Noah’s Ark and the Giza Tunnels: How New Claims Get Shot Down

Some claims about our past arrive with a bang. A ship in the mountains of Turkey. A hidden city under the pyramids of Giza. A few weeks later, the experts answer, and the story goes quiet.

I wanted to see how that answer works. So I picked two cases that follow the same pattern. On this page I put the claim and the official reply next to each other. You can judge for yourself.

The boat-shaped hill near Ararat

The first case is the Durupinar site. It is a boat-shaped mound about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) south of the summit of Mount Ararat, near the town of Dogubayazit in eastern Turkey. I wrote about the mountain itself on my page on Mount Ararat.

Life magazine ran an aerial photo of it in September 1960, with the caption “Noah’s Ark?”. The first team found no wood and no man-made objects, and left after two days.

In the 1980s the explorer Ron Wyatt claimed the site as the Ark. David Fasold began his own study in 1985. Fasold was a merchant marine officer who made nine trips to the site.

What the believers found

Fasold listed his evidence carefully. The length and width matched the 300 by 50 cubits of Genesis. A cubit is an old measure of length, about half a meter.

His metal detectors found more than 5,000 buried iron targets. They lay in lines from the pointed end to the round end. His ground-penetrating radar showed what looked like a regular inner structure. Ground-penetrating radar sends radio pulses into the soil and records the echoes.

About 24 kilometers (14.9 miles) away lay eleven large flat stones with a hole at one end. Fasold read them as drogue stones, weights that a ship hangs from ropes to keep steady. A Turkish geologist on the project, Salih Bayraktutan, found it hard to explain why a natural hill had so much geometry.

How the mainstream answered

The answer came from Fasold himself. After nine years he began to doubt. He brought his samples to the geologist Lorence Collins at California State University Northridge.

In 1996 the two men published a paper together in the Journal of Geoscience Education (DOI; full text). Their verdict was clear. The mound is a doubly plunging syncline. That is a fold in rock layers that dips down at both ends, so that erosion leaves a pointed, boat-like shape.

The “iron brackets” were limonite and magnetite. These are natural iron minerals, and both make a metal detector buzz. The lines of “walls” were iron stains that formed along cracks in the folded layers.

The supposed fossil gopherwood was a crinkled metamorphic rock called peridotite. Every rock sample from the structure was andesite or basalt, both volcanic stones. No petrified wood and no wood carbon turned up in any trench or core.

The drogue stones were made of local andesite. The paper notes that Mesopotamia, where Noah would have built his ship, has almost no volcanic rock. So the stones were cut nearby.

The strongest point for me was a layer of fossil limestone that cuts through the fold. If those fossils died in the Flood, the hill is older than the Flood. Then it cannot be the ship.

Collins and Fasold still left one door open. Fasold thought the ancients may have seen this hill as the ship of the Deluge. Collins called that “a interesting speculation”.

The site comes back

The story did not end in 1996. Since 2021 a team from Istanbul Technical University, Agri Ibrahim Cecen University and Andrews University has worked at Durupinar. They sent about 30 rock and soil samples to Istanbul for testing, as the Jerusalem Post reported.

The team reported clay, marine deposits and mollusk shells. They dated the material to between 3,500 and 5,000 years old. The lead researcher, Faruk Kaya, stayed careful. He told the press that the dating does not show the ship is there. These results have not been through peer review.

A second group, Noah’s Ark Scans, has pushed much further. Its founder is Andrew Jones. The group posts its work almost daily on X as @noahsarkscans, and I read through its posts from September and October 2026.

The radar story starts in October 2019. The group ran a ground-penetrating radar survey across the whole formation. The group says an outside geophysicist later went through the raw data for six months.

In 2023 she shared her findings, asked if we had dug a tunnel beneath the formation (we did not), and found a massive hallway-like tunnel roughly 4 meters (13.1 feet) down running through the dead center of the formation, along with voids, corridors, chambers, a larger central cavity, and parallel linear patterns.

Noah's Ark Scans, post on X, 21 October 2026

In plain words, the group says a second expert saw the same hollow spaces without knowing what to look for. That is the kind of blind check I like to see.

In 2026 the group brought in a second radar. Its operator is Khosrow Bakhtar, a rock-mechanics engineer who worked on many US defense projects. The group shared his preliminary report at the end of September.

He found an "extraordinary and massive object" beneath the surface, with organized patterns, corridors, chambers, and a structure he believes could be a space shuttle or a ship.

Noah's Ark Scans, post on X, 30 September 2026

That line caught my eye. Even the people who want a wooden ship leave room for something stranger.

Then came the drill. On 21 September 2026 the group began core drilling under Turkish permits. A core drill cuts out a long tube of earth, so you can read the layers in order. The team then lowered a small robot, which they call Gopher, into the holes.

As radar scans accurately told us, No rock or bedrock found.

Noah's Ark Scans, post on X, 24 September 2026

The group means that the drill did not hit a solid rock core where the old theory would put one. The team also says soil from inside the shape held about three times more organic matter than soil outside, in tests from 2024. Organic matter can come from rotted wood.

The group is careful about what comes next.

Hundreds of samples collected from the Durupınar formation are now awaiting detailed laboratory analysis.

Noah's Ark Scans, post on X, 15 October 2026

These samples are now with a lab in Ankara. I want to see those results.

Setting the two side by side

This is a lot of new data. It deserves a real answer, not a shrug.

Still, the mainstream case of 1996 has not been answered point by point. The fossil limestone that cuts the fold is still there. The volcanic samples are still volcanic. A loose fill with no hard core fits a mudflow too. A mudflow is a slide of wet earth that carries rocks and soil downhill.

The new radar results come from the group itself. I could not find them in a peer-reviewed journal. The posts also ask for donations, which is normal for a private dig, but it is a reason to wait for the lab. Bakhtar’s report is called preliminary by the group itself.

I kept going back to one question. A fold of rock can explain the shape. Can it also explain hollow spaces and a difference in the soil? The drill has now gone in. The lab results will tell us more than any press release.

Radar under the Khafre pyramid

The second case is younger and louder. On 22 and 23 March 2025, three Italian researchers held a press conference on YouTube. They were Corrado Malanga, Filippo Biondi and Armando Mei.

They said satellite radar showed a huge complex under the Pyramid of Khafre, the second pyramid of Giza. They described eight vertical shafts wrapped in spiral paths, dropping 648 meters (2,126 feet) into the earth. Below them, they said, lay two giant chambers the size of city blocks.

Their tool was synthetic aperture radar, or SAR. That is radar on a satellite that builds a detailed picture of the ground from many echoes as it passes. Biondi said his method also reads tiny vibrations in the ground to build a 3D image.

Biondi stood by the work. He told AFP the structures “appear to belong to an unknown civilization referenced in ancient myths worldwide”.

The answer from Egypt and the experts

The answer was fast and hard. AFP collected it in a fact check in April 2025.

Zahi Hawass, the former Egyptian minister of antiquities, called the claims “nothing but fabrications”. He added that no team had used radar inside the pyramid.

Lawrence Conyers of the University of Denver is a specialist in radar for archaeology. He said radar waves fade in the ground, and SAR cannot reach such a depth.

AFP also noted that none of the three men is an Egyptologist or archaeologist. Malanga is an organic chemist at the University of Pisa who also studies UFOs. The Khafre claims were never published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The retraction of August 2026

The Khafre claims grew out of an older paper. In October 2022 Biondi and Malanga published a study on the Great Pyramid of Khufu in the journal Remote Sensing (DOI). They said SAR showed a network of rooms and corridors inside it.

On 10 August 2026 the journal retracted that paper. A retraction means the journal withdraws a paper it had published. The editors found “serious methodological flaws and statistical errors that were deemed to undermine the scientific conclusions of the article”, as Retraction Watch reported.

Biondi and Malanga disagreed with the retraction. Conyers had been asked to review the paper back in 2022. He said he would not recommend it unless a second reviewer checked its mathematics.

Not everyone who doubts is a skeptic

I found the most useful voice outside the mainstream. The YouTuber Metatron does not dismiss a find under Giza at all. He trusts Biondi’s scans more than Malanga’s reading of them.

I just don't think that the explanation presented by Corrado Malanga is fit and reliable.

Metatron, Mines under the Giza pyramids

He means that a real feature and a wild explanation are two separate things. His own guess is ancient mine shafts. He builds that on Greek and Roman mining. I go through his case in my note on Metatron on mines under the Giza pyramids.

I like this approach. It keeps the door open without swallowing the whole story.

What the Ark could be

The same split shows up with the Ark. Some readers look for planks in a hill. Others read the Ark as something stranger. The teacher Efraim Palvanov reads it through Jewish sources, where a shining stone lit the vessel from inside.

So this Ark is now becoming some kind of artificial ecosystem.

Efraim Palvanov, Noah's ark and the Tower of Babel

In his talk, the light-giving stone turns the boat into a self-contained world. That reading does not need wood in a Turkish hillside at all. It fits better with what I found when I compared the two floods of Genesis.

The pattern I see

Both cases start with a shape. A ship-like hill. Lines in a radar image. Both claims came from people outside the field that would judge them.

In both cases the answer named a natural cause or a flawed method. The fold of rock is real geology. The retraction is a real decision by a journal. I respect those facts.

But I also notice what the answers leave out. The Durupinar cores are still in the lab. Nobody has dug under Khafre. The question of what lies below is answered by rules about what is possible, not by a spade.

That is the same road the Sphinx took, and Göbekli Tepe before it was dug. A temple that “could not” exist that early now stands in the open, as I show on my page on the Göbekli Tepe excavation. I keep both cases open on my list. I wait for the drill and the spade.