NOAH’S ARK FOUND?
(A report from several years ago)
By Hugo C. Jackie
Russian Flier Reports
VLADIMER ROSKOVITSKY, a Russian flier in the service of the Czar, just before his overthrow by the Bolshevist revolution, reported what is believed by many to be the authentic discovery of the remains of
Noah’s ark, amazingly preserved in the ice of a glacial lake on Mt. Ararat, where the Bible said it came to rest. Roskovitsky, a Christian, came to America a number of years ago and became a citizen here. Here is his story:
“It was in the days just before the Russian revolution that this story really began. A group of Russian aviators were stationed at a lonely temporary air outpost about twenty-five miles northwest of Mount
Ararat. The day was dry and terribly hot, as August days so often are in this semi-desert land.
“Far up on the side of the mountain we could see a thunder shower, while still farther up we could see the white snow cap of Mount Ararat which has snow all the year around because of its great height. How we
longed for some of that snow!
“Then the miracle happened. The captain walked in and announced that plane number seven had its new supercharger installed and was ready for high altitude tests, and ordered my buddy and I to make the test.
At last we could escape the heat!
“Needless to say, we wasted no time getting on our parachutes, strapping on our oxygen cans and doing all the half dozen other things that have to be done before ‘going up.’
“We circled the field several times until we hit the fourteen thousand foot mark and and then stopped climbing for a few minutes to get used to the altitude.
“No use wasting time warming up the engine when the sun already had it nearly red hot.
“I looked over to the right at that beautiful snow-capped peak, now just a little above us, and for some reason I can’t explain, turned and headed the plane straight toward it.
“As I looked down at the great stone battlements surrounding the lower part of this mountain I had remembered that it had never been climbed since the year seven hundred before Christ, when some pilgrims were supposed to have gone up there to scrape tar off an old ship to make good luck emblems to wear around their necks to prevent their crops being destroyed by excessive rainfall. The legend said they had left in haste after a bolt of lightning struck near them and had never returned. Silly ancients. Who ever heard of looking for a shipwreck on a mountain top?
“A couple of circles around the snow-capped dome and then a long, swift glide down the side andthen we suddenly came upon a perfect little gem of a lake; blue as an emerald, but still frozen over on the shady side. We circled around and returned for another look at it. Suddenly my companion whirled around and yelled something and excitedly pointed down at the overflow end of the lake. I looked and nearly fainted!
“A submarine! No, it wasn’t, for it had stubby masts, but the top was rounded over with only a flat catwalk about five feet across down the length of it. What a strange craft, bulit as though the designer had expected the waves to roll over the top most of the time, and had engineered it to wallow in the sea like a log, with those stubby masts carrying only enough sail to keep it facing the waves. (Years later in the Great Lakes I saw the famous ‘whaleback’ ore carriers with this same kind of rounded deck.)
“We flew down as close as safety permitted and took several circles around it. We were suprised when we got close to it as the immense size of the thing, for it was as long a a city block and would compare very favorably in size to the modern battleships of today. It was grounded on the shore of the lake with about one-fourth of the rear end still running out into the water, and its extreme rear was three-fourths under water. It had been partly dismantled on one side near the front, and on the other side there was a great door nearly twenty feet square, but with the door gone. The seemed quite out of proportion, as even today ships seldom have doors even half that large.
“After seeing all we could from the air, we broke all speed records back down to the airport.
“When we related our find, the laughter was loud and long. Some accused us of getting drunk on too much oxygen, and there were many other remarks too numerous to relate.
“The captain, however, was serious. he asked several questions and ended by saying, ‘Take me up there, I want to look at it.’
“We made the trip without incident and returned to the airport.
“‘What do you make of it?’ I asked, as we climbed out of the plane.
“‘Astounding,’ he replied. ‘Do you know what ship that is?’
“‘Of course not, sir’
“‘Ever hear of Noah’s Ark?’
“‘Yes, sir. But I don’t understand what the legend of Noah’s Ark has to do with us finding this strange thing fourteen thousand feet up on a mountain top.’
“‘This strange craft,’ explained the captain, ‘is Noah’s Ark. It has been sitting up there for nearly five thousand years. Being frozen up there for nine or ten months of the year it couldn’t rot and has been on cold storage, as it were, all the time. You have made the most amazing discovery of the age.
“When the captain sent his report to the Russian government, it aroused considerable interest, and teh Czar sent two special companies of soldiers to climb the mountain. One group of fifty men attacked one
side and the other group of one hundred men attacked the mountain from the other side.
“Two weeks of hard work were required to chop out a trail along the cliffs of the lower part of the mountain, and it was nearly a month before the ark was reached.
“Complete measurements were take and plans drawn of it as well as many photographs, all of which were sent to the Czar of Russia.
“The ark was found to contain hundreds of small rooms and some rooms very large with high ceilings. The large rooms usually had a fence of great timbers across them, some of whcih were two feet thick, as though designed to hold beasts ten times as large as elephants. Other rooms were lined with tiers of cages somewhat like one sees today as a poultry show, only instead of chicken wire they had rows of tiny wrought iron bars along the fronts.
“Everything was heavily painted with a wax-like paint resembling shellac, and the workmanship of the craft showed all the signs of a high type of civilization.
“The expedition found on the peak of the mountain above the ship, the burned remains of the timbers which were missing out of the side of the ship. It seems that these timbers had been hauled up to the top of
the peak and used to build a tiny one-room shrine, inside of which was a rough stone hearth like the altars the Hebrews used for sacrifices, and it had either caught fire from the altar or had been struck by lightning as the timbers were considerably burned and charred over and the roof was completely burned off.
“A few days after this expedition sent its report to the Czar, the government was overthrown and Godless Bolshevism took over, so that the records were never made public and probably were destroyed in the zeal of the Bolshevics to discredit all religion and belief in the Bible.
“We White Russians of the air fleet escaped through Armenia, and four of us came to America, where we could be free to live according to the ‘Good Old Book,’ which we had seen for ourselves to be absolutely
true, even to as fantastic sounding a thing as a world flood.” (This article, “Noah’s Ark Found,” by Vladimer Roskovitsky, is taken from “The New Eden,” special edition, pp. 3-7.)
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1. 475 B.C. -A Babylonina priest named Berosus stated that a boat could be seen on a mountain in Turkish Armenia.
2. 30 B.C. -Nicolas Damascenus wrote of the Armenian mountain where a boat was stranded ager the Great Flood.
3. 100 A.D. -Flavius Josephus said Noah’s Ark was stranded on a mountain in Armenia and the ship could still be seen.
4. 1300 A.D. — Marco Polo wrote that Noah’s Ark rested “high on a mountain in Armenia.”
5. 1829 — A Russian physician, Dr. Frederick Parot, climbed Mount Ararat, and discovered wood.
6. 1883 — A group of Turkish government commissioners claimed to have spotted the ark while investigating an avalanche. They were able to enter the remains and reported that they for the interior to be “well preserved and containing room-like divisions.”
7. 1889 — Archbishop Nouri of Persia, reached the ark and saw “dark red wood.”
8. 1943-44 — U.S. bomber crews flying into Erivan occasionally reported seeing a “large wooden object” on the mountain.
9. 1948 — A Turkish farmer named Neshit claimed to have found the old hull while climbing in the snowfields and said he was able to walk on the deck.
10. 1952 — American oil engineer George Greene claims he saw an photographed “the hull of a ship” from his helicopter while circling Ararat’s snow cap.
11. 1955 — French industrialist Fernand Navarra, member of a SEARCH exploration team (Scientific Exploration an Research), climbed the mountain of Ararat and found hand tooled timbers in the area of
previous sittings.
12. 1969 — Timbers extracted from the glacier by the Arctic Institute of North America, one of the world’s foremost polar research or-ganizations, yielded a carbon-14 age of 4-5000 years, consistent with the Biblical chronology. After takin a seismic profile of the ice mass, the Institute estimated that at least 50 tons of these hand-tooled planks were still in the glacier.
13. 1969 — Harry Crawford, son of trhe founder of SEARCH, led a team up Mt. Ararat bringing back more traces of the ark. Since then the Turks said that they could not allow the team to return for “security reasons.”
Finding wood on a mountain in not a particularly big deal under normal circumstances, but it should be noted that (a) Ararat has virtually no trees on her whatsoever — only grass and flowers; (b) the fact that
the planks are all tooled from a type of white oak which is not found within a radius of 300 miles is highly unusual; (c) the very precarious region where th glacier lies is barely accessible to agile men with mountaineering gear, making it very unlikely that men may have hauled the timber up to the area; and (d) the site is above the frost line and therefore frozen all year round.
We should note here that any flood which could carry a huge boat (450 feet long) to a point 14,000 feet or more above sea level obviously would cover the whole earth just as stated in Genesis 7:19-20.
It should also be noted that virtually all of the native inhabitants living within visibility of the mountain concur heartily that the old hulk is still there. Their folklore speaks of it and from time to time claim that wandering shepherds spot it in midsummer. They steadfastly refuse to climb higher than 12 or 13,000 feet, insisting that evil spirits guard the ark. Generally, research teams can find no one who will guide them to the ark regardless of how much money is offered. But it is obvious that the natives are in full agreement
that the “Nuhem genisi” — Noah’s Ark — is still on the mountain.
Written by Jesus People, USA
Addendum: (From Halley’s Bible Handbook)
Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Greeks, Chinese, Phrygians, Fiji Islanders, Esquiaux, Aboriginal Americans, Indians, Brazilians, Peruvians, and indeed every branch of the whole human race, Semitic, Aryan, Turanian — have traditions of a Great Deluge that destroyed all mankind, except one family, and which impressed itself indelibly on the memory of the ancestors of all these races before they separated. “All these myths are intelligible only on the supposition that some such event did actually occur. Such a universal belief, not springing from some instinctive principle of our nature, must be based on an Historical Fact.”
Greek tradition: Deucalion, warned that the gods were going to bring a flood upon the earth, for its great wickedness, built an ark, which rested on Mt. Parnassus. A dove was sent out twice.
Polynesians have stories of a Flood form which 8 escaped.
Peruvians: One man and one woman were saved in a box that floated on the flood waters.
Chinese tradition: Fa-He, founder of Chinese civilization, is represented as having escaped with his wife, 3 sons and 3 daughters from a Flood sent because man had rebelled against heaven.
Hindu tradition: Manu, warned, built a ship, in which he alone escaped from a Deluge which destroyed all creatures.
England: Druids had a legend that the world had been re-peopled from a righteous patriarch who had been saved in a strong ship form a Flood sent to destroy man for his wickedness.
