People have been looking for Noah’s ark since at least the first century. This table sets out each search we could trace to a source we read: when it happened, where, who made it, what they claimed and what came of it, with the sources on every row. Nothing on it has yet been shown to be the ark by tests published for others to check, and the newest results, from the Durupınar site in Turkey, are still to come.
Updated 9 November 2026. 52 searches and reports. See them on a map.
Results still to come
| When | Where | Who and what they claimed | What came of it | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| From late October 2026 (France) to about January 2027 (Turkey) | Laboratories in France and Turkey | Professor Atila, speaking on 15 October 2026. Expected carbon-14 results on burnt wood from France in about 15 days and from Turkey in about three months. | Still to come. We had found no published result by 9 November 2026. | |
| End of November 2026 | Durupınar | Khosrow Bakhtar, according to Andrew Jones. Jones said on 12 October that the final radar report would come out at the end of November. The project’s 1 October release said a fuller technical report was expected by November. | Still to come. | |
| April or May 2027 | Durupınar | Sivas Cumhuriyet University and Noah’s Ark Scans. The final report is targeted for April or May 2027. A second field season is planned for 2027, subject to permit approval. | Still to come. |
The searches so far, newest first
| When | Where | Who and what they claimed | What came of it | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 October 2026 | Durupınar | Noah’s Ark Scans, in a press release. Said charred wood had been recovered from almost 30 feet down and sent for carbon-14 dating and species identification. | The release says no firm conclusions should be drawn until laboratory results are published, and quotes Jones saying it could be the ark or “a shepherd’s campfire.” We had found no published result by 9 November 2026. | |
| 15 October 2026 | Ağrı, Turkey, on the work at Durupınar | Professor Atila, at the 8th International Symposium on Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark. Said the first fifth of the radar results show a corridor with room-like spaces and three layers, which he linked to the ark’s three decks. | He said the data were not yet enough for a firm conclusion, and told The Jerusalem Post: “Maybe it can be a geological hole.” | |
| June to September 2026 | Durupınar | Sivas Cumhuriyet University, led by Professor Cenker Atila, with Noah’s Ark Scans. Khosrow Bakhtar’s radar survey was followed by core drilling. Bakhtar said the shapes he saw were not geological. Twelve holes inside the formation and four outside reached about 20 metres, and a drill bit broke on a hard layer 4 to 5 metres down. | Jones told Newsweek on 28 September that the team had “not identified any material as ancient wood or established its age.” A review in Answers Research Journal, written from a position affirming the ark’s historicity, said claims had “moved faster than the data.” | |
| October 2015 | Mount Ararat | Southern Evangelical Seminary and Noah’s Ark Ministries International, according to the Institute for Creation Research. The seminary said video, photographs and testimony about finds on Ararat would be shown at its Apologetics Conference on 16 and 17 October. | Brian Thomas of the Institute for Creation Research urged scepticism, citing personal correspondence with other searchers who concluded that the group’s 2010 claims were fake. | |
| 2014 to 2024 | Durupınar | Noah’s Ark Scans, a US Christian group founded by Andrew Jones. Radar and resistivity surveys in 2014, 2019 and 2021, and soil samples in 2024, were reported to show unusual shapes and richer soil inside the formation than outside. | Jones published the 2019 radar results in 2024 and asked whether the shapes are “man-made or natural.” A 2026 review in Answers Research Journal argued that soil differences of this kind can have natural causes. | |
| 2010 | Mount Ararat | Donald Mackenzie, from Lewis in Scotland. The BBC reported that Mackenzie went back to Ararat in 2010 after a Chinese group claimed to have found the ark, and was reported missing on 14 October. | The Herald reported in 2013 that a film crew had found his last campsite and that his brother believed he was not alive. At that date what had happened to him was not known. | |
| 2010 | Mount Ararat, above 4,000 metres | Noah’s Ark Ministries International, a Hong Kong group. Said a Chinese and Turkish team had gone inside a large wooden structure, which a filmmaker with the team put at “99.9 percent” certain. | Randall Price, an evangelical archaeologist who had been on the team in 2008, warned that it might be a hoax and passed on an allegation that workers had planted the wood. John Morris, a consultant to the team, said the evidence was not yet there. | |
| July 2005; reported 2006 | Mount Suleiman, Elburz range, Iran | Robert Cornuke and the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute. Cornuke’s team reported a boat-shaped rock outcrop at just over 13,000 feet, and he told National Geographic “It looks uncannily like wood”. | Cornuke also said “We can't claim to have conclusively found the ark”. Geologists told National Geographic the rocks looked sedimentary, with layers that could be mistaken for wood grain. | |
| November 2004 | Mount Ararat, at the top; 18km from the ‘official’ location, they said | Andrew Yuen Man-fai and Pastor Boaz Li Chi-kwong, Hong Kong evangelists. The two said they found parts of the ark embedded in ice at the top of the mountain. | They said a “mysterious force” made their video camera malfunction, so they brought back only blurred images and no specimens. | |
| 2004 | Mount Ararat, about 15,500 feet | Daniel McGivern, Hawaii businessman, with Ahmet Arslan as planned leader. McGivern said 2003 satellite pictures showed apparent man-made structures in the ice, and told National Geographic “We're telling people we're 98 percent sure”. | Turkey refused the permit on security grounds and the expedition did not go ahead. National Geographic reported that critics questioned how serious it had been. | |
| 1996 | Durupınar | Lorence Collins, geologist, and David Fasold. Fasold, who had argued in a 1988 book that the site was the ark, studied it again with Collins. | Their paper in the Journal of Geoscience Education concluded that it is “a completely natural rock formation.” | |
| 1993 | Claimed to be Mount Ararat | George Jammal, an actor. On the CBS special The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark, shown in February 1993, Jammal displayed what he said was ancient wood from inside the ark. | Jammal told the Los Angeles Times it was a hoax and that the wood came from railway tracks in Long Beach. Sun International Pictures, which produced the film, admitted the error: “We were obviously duped”. | |
| 1988 | Durupınar | A drilling attempt later described by John Baumgardner and by Noah’s Ark Scans. Four core holes were drilled into the formation. | A 2026 review reports that the cores held no identified wood and that two holes reached layered bedrock at about 5 metres. Noah’s Ark Scans says the samples were corrupted by the water used to cool the drill. | |
| 1982 to 1987 | Mount Ararat | James Irwin, former US astronaut. Irwin led searches on Ararat in 1982, 1983 and 1985. In 1983 he flew round the mountain in an army plane and searched two passes with a party of 22 climbers, the New York Times reported. | A fall ended the 1982 attempt, and in 1983 he said “the ark continues to elude us”. He told the AP in 1986 he was giving up, and John Morris wrote that a 1987 flight using his foundation’s helicopter showed “no hints of the Ark”. | |
| 1977 to 1999 | Durupınar | Ron Wyatt, an American nurse anaesthetist and amateur archaeologist. Argued that radar and other scans showed walls, decks, petrified wood and metal fittings, and that large stones nearby had hung from the ark. | Geologists identified the supposed petrified wood as ordinary rock and the “anchors” as local volcanic rock. The Adventist archaeologist David Merling weighed the claims in 1993 and concluded: “Noah’s ark has yet to be found.” | |
| 1971 to 1990 | Mount Ararat | John D. Morris, Institute for Creation Research. Led 13 expeditions to the mountain in search of the ark. | The Institute wrote in 2020 that the efforts “returned tales of terrifying times but no Ark.” | |
| 1964–66 | Mount Ararat | The Archaeological Research Foundation; report edited by Lawrence B. Hewitt. John Warwick Montgomery records that the foundation, in which Seventh-Day Adventists were strongly represented, studied the geology, glaciers and plants of Ararat. | The selections from its report that Montgomery reprints cover rock, ice and plants and describe no remains of the ark. | |
| 1960 | Durupınar | An expedition led by George Vandeman, with Captain Durupınar. Set out to learn whether the shape was the petrified ark. | Two days of digging, with dynamite, found “dirt, rocks and more dirt.” The team’s news release called the formation “a freak of nature and not man-made.” | |
| 1959 | Durupınar, near Doğubayazıt, Turkey | Captain İlhan Durupınar, Turkish army. Noticed a ship-like form on aerial photographs taken for a NATO survey of Turkey. | The report drew press attention and visits to the site, which now carries his name. | |
| 1955 and 1969 | Mount Ararat, at about 13,750 feet | Fernand Navarra, French explorer. Brought down hand-hewn wood from the ice in 1955 and, with others, more wood in 1969. It was at first dated to about 5,000 years old. | Britain’s National Physical Laboratory dated the 1955 oak to about AD 760, “evidently not the Ark.” Laboratories at the University of California later found Ararat wood about 1,200 years old. | |
| Late summer 1952, by Montgomery’s account | Mount Ararat, north-east flank | George Jefferson Greene, American engineer. According to papers in the Cummings archive, Greene saw an object in the ice from a helicopter and photographed it from close range. | He could not raise an expedition and was killed in British Guyana on 27 December 1962. By this account his pictures disappeared after his death. | |
| August 1952 | Mount Ararat, ice cap at about 13,800 feet | Fernand Navarra and Jean de Riquier. Navarra wrote that on 17 August they came on a dark patch in the ice whose shape he took to be “unmistakably that of a ship’s hull”. | The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported “Not a single trace of Noah’s Ark” from the climb, and de Riquier later voiced doubt. Navarra’s wood finds of 1955 and 1969 are in a separate row. | |
| 1949 | Mount Ararat | Aaron J. Smith of People’s Bible College, North Carolina, and the British amateur Egerton Sykes. Time reported that Sykes planned an Ararat expedition with Smith along, and that Pravda attacked it as “biblical amusements of these Anglo-American imperialists”. | According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Smith’s party “tried fruitlessly to find Noah’s boat in 1949”. The TalkOrigins index says it could not locate Reshit or the ark. | |
| 1949 | Mount Ararat, the western plateau | A US Air Force photo flight; Porcher Taylor obtained the frames in 1995. Frames taken on 17 June 1949 show what Taylor called a “dense, linear shaped and distinct” shape at about 15,500 feet. | A US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst read it as “long linear facades in the glacial ice.” A CIA search of imagery from 1990 to 1992 found only apparent rock formations showing through the snow and ice. | |
| September 1948 | Mount Ararat, northern slope | Reshit, a Kurdish farmer, as told by Shukru Asena to the Associated Press. Asena told the AP in Istanbul that Reshit had found what he called the prow of a ship about two-thirds of the way up, saying “I know a ship when I see one”. | No one brought back a picture, and the report said old hands who had climbed Ararat were unconvinced. The TalkOrigins index says A. J. Smith later could find no one who had seen it or heard the story. | |
| July 1943; told decades later | Said to be Mount Ararat | Ed Davis, US Army engineer based in Iran. Davis said a man named Abas took him up the mountain, where he saw “a huge, rectangular, man-made structure” partly covered by ice and rock. | Bill Crouse’s Ararat Report, reviewing the story, concluded: “we do not think he was ever on Mt. Ararat in Turkey”. | |
| Printed 1941 and 1942; set in 1916–17 | Mount Ararat | A story told in the name of a Russian airman called Roskovitsky. Religious papers printed a story of a Russian airman who saw an old ship beside a glacial lake before the Revolution, and of soldiers sent by the Czar who found it to be the ark. | Present Truth reported in 1946 that several of the papers had printed retractions. The TalkOrigins index says “The original story is admittedly untrue”. | |
| Late 1930s | Mount Ararat, north side, beyond Lake Kop | Hardwicke Knight, a New Zealander. According to papers in the Cummings archive, Knight walked over half-buried rectangular timbers that “looked like the frame of a very heavy wagon”. | The piece he broke off did not survive, and it was many years before he spoke of what he had seen. | |
| 1909 | Judi Dagh | Gertrude Bell. Bell climbed to the place called the ship of the Prophet Noah and found roofless stone chambers on the summit, which she was told Christians, Muslims and Jews still visited. | She judged the chambers recent and Muslim, and placed the ruined “Cloister of the Ark” on a small plateau below. | |
| About 1902–10; told in 1970 | Mount Ararat (Masis) | George Hagopian. Hagopian told ark researchers in 1970 that as a boy, around the turn of the century, he was taken to the ark by his uncle. | Bill Crouse’s Ararat Report called it “an interesting, but unverifiable story”. The TalkOrigins index says its details disagree with other accounts and with Genesis. | |
| Told about 1900 | Mount Ararat | Archdeacon John Joseph Nouri, as recalled by the missionary Frederick Coan. Coan’s memoir says Nouri told him he reached the ark after repeated attempts and saw it “wedged in the rocks and half filled with snow and ice”. | The TalkOrigins index says “John Joseph is not a credible source” and that his titles could not be verified. | |
| 31 March 1883 | Ararat ranges, in the story | The columnist “Pollex” of the New Zealand Herald, named as George Reed by the paper’s Brian Rudman. The Herald’s Calamo Currente column reported that Turkish commissioners had found a giant structure of dark wood at the foot of a glacier and believed it to be the ark. | The author admitted in the same column on 24 November 1883 that the story was “imagined and framed within the city of Auckland”, after it had gone round the world. | |
| 1876 | Mount Ararat, above 13,000 feet | James Bryce. Bryce said that on his climb he found a piece of wood about four feet long, “evidently cut by some tool”, and took a bit of it away. | He wrote that it would be hard to prove it was not gopher wood, admitted another explanation occurred to him, and would not give it: “no man is bound to discredit his own relic”. | |
| Said to be 1856; told 1916; written down 1952 | Mount Ararat, near the summit | Haji Yearam, as written down by Harold Williams. According to Williams, Yearam said that as a boy in 1856 he helped guide three English scientists to the ark, and that they swore to keep it secret. | The TalkOrigins index finds no record of such an expedition leaving England and says the newspaper confession Williams cited has never been found. | |
| September 1829 | Mount Ararat, summit | Friedrich Parrot. Parrot reached the summit and recorded that Armenians were firmly persuaded “Noah's ark remains to this very day on the top of Ararat”. | The summit passage read here describes ice and the view, not remains. Parrot argued only that the top could hold “a sufficient depth of ice to cover the ark”. | |
| 25 February 1821 | Al Judi | Hussein Aga, guide to the traveller Claudius James Rich. Rich’s Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan records that his guide said he had “with his own eyes seen the remains of Noah’s Ark”. | John Warwick Montgomery, who quotes the entry, treats it as weak evidence and notes that Rich himself doubted the guide’s reliability. | |
| July 1670 | Mount Ararat | Jans Janszoon Struys, Dutch traveller, and a hermit named Domingo Alessandro. Struys wrote that he treated a hermit on Ararat, who gave him a wooden cross and a signed statement saying “I myself entered that Ark”. | The account comes from Struys’s own travel book of 1677. John Warwick Montgomery reports a biographer’s charge that Struys deceived readers about the climb, and rejects it. | |
| 1307 | Mount Ararat | Hayton (Het’um or Haithon), Armenian prince and monk. Hayton’s history says snow stopped anyone climbing Ararat, but that on the summit “something black is visible, which people say is the Ark”. | He reports what people said. Bill Crouse’s Ararat Report notes that he does not claim to be an eyewitness. | |
| About 1255 | Massis (Ararat), near Naxua | William of Rubruck, traveller, repeating a local bishop. Rubruck wrote that people said Noah’s ark rested in these mountains, and that a bishop told him an angel stopped a monk’s climb by bringing him a piece of its wood. | The piece was said to be kept in the bishop’s church. Rubruck was told “Many have tried to climb it, but none has been able”, though he thought the mountain did not look so high. | |
| Late 12th century | The “mountains of Ararat”, which he put five days from Babylon | Rabbi Petachia of Ratisbon (Regensburg), traveller. Petachia’s account says the ark was carried between four peaks that stand above one high mountain, and could not get out. | The same account adds: “the ark is not there, for it has decayed”. | |
| About 1165–1173 | Near Geziret Ibn Omar (Cizre) | Benjamin of Tudela, in his Itinerary. Benjamin wrote that the ark had rested four miles from the town, but that Omar ben al Khataab “took the ark from the two mountains and made it into a mosque”. | A legend. A. Benisch, translating Petachia’s travels in 1856, noted that Petachia’s account of the ark does not agree with Benjamin’s. | |
| Quran 11:44 | Al-Judi | The Quran. Surah Hud says of the ship that it “came to rest upon (the mount) Al-Judi”, in Pickthall’s translation. | The 1911 Britannica records this as a tradition accepted by Kurds, Syrians and Nestorians. Michał Marciak traces the link between the ark and the mountain above Cizre to at least the 5th century AD. | |
| AD 628–29 | Thamanin and Mount Judi | The emperor Heraclius, according to the chroniclers Agapius and Elmacin. Agapius says Heraclius camped at Thamanin, climbed al-Judi and “examined the place of the ark”. Elmacin (1223–1274) also tells of the climb. | Neither says he saw the ark. The translator Robert Hoyland calls Agapius “our only source for this alleged ascent” and notes that Greek sources put Heraclius at Ganzak in early spring 628. | |
| 4th century | The country of the Kurds (Epiphanius); the mountains of Armenia (Chrysostom) | Epiphanius of Salamis and John Chrysostom, church fathers. Epiphanius wrote that the ark’s remains “are shown in the country of the Kurds”. Chrysostom asked in a sermon whether they were not “preserved there to this very day for our admonition”. | Both writers use the remains as an argument, and neither passage says the writer saw them. Bill Crouse’s Ararat Report notes that Epiphanius was no eyewitness and gives no clear sign of meaning present-day Mount Ararat. | |
| 4th century, in later telling | A mountain in Korduk’, later Mount Ararat | St Jacob of Nisibis, in Armenian Christian tradition. Jacob climbed to see the ark, tired near the top, and woke with a piece of its wood, brought by an angel. | This is a legend, told of two places. A fifth-century Armenian history sets it on a mountain in the district of Korduk’; the Armenian Church now tells it of Mount Ararat, and says the fragment is kept at Etchmiadzin “to this day.” | |
| Shortly after AD 180 | The “Arabian mountains” | Theophilus of Antioch, Christian writer. In his work addressed to Autolycus, Theophilus wrote of the ark that “the remains are to this day to be seen in the Arabian mountains”. | He names no witness and does not say he saw the remains himself. | |
| About AD 93 | Armenia, in his telling | Flavius Josephus, historian. Reported that the ark’s remains “are shown there by the inhabitants to this day,” and elsewhere placed them in “the country called Carra.” | He passed on what others said and named no spot that can be mapped. His translator William Whiston wrote that he could not tell whether any remains survived. | |
| Undated Talmud legend, set in Sennacherib’s reign | Not named; the passage links it to Ararat | Sennacherib, in a story in the Babylonian Talmud. The Talmud says Sennacherib “found a beam from Noah’s ark, from which he fashioned a god”. | A legend, told to explain the name of the god Nisroch in 2 Kings 19:37. The same passage says his sons fled to Ararat, “where Noah’s ark had come to rest”. | |
| Genesis 8:4 | “The mountains of Ararat” | The book of Genesis. The ark came to rest “upon the mountains of Ararat.” | The text names a range in the land of Ararat, and no single peak. The Catholic bishops’ New American Bible notes: “There is no Mount Ararat in the Bible.” |
Rows marked “Still to come” give the dates the project itself has named; they are forecasts, not results.
Corrections
We kept to searches we could trace to a source we read, so older stories and rumours that we could not trace are left out. If you know of a search we have missed, or find a mistake, tell us and we will correct it and log the correction.
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How to cite it
Christian Pure. “Searches for Noah’s Ark: A Sourced Table.” Updated 9 November 2026. https://christianpure.com/noahs-ark-searches-table/.
Last updated 9 November 2026.