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know how it affected the rest of the
search, but it couJdn't have been
good.
"The political tension in Turkey
has lessened somewhat after being
quite antagonistic for severa! years,..
adds Morris. "Now with American
aid being reinstated there, our
chances might be better."
But the prospects for permits this
past summer were s till dismal, and
only a precious few permits were
granted. Cummings' group, one of
the most respected, did receive per–
mission, but it hasn't yet returned.
Another renowned Ark hunter.
John Warwick Montgomery, pro–
fessed to have "secret leads" toward
obtaining permission for future ex–
peditions.
SEARCH's Bradley is al.ready
looking forward to 1977. "One of
our directors with excellent Turkish
connections is a brilliant nuclear
physicist presently teaching at
Princeton and Oxford," he says.
"This individual has obligations
that will tie him up until spring.
Tben he'll try and personally work
out the necessary details to obtain
permits, structured basicaUy as a
Turkish expedition which SEARCH
could support. So we' re hoping for
an expedition
some~ime
next year."
Wood From Ararat
That expedition would occur 22
years after the dramatic discovery of
hand-tooled wood on Ararat. The
wood was allegedly found high on
Ararat's s1opes by the French indus–
trialist and amateur explorer Fern–
and Navarra. In July 1955, he and
his 11-year-o1d son returned to the
spot where three years earlier he
had spotted a massive si1houette en–
cased in a glacier at 14,000 feet.
Working within a narrow crevasse.
Navarra chipped ice away until he
reportedly uncovered a section of a
long wooden beam. Unable to re–
move the entire timber, Navarra
said that he cut off a five-foot sec–
tion which he Jater cut into even
smaller pieces to conceal bis find
from any military patrols.
His sample was verified to be
hand-tooled wood covered with a
pitch-like substance. Examined at
the University of Bordeaux in
France and the Forestry Institute of
Madrid, the fragment's age was esti-
The
PLAIN TRUTH October 1976
mated at 5,000 years. As part of a
SEARCH expedition in 1969, Na–
varra returned to a different slope
on Ararat and discovered four other
samples of plank-like wood. The
woo~
is
a tantalizing specimen, but
hardly conclusive evidence. "The
SEARCH organization claims the
wood is from Noah's Ark, but I
never have. Never!" stresses Cum–
mings.
There also remains considerable
controversy involving the wood's
age. In 1970, Dr. Rainer Berger,
professor of anthropology, geogra–
phy, and geophysics and head of
U.C.L.A.'s isotope laboratory, sub–
jected Navarra's 1955 wood sample
to radiocarbon tests. Berger con–
cluded that the fragment was a mere
1,230 years old, plus or minus 60
years. This would make the sample
a closer parallel in history with Leif
Ericson than with Noah. The Na–
tional Physical Laboratory of Ted–
dington, England, dated the wood's
age at 1,190 years, plus or minus 90
years. Similar tests conducted on
1969 specimens at the Geochron
Laboratories in Cambridge, Massa–
chusetts, and the University of
Pennsylvania found the wood's ,age
to be about 1,300 years.
But none of this is convincing to
Ark hunters. "The very fact that the
same wood can be dated at obvi–
ously differing dates indicates the
whole dating method is off," says
Morris. "The Sky1ab project carne
out with sorne data showing that the
equation used to date the wood is
invalid because at present the C- 14
is being formed 20 percent faster
than it decays. There's no equilib–
rium in the C-14 concentration in
the atmosphere."
Berger defends the method's ac–
curacy with data from thousands of
consecutive Bristlecone pine tree
rings which, he says, allow you to
correct for minor changes and fluc–
tuations in the C- 14 content of th e
atmosphere. "1 have complete con–
fidence in this method of dating,"
Berger told
The P/ain Truth.
"l
know the sources of possible error,
and 1 believe that with proper care
they can be virtually eliminated."
Cummings , meanwhile, feel s
somewha t bewildered by the argu–
ment over the wood's age. "I've
heard estimates that vary from
6,000 to 1,200 years, so l don't know
what to tell the public. All 1 say is
that there's been hand-tooled lum–
ber found on a mountain without a
hardwood tree around for miles, so
where did these samples come
from?"
Berger suggests one possibility:
The wood is from sorne sort of struc-
A RENDERING
of Noah 's Ark by the
artist Elfred Lee,
as
described by
"Georgie, " an Armenian who sup–
posedly
saw
the Ark
as a
child.
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