Satellite closes in on Noah’s Ark mystery

DigitalGlobe's QuickBird commercial remote sensing satellite imaged the Mount Ararat "anomaly" in 2003.

(SPACE.com) -- High on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, there is a baffling mountainside "anomaly," a feature that one researcher claims may be something of biblical proportions.

Images taken by aircraft, intelligence-gathering satellites and commercial remote-sensing spacecraft are fueling an intensive study of the intriguing oddity. But whether the anomaly is some geological quirk of nature, playful shadows, a human-made structure of some sort, or simply nothing at all remains to be seen.

Whatever it is, the anomaly of interest rests at 15,300 feet (4,663 meters) on the northwest corner of Mount Ararat, and is nearly submerged in glacial ice. It would be easy to call it merely a strange rock formation.

But at least one man wonders if it could be the remains of Noah's Ark, a vessel said to have been built to save people and selected animals from the Great Flood, the 40 days and 40 nights of deluge as detailed in the Book of Genesis.

The Genesis blueprint of the Ark detailed the structure as 6:1 length to width ratio (300 cubits by 50 cubits). The anomaly, as viewed by satellite, is close to that 6:1 proportion. - CNN

Or it could be Santa's sled. Noah's Ark? Oh come on. This should be in the Weekly World News, but not CNN or Space.com until something real is discovered. Read Gilgamesh. It was written long before Genesis and it too speaks of the building of an Ark to escape a flood. It seems clear the Noah story is taken from the much earlier story, but re-written to reflect the monotheistic religion of the time.

The version of Gilgamesh we have today was written down in Akkadian sometime between 1300 and 1000 BC by the Babylonian priest Sin-liqe-unninni, who "canonized" the text- that is, he edited it, wrote an introduction (in which he gives us his name), and established the version used in modern translations. He himself, however, was definitely reworking an older text from Sumerian, possibly dated to as early as 2100 BC.

The earliest stratum of the Genesis flood account, the Jahwist text, probably dates to around 800-750 BC. The part that describes the dimensions of the ark, the Priestly source, probably dates to around 705-701 BC (in the reign of King Hezekiah). - wiki