At the end of September, a man who has survived just about everything this planet can throw at a human being, walked up a brown hill in eastern Turkey.
Bear Grills, the former special forces soldier who climbed Everest, who has eaten things on camera most of us couldn’t look at, and who has spent his whole life testing what will hold and what won’t.
The hill he walked onto is 515 ft long, and it’s shaped like a boat.
People call it Noah’s Ark.
The team working there said he came to see the evidence for himself.
And here’s the part almost nobody noticed.
He arrived in the exact week the dig went from talking to touching.
The drills had just gone in.
A drill bit had just shattered on something hard underground.
A robot built to crawl into wombat burrows had just been lowered into the earth for the first time.
And within days of his visit, things started happening that nobody on that team saw coming.
The full footage of his visit hasn’t been released, but we know exactly what was on that hill the week he came because the team told the world about every piece of it.
So, we’re going to do what Bear Grills does with everything.
We’re going to test it.
Five things the researchers had on that hill one at a time.
And the one question a survivor asks about each of them.
Will it hold?
First, why him and why it matters?
Bear Grills is not a scientist and he would never claim to be.
But his entire career is built on one skill.
Deciding very quickly what you can trust with your life.
A rope, a ledge of ice, a river crossing, a story someone tells you about the path ahead.
In his 20ies, a parachute accident left him with a broken back.
Doctors weren’t sure he’d walk properly again.
Less than 2 years later, he was standing on the summit of Mount Everest.
He’s also something a lot of his fans don’t know.
A man of deep Christian faith, he’s written a daily devotional and he has said in interviews that his faith in Jesus is the most important thing in his life.
So when the team posted about his visit, they put it in his language.
They said they talked about the oldest survival story there is.
A man who built when there was no rain, who kept going when the world laughed at him, who trusted what he could not yet see.
In their words, Noah was the original survivalist and Bear agrees.
That’s a beautiful line, but a survivor doesn’t trust a beautiful line.
He tests it.
So, let’s open the kit.
There’s something you should know about how this dig is happening.
It isn’t paid for by a government or a TV network.
The team raised more than $100,000 from ordinary people toward a goal of 600,000 for the drilling, the equipment, and the lab tests.
Every core that came out of that hill, someone they’ll never meet helped pay for.
This channel works exactly the same way.
We don’t have a sponsor.
A video like this is days of reading press releases, university statements, and old geology papers, so you get the whole picture in one place instead of a headline.
If that’s ever been worth something to you, there’s a buy me a coffee link in the description.
A coffee honestly keeps us going through one more night of reading drilling reports.
And if it’s not for you, that’s completely fine.
Stay right here because the first thing on that hill is the one everybody has seen and almost nobody has looked at properly.
Test one, the shape.
From the air, it’s hard to unsee.
A long pointed form curved like a hull lying on a slope about 18 mi south of Mount Ararat.
It’s roughly 515 ft long.
Genesis gives the ark a length of 300 cubits which depending on the cubit comes out to around 450 to 500 ft.
The shape was exposed according to local accounts after heavy rains and earthquakes in 1948.
A Turkish army captain named Ilhan Durupinar spotted it in aerial photographs in 1959 and the place still carries his name.
Now would a survivor trust this?
No.
Not on its own because nature makes boat shapes all the time.
Rock and mud flowing down a slope can wrap around a harder core and leave a pointed oval mound.
In 1996, a geologist named Lawrence Collins and the explorer David Fold, who had once been one of this site’s biggest champions, published a study concluding that it was a completely natural rock formation.
So, the shape is the reason everyone is here.
It isn’t the reason to believe anything.
Test one, it doesn’t hold by itself.
Test two, the radar.
This year, the team brought in a man whose job for decades was finding things hidden underground.
Dr.
Hosro Baktar, a defense scientist whose radar, according to his team, was used to find smuggling tunnels for the US military.
His preliminary results were the first thing the researchers had to show.
In the team’s words, the data was not showing a simple homogeneous solid rock signature.
Later, Baktar would describe what he saw as corridors, chambers, and three levels and call it the most significant finding of his 45-year career.
So, does it hold?
Here, a survivor would say, “Maybe.”
Radar can tell you that the ground isn’t one solid block.
It can show you edges and empty spaces.
What it can’t do is tell you what those spaces are made of or who made them.
Critics, including creationist groups who believe in a global flood, have argued that the team’s processing could make natural layers look built, and none of the raw radar data has been published for anyone else to check.
Test two, a signal worth following.
Not yet a rope you’d hang from.
Test three, the holes.
The week before bear arrived, the drills went in.
This was the first government permitted scientific study of the formation approved earlier in the year by Turkish authorities and the national parks directorate because the site sits inside a national park.
According to the team, they drilled 12 holes inside the boat shape and four outside it as controls, some of them down around 20 m.
And the claim that got people’s attention was simple.
Andrew Jones, the founder of Noah’s Arc Scans, said none of the holes hit bedrock.
Why would that matter?
Because one of the main natural explanations is that the formation is a thin skin of mud and rock lying over shallow bedrock.
If you can drill 20 m and never reach a hard floor, that explanation gets harder.
But a survivor knows the difference between not finding something and proving it isn’t there.
20 m is not that deep in a landscape of volcanic debris and landslides.
And these results haven’t been independently reviewed.
Test three.
Interesting.
It doesn’t hold yet.
Before we get to test four, the thing that broke, here’s what’s coming next on this channel.
The lab results from this dig are expected over the winter and a detailed report in the spring.
When they land, 100 channels will post the word confirmed within an hour.
We won’t.
We’ll read the actual report line by line and tell you what it really says, even if the answer is disappointing.
That kind of video takes real time and nobody pays us to make it.
If you’d like it to exist, the buy me a coffee link is in the description.
The people who chipped in for that drill are the reason anyone knows what’s under that hill.
People backing this channel are the reason we can stay on this story with you until the very end.
Test four.
The drill bit that broke.
In one of the holes at about four to 5 m down, the drill hit something so hard that the bit shattered.
The team was careful about what they said next.
Andrew Jones told Newsweek, “It could be petrified or heavily mineralized wood, or he added, it could be a block of rock in the surrounding debris.
Think about that from a survivor’s point of view.
Something down there was hard enough to break steel.
That’s real.
It happened.
But hard is not the same as wooden.
Volcanic rock and boulders in a landslide are hard, too.
And if it really is petrified wood, there’s a catch.
When wood petrifies, the original material is replaced by minerals over a very long time, and the carbon you’d need to date it is mostly gone.
Jones even corrected his own earlier wording.
He said that when he talked about the decayed top tier remains of the ark, he was describing a hypothesis being tested, not a finding.
Test four, something real broke.
Nobody yet knows what broke it.
Test five, the robot.
This is the strangest piece of the whole story.
The machine that went down those holes wasn’t built for archaeology.
It was built for wombats.
An engineer named Dr.
Robert Ross at Latroe University in Australia had designed a robot called Wombot to crawl into wombat burrows in Tasmania and measure the conditions inside as part of research into a disease that was killing the animals.
When he read that the Noah’s Arc team needed a robot to go where a person couldn’t, he built them a smaller version.
They called it Gopher.
It left Australia in late July.
Right around the time Bear arrived, the team lowered Gopher into one of the bore holes and released what they called a first look inside.
But it ran into a very ordinary problem.
In the team’s own words, its wheels had trouble moving on the very loose sediment.
It needed modifications before it could look around.
So, what did the camera actually show?
Loose sediment, darkness, a narrow hole, no beams, no planks, no hull.
Critics were quick to point that out and they were right.
Test five.
A brilliant idea.
It hasn’t shown us anything yet.
So that’s the honest score from the weak bear grills walked onto that hill.
Five things on the table.
A shape, a radar signal, deep holes, a broken drill bit, and a wombat robot.
Not one of them on its own would hold a survivor’s weight.
And yet, the title says it changed everything.
Here’s why.
Because of what happened next.
Within days of that visit, the founder of the project, Andrew Jones, was living through something that sounds like a thriller.
According to the team’s president, Lauren Witzky, people had been banging on his door between 1 and 3:00 in the morning, shouting threats to kill him.
Then his apartment near the site was broken into.
Laptops, computers, and memory cards were taken.
A microphone, a printer, and other valuables were left behind.
Witzky said whoever did it specifically knew what they were there for.
Jones later told NewsNation that the office laptop holding the excavation records was wiped, but he said he’d already backed up most of the data, and he refused to blame the people of the region.
In his words, “I am not going to guess who did it.
Nobody has been named.
Nobody has claimed it.
And we’re not going to guess either.
But a survivor would notice one thing.
Somebody thought what was on that laptop was worth stealing.
And then the team kept drilling.
In late October, Professor Sena Atila of Sivas Kumhurat University, who directs the archaeology, announced that pieces of wood had been recovered from deep inside the formation from almost 30 ft down, damaged, charred as if they had been burned.
They’ve gone to laboratories in Turkey and France for carbon dating and to identify the type of tree.
This is the first thing in this whole story that a survivor could actually put weight on because it can be tested by people who have nothing to do with the team.
A radiocarbon lab doesn’t care what you believe.
It counts atoms, but even here the team was honest.
Photographs of the wood haven’t been released yet.
Reports disagree on whether it’s charred or petrified.
And Andrew Jones has said the burned pieces could be from the ark or from a shepherd’s campfire centuries ago.
He has also said that even ancient wood would not by itself prove that anyone built anything.
So here’s what to watch for when the result comes.
If the wood is a few hundred years old, it’s people who lived on that plane in recorded history.
If it’s tens of thousands of years old, it’s nature.
And if it comes back somewhere around 4 to 5,000 years from a tree that doesn’t belong on that bare plateau, then that hill stops being a curiosity and becomes a question every scientist would have to take seriously.
But a survivor doesn’t just wait for an answer.
He checks how the answer was made.
So here are the three things that will tell you whether to trust the result before you even read the number.
The first is blind testing.
When the team sent soil samples to Ataturk University in Erdzerum for analysis, according to one detailed account of the project, the samples were labeled so the analysts couldn’t tell which ones came from inside the boat shape and which came from outside.
That matters more than it sounds.
If a lab knows what you’re hoping for, it’s human nature to lean toward it.
If it doesn’t know, it can’t.
The second is control holes.
Remember, four of the drill holes were deliberately placed outside the formation.
If the soil, the carbon, and the wood inside the shape look exactly like the soil, carbon, and wood outside it, then the shape isn’t special.
If they’re different, that’s the first real clue in 60 years.
A result from inside means very little without the result from outside sitting next to it.
The third is publication.
A press release is someone telling you the rope is strong.
A published report with sample numbers, lab names, raw ages, and methods is handing you the rope so you can pull on it yourself.
Andrew Jones has said the findings still have to go through peer review and that a detailed report is planned for the spring of 2027.
Until that report exists, every claim for or against is still just a story about the rope.
And there’s a reason the team keeps saying it out loud.
Most geologists who’ve studied this hill think it’s natural.
If this team is right, they’ll have to convince exactly those people.
And the only way you convince a skeptic is with data they can check.
The team says a second field season is planned for 2027 if the permits are approved.
Jones has said there’s no plan for a large scale excavation.
So the next big answer won’t come from a bulldozer.
It’ll come from a lab bench.
So what did the researchers show bear grills that changed everything?
Not proof.
Nothing on that hill in September was proof and the team never said it was.
What they showed him was the moment a legend turns into a test.
For 60 years, Durupanar was a shape in a photograph and an argument between people who had already made up their minds.
This year, for the first time, someone was allowed to drill into it, scan it, send a robot down into it, and pull material out of it for labs that anyone can check.
That’s what a survivor respects.
Not a story, but a story you can test.
Bear Grills has spent his whole life knowing that the ground under your feet is either going to hold or it isn’t, and that you’d better find out before you put your weight on it.
Right now, a few pieces of burned wood in a lab are about to find out for all of us.
And this time, whatever the answer is, it’ll be a real
