Finding Noah

In a 1979 episode of In Search Of, host Leonard Nimoy characterized Noah’s ark as “the greatest archeological prize of all.” Most scientists, however, haven’t taken up the challenge since they deny creepers and flyers would load two-by-two onto an ancient carpenter’s two-by-fours. Spurred by trust in biblical inerrancy, a Christian research team climbed Mt. Ararat in 2012 and 2013 to find the ark. A new documentary, Finding Noah: An Adventure in Faith, chronicles the quest.

Finding Noah opens by examining Ice Age geological clues and some of the 200 religious traditions—including Islam and Hinduism—supporting a worldwide flood. Dubious sightings of the ark, the film notes, go back centuries: A Russian prince claimed in 1887 to have walked the ark’s interior, the CIA supposedly took secret photos of the ark from U-2 flyovers, and so on. But the Finding Noah crew doesn’t want to be counted among the hoaxsters. “The important thing,” one team member says, “is finding what the facts are.”

The odds seem stacked against locating any recognizable fragment of the ark. Ararat, “the painful mountain” to locals, juts precariously up from a seismic fault line in eastern Turkey. The volcano blew its nearly 17,000-foot glacier top as recently as 1840. Arguably, the mountain’s millennia of movements have pulverized Noah’s vessel to sawdust. But some believe the subterranean recesses of the high-elevation icebox preserve the ark.

The Finding Noah team doesn’t find Noah or the ark (or evidence of Russell Crowe’s stony Sasquatches). By the time the unrated (but clean), Gary Sinise–narrated documentary ends, the explorers have unearthed from Ararat’s slopes scant evidence for the ark. But the disappointed mountaineers rejoice in the region’s spectacular beauty, friendships they’ve forged with their Kurdish guides, and the “real story—how the search changed our lives.”

For the time being, Noah’s ark will remain biblical archeology’s final frontier.