a group from the Archeological Research Foundation which included
George Vandeman, İlhan Durupınar, and Arthur Brandenberger, professor of photogrammetry, surveyed the site in September 1960. After two days of digging and dynamiting inside the "boat-shaped" formation, the expedition members found only
soil and
rocks. Their official news release concluded that "there were no visible archaeological remains" and that this formation "was a freak of nature and not man-made". The site was then ignored until 1977, when it was rediscovered and promoted by
pseudoarchaeologist and amateur explorer
Ron Wyatt. Throughout the 1980s, Wyatt repeatedly tried to interest other people in the site, including ark hunter and former astronaut
James Irwin and
creationist John D. Morris, neither of whom was convinced the formation was the Ark. In 1985, Wyatt was joined by
David Fasold and geophysicist
John Baumgardner for the expedition recounted in Fasold's
The Ark of Noah. As soon as Fasold saw the site, he exclaimed that it was a
shipwreck. Fasold brought along
ground-penetrating radar equipment and a "
frequency generator", set it on the wavelength for
iron, and searched the formation for internal iron
loci (the latter technique was later compared to
dowsing by the site's detractors). Fasold and the team states that the ground penetration radar revealed a regular internal formation and measured the length of the formation as , close to the 300
cubits or of the Noah's Ark in the
Bible, if the royal
Ancient Egyptian cubit of is used. Fasold asserted in his 1988 book that locals call one of the peaks near to the Durupınar site al Cudi (Turkish
Cudi Dağı, Kurdish
Çîyaye Cûdî) and linked this to the
Mount Judi named in the Quran as the final resting place of Noah's Ark. The assertion is controversial and not well supported by local toponymy. After a few expeditions to the Durupınar site that included drilling and excavation in the 1990s, Fasold began to have doubts that the Durupınar formation was Noah's ark. He visited the site in September 1994 with Australian geologist
Ian Plimer and concluded that the formation was not a boat. He surmised that ancient peoples had erroneously believed the site was the ark. In 1996, Fasold co-wrote a paper with geologist
Lorence Collins titled "Bogus 'Noah's Ark' from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure", which concluded that the boat-shaped formation was a natural stone formation that merely resembled a boat. The same paper pointed out that the "anchors" were local volcanic stone. Others, such as fellow ark researcher David Allen Deal, reported that before his death, Fasold returned to a belief that the Durupınar site might be the location of the ark. His close Australian friend and biographer June Dawes wrote: He [Fasold] kept repeating that no matter what the experts said, there was too much going for the Durupınar site for it to be dismissed. He remained convinced it was the fossilized remains of Noah's Ark. In 2011, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey granted jurisdiction over Noah's ark works specifically to a five-professor Cultural Center Board of Directors from Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University, as having precedence at the Durupınar site, overriding the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s Immovable Cultural and Natural Assets High Council. ==Arzap stones==