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From the road above historic border town Dogubayazit, in Agri province of eastern Türkiye, the Durupinar formation looks like the prow of a ship someone parked in the hillside.
A Turkish army captain, Ilhan Durupinar, spotted it in aerial photographs in 1959, and the shape has been sold as scripture ever since. Getting a drill onto it takes a permit, and the permit takes a Turkish university and professor under law.
“The first thing is when you’re trying to get a permit, you have to work under a Turkish university,” Andrew Jones, founder of Noah’s Ark Scans, says in last month’s interview this piece draws on. “And it’s not just under the Turkish university. You’re working with a Turkish professor. So, here’s someone who’s going to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to put my reputation on the line looking for Noah’s Ark.’”
Jones has chased the formation for nearly three decades, and this week he made headlines in his niche when he told Newsweek that people banged on his door at night and threatened to kill him.
But he is no longer working alone. Core drilling began on Sept. 21 under the project’s Turkish director, Dr. Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University, named in coverage of the dig, with a growing American cast behind him.
The campaign page of the Noah’s Ark "researchers" asks for $600,000 to pay for drilling and lab work, and donations have now passed $150,000. Jones previously said that season’s expedition cost about $700,000, roughly a third of it covered by a Christian foundation he declined to name, with the rest coming from small donors.
The headlines did the fundraising. The Daily Mail reported that the team had “100% confirmed” a man-made object. Fox News carried Jones’s description of “organized patterns” that might be an ark deck. Jones has conceded to the Forward that social media exaggerated his findings, which he called a double-edged sword: the hype overstates, and it also brings in donors. The group also sells guided visits to the site at $3,600.
The drill gave the story its best prop. Jones says a bit snapped at four or five meters when it hit something harder than limestone, and that it could be mineralized wood. It could also be rock, and he has acknowledged that even a positive lab result would not prove human construction.
As interesting as it is archeologically, the Durupinar formation’s duty as an American far-right magnet makes it a case study.
The project’s marketing and fundraising director is Lauren Witzke, a 2020 Republican Senate nominee in Delaware. She has called herself a flat-earther, supported QAnon, and described the COVID vaccine as a “satanic plot.”
In 2022, she co-produced the anti-vaccine film "Died Suddenly." She told followers that the dig could force universities to rewrite their curricula and challenge evolution.
The team page also lists Edward Szall, an associate of the far-right broadcaster TruNews, as head of production. Another prominent far-right figure in the United States, Dinesh D’Souza, ties the site to his new book, "The Stones Cry Out," and columnist Benny Johnson posted a video titled “Scientists Go INSIDE Noah’s Ark For The First Time!?”
On the Turkish side, the arrangement Jones describes is formal. Fox News now describes Jones as supported by Agri Ibrahim Cecen University, which hosted the 7th International Agri Mountain and Noah’s Ark Symposium in October 2023. Jones contributed a chapter to the 2024 book that came out of it.
The local Turkish media have yet to report on the flood of foreign visitors.
None of this is new. The pseudoarchaeology label comes from mainstream geology, and the argument is old enough to have a dead author.
In 1996, Lorence Collins, a geologist at California State University, Northridge, and David Fasold, a salvage expert who had spent years promoting the site as the Ark, co-wrote a paper in the Journal of Geoscience Education. Their microscopic and fieldwork findings revealed a completely natural rock formation, a doubly plunging syncline shaped by erosion.
The “metal-braced walls” were natural concentrations of iron minerals, and no fossilized wood or carbon traces were found. Collins later added that the “petrified wood” was basalt.
The new claims rest on radar anomalies and a drilling program whose results have not yet been peer-reviewed, a limitation Jones’s own press release acknowledges.
The search at Durupinar now runs on three things at once: religious conviction, a viral marketing operation, and American culture-war politics, all operating on Turkish soil with a Turkish professor’s signature on the permit.
The lab results are pending, the fundraising page is still open, and the drill bit has not been replaced yet.
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