Original subtitles

- Within the realm of uncertainty,

lie myths, stories,

never entirely believed,

but never entirely doubted.

The explorer searches for their origins,

the answers to who we are.

- For centuries,

legend maintained that the last of the Incan leaders

had escaped capture by the Spanish conquistadores,

and retreated to a hidden city, high above the clouds.

Only in modern times has the legend proved

to have a basis in fact,

with the discovery of Machu Pichu.

- Concealed in the jungle,

this once lost city is now a portal

to a vanished civilization.

The more we discover, the more we want to know.

- Dateline: Egypt.

In the shadows of the giant pyramids

that stood as lonely sentinels over the vast desert sands,

a 1922 archaeological expedition,

headed by Englishman Howard Carter,

sought to uncover the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh,

King Tutankhamen.

- I carefully drew back the bolt,

and opened the door.

- Hidden for centuries,

the final resting place of the boy king

made its contribution to modern man's

clearer understanding of his ancestors.

The mountains of Ararat.

The head waters of the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers.

History calls this the cradle of civilization.

- The seeds of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity

all came from that region.

Steeped in antiquity,

this area has yielded countless discoveries.

Like the 1799 unearthing of the Rosetta Stone.

- The stone bore three inscriptions,

ancient hieroglyphs at the top,

another unknown text,

and at the bottom, ancient Greek.

- So, by translating the Greek,

scholars were now able to decipher the hieroglyphs.

Another find.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been called

the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times.

They show the evolutionary link

between Judaism and Christianity.

- It just completely changed

our understanding of the Bible.

We didn't have any idea that these even existed.

- But, it was archaeologists,

traveling through layers of time,

who, in the 1850s, unearthed cuneiform clay tablets

containing an ancient story about a great flood.

The Epic of Gilgamesh,

which has similarities to the story of Noah.

- The great gods decided to make a deluge.

- Genesis 6.

"So, God said to Noah,

- "I'm going to put an end to all people,

"for the earth is filled with violence because of them."

- The story of Noah is told many times in the Quran.

In the story itself,

Noah is informed that there's gonna be a great flood.

After many years of preaching to his people,

very few followers actually believed in him and his message.

And so, he was informed by God to build this ark.

- "So, make yourself an ark of cypress wood.

"Make rooms in it, and coat it with pitch, inside and out.

"Take into the boat the seed of all living things.

" I'm going to bring flood waters on the earth

"to destroy all life under the heavens."

- What prompts the deity, Yahweh, the god of the Bible,

to send the flood?

It has nothing to do with,

that the humans are procreating,

and creating noises and disturbances.

But rather, their ethical behavior.

"Every living thing,

that moved on land, perished."

- The rains started falling.

And also the water started gushing up.

"Everything on dry land,

"that had the breath of life in its nostrils,

"died."

"But, God remembered Noah.

"And he sent a wind over the earth,

"and the waters receded."

- When we study the flood, from a comparative perspective,

is that we see it in every culture.

The flood was a very common story told.

That something happened,

and there was an ark that saved human kind.

- "And on the 17th day of the seventh month,

the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat."

- Did you go clear to the top?

- Well, we got up on the ice cap.

We didn't get to the --

- Did you see the ark, itself?

- I did.

Early history notes

many such sightings of the ark.

- In the third century,

Berosus wrote that its location was such

that common people could visit.

- Egyptian historian Heironymus

mentions the ark --

- Josephus wrote of the vessel in 50A.D.

- Epiphanius, bishop of Salem,

has stated that he was shown wood from the vessel.

- Armenian historian, Hayton,

wrote that, in the snows of Mt. Ararat,

one can see a black spot.

That is the ark of Noah.

- Even Marco Polo

wrote about the ark's presence on Ararat, in 1269 A.D.

- In 1829,

Fredrich Perot reported being shown wood relics

from the ark, at the base of Ararat.

- If we don't go, we won't know.

Somebody has to take up the challenge.

We're part of that group of men

who have tried to do it, in history.

- Karl Behrens, in 1835.

- Claudius Rich, in 1836.

- Herman Von Abich

conquered the Ararat summit in 1845.

- Englishman, H. Danby Seymour

reached the peak in 1846.

- Colonel Khodzko of the Russian army

climbed in 1850.

- Englishman Major Robert Stuart

made it in 1856.

- And hopefully, one day, it will be done.

- I always thought,

"Let's just go up and find the thing.

"Put this to rest, once and for all."

And people have been trying to do that for centuries.

- Even getting to Mount Ararat,

today's explorer deals with obstacles on the road

to what locals call Abridah,

"the Painful Mountain".

- This will be our third try.

- We're having a little trouble getting up the hill,

so we all had to bail out of the vehicle.

I think the ark of Noah,

on greater Ararat, in Eastern Turkey,

would be the ultimate archaeological find.

- It's a big mountain.

I'm 50 years old, and I'm thinking,

can I really make it up that mountain?

You know what I thought?

"God will go before me.

"I'll make it up that mountain."

What it means to me, to search for Noah's ark,

is to come back with some

tangible evidence that the ark existed.

- The local Kurdish people

protect this mountain.

No one climbs without their support.

- I believe the ark on this mountain.

- In ancient times,

this land was a buffer kingdom, between rival empires.

Throughout the centuries,

it has often known the thunder of hooves,

and the clash of steel.

As modern borders were redrawn,

Ararat was seized from its ancestral home in Armenia,

and given to Turkey.

Now, it rises majestically, across the border,

a constant reminder.

- This is why we have pain in our heart.

Because, our symbol was taken from us,

without considering the will of Armenian people.

It was in Armenia where Noah constructed temple,

It was in Armenia where he made his first sacrifice.

If you take out Ararat from Armenia mythology,

Armenia will cease to be Armenia.

- This is not a normal part of the world.

This is a hostile part of the world.

- It's a demilitarized zone.

It's highly classified.

- We had the PKK.

We have the Turkish army.

Needless to say, they don't like one another.

- In the decades long conflict with Turkey,

the PKK controls the mountain.

- The PKK view themselves as freedom fighters.

They represent the people.

They once had land, they no longer have lands.

They believe they're fighting for a righteous cause.

- You walk into a context where there's a war zone.

You're on a mountain, dominated and controlled by the Kurds.

At the same time, you're in a country,

and the mountain exists in that country,

that is under the sovereignty of the Turkish authorities.

- With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire,

after World War I,

the treaty of Severa guaranteed a homeland for the Kurds,

until the treaty was dismissed,

after the Turkish War of Independence in 1923.

And hostilities escalated.

In 1945, the Kurds petitioned

the newly formed United Nations for a sovereign state,

and received

nothing.

So, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Armenia, and Turkey

all have chunks of, what should have been, Kurdistan.

- That's why they're so militant.

They want their own country back.

I understand that.

- These are freedom fighters, in there own eyes,

for what's legally always been,

and should have been, theirs.

- In years past, we have been directed by the PKK,

through our Kurdish partners,

to exit the mountain.

- And you know once you get on that mountain,

no one really is going to help you.

The military doesn't go where you go.

- We had Turkish commandos with us,

until they decided they didn't want to go any higher.

- You're on your own.

If someone wants to kidnap you,

they want to shoot you,

they have every freedom to do it.

- But, for those searching for Noah's Ark,

there is no other destination.

- They call me Cowboy.

I came over, and agreed to set up,

and make sure everybody got to the top,

make sure the equipment works,

make sure the food is here.

Deal with political problems that we have.

- We're going up to drill.

My hope is that, yes, indeed, we find it.

- Word.

- I think we're supposed to look for things like this.

- I think there's so much evidence,

that it's irresponsible not to look.

- We are built to explore, find and reveal.

It's just a part of who we are,

from Marco Polo to Christopher Columbus.

- It's a great team.

I look at them all like brothers, you know?

- For me, the past five years has been,

really a mirror into my soul.

Why am I doing this year after year?

Why am I risking life and limb to look for something

that we have no conclusive evidence actually exists?

- The quest to find the ark starts with my faith.

It started with my faith.

It started with a calling that I felt.

- We have come together to meet this challenge of

scientifically examining, investigating,

and revealing to the world,

the evidence that may exist for Noah's ark on that mountain.

- Last year, it was an amazing trip.

Being able to work with my son,

on top of a mountain.

We work and play well together.

And we added value to the trip,

because we were able to Frankenstein stuff together.

And that's what you have to do in a place like this.

- None of these things are labeled, of course.

We had an active volcano

on a fault line, within recorded history

that's demolished multiple civilizations.

And, then to think,

okay, there's something that's gonna be suspended

in a 60 foot deep glacier,

that breaks off and falls into a gorge

twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.

There's different arguments about how old the earth is,

whether it's 6,000, or 60 million years old.

And, even if it's the young- smaller model, the fact that and a matter what

if it's concrete wood, bathed in,

who knows what kind of chemical pitch,

if there's a splinter up there,

I'd come to the point where,

if there's a splinter of wood up there,

it will be by the hand of God,

let alone some intact anomaly.

- I've had my worst nights of my life on that mountain.

I've frozen on that mountain.

I've been bloody on that mountain.

You sit in your tent, and the wind is whipping,

and hitting the flaps.

You're eating your granola bar,

which you're gonna throw up anyway,

because you're so nauseated.

It's just an unpleasant place to be,

and sometimes you question the sanity of just doing it.

- You know you're taking your life in your hands

when you go on that mountain.

So, it has to be a cause bigger,

and greater than yourself

to motivate you to do that.

- I expect

something amazing on this trip.

I think there's gonna be a transfer

from what I got,

and this is all spiritual in nature,

what I received was word that

I was going to receive something.

And, I was gonna be giving something to God.

How could I not come?

- Finding the ark would indicate

that God, actually, has intervened

with man.

And that has a profound impact.

People that have thought this through

are scared to death to find it to be true.

- Then you realize,

if you do see these rotten timbers

of this boat, sticking out of the ancient optics of ice,

it could change everything.

It could change the whole perception of the Bible.

It could change people's thought process

about where they came from,

who they are.

- Do you believe the entire Bible is to be taken literally?

- Well, if it's history, as Genesis is,

it's written as typical historical narrative,

you take it as history.

If it's --

- Part of the root of the fascination

of the story of Noah's flood is, first of all,

it's a really good story.

I mean, it's an epic tale.

It has all the elements of a good story.

But, there's particular branches of Christian theology

that have basically embraced the idea

of viewing the Bible as a literal, historical,

and complete record of the history of the world.

- It sounds as though you believe your world view,

which is a literal interpretation

of most parts of the Bible,

is correct.

- The conflict between science and religion,

that is often portrayed in the media today,

I think , is actually better portrayed

as a conflict, within religion, over how to view science.

- There are some difference between Jews and Christians,

in the way that they relate to the story of Noah,

and the way Muslims do.

- Everyone, whether they're Muslim, or Jewish, or Christian,

the three accounts that have the ark

in their religious documents,

all believe that the ark exists,

because their founding documents say it does.

- I believe that historical texts

are all part of the human knowledge.

And, the human knowledge is all based on both

the religious texts,

and the things that they saw in nature,

and the things they were told by their elders.

- Hundreds of cultures throughout the world

share the same legend of a catastrophic flood

that destroyed most of mankind.

In 95%, the flood was world-wide.

In 88%, a certain family was favored.

In 70%, survival was by means of a boat.

In 67%, animals were also saved.

In 35%, birds were sent out from the boat.

And in 9%, exactly eight people were spared.

- And, rather than immediately dismissing

a literal world-wide flood,

just suppose that, maybe,

actually, that this is speaking of real events.

- If the biblical stories in Genesis

are literally true, and historically accurate,

you basically have to throw away

geology, and all the physics, and chemistry,

and math, and biology that it's built upon,

to embrace that view.

- Being a flood over the entire earth.

And, those that take that literally,

are kind of bound to understanding it, in that way,

even if it contradicts science.

Where as Muslims, we're kind of bound to accept science,

whatever that says,

and then reconcile that with the text.

- We know for certain, geologically,

that before 5,000 years ago,

there were enormous amounts of rainfall,

where a great deal of water would have accumulated,

and a major flood would have occurred.

There is no question about it,

because we see the evidence of this in the rock, itself.

- So, when you come at it from a Christian point of view,

I don't think you should be closed to the possiblity

that Genesis is actually just simply

describing what happened.

- In which case,

validating your faith relies on the reality of that story,

as a global flood,

and that it ended up on Ararat.

- This is my father place.

My father was put his tent down here.

This is my grandfather places also.

I remember, my mother would say to me,

"Come, I have to wash you",

but I always run away.

And, there she was, come behind me,

take my arm, and then hit me,

"Come here, you very dirty,

"I have to clean you".

It was like this.

Yeah, it was like this.

- Every season,

Kurdish shepherds lead their flocks above the desert heat.

To graze in pastures fed by the melting ice cap.

The warmer the summer,

the greater the exposure,

leading to the most intriguing of local legends.

- Throughout the 1800s, they came.

In 1856, local boy, Haji Yearam, and his father,

were hired by three unbelieving scientists

to take them up to the ark.

When the scientists saw the vessel,

they flew into a rage, and attempted to destroy it.

- They took a blood oath,

that if any one of the three ever revealed the truth,

the other two would kill him.

- Some 50 years later,

one of the scientists gave a deathbed confession,

which corroborated Haji Yearam's story.

- In July, 1955,

Fernand Nevara, traveling with his son, Rafael,

climbed Mount Ararat.

Rafael saw the ark first, in a crevasse.

After lowering himself into the crevasse,

and using a pick axe to chop through the ice,

"I found wood!" he called.

Yes, Nevarra had found wood.

But, was it a piece of the ark?

- Testing proved it wasn't old enough.

The wood was from the 8th century,

4,000 years after Noah's time.

But, what was the wood doing on the slopes of Ararat?

- What I have listed here,

are four reports of the ark with the door off,

seven reports of one end broken off,

18 reports of sticking out of the ice --

- In 1883,

reports issued by a Turkish commission,

investigating avalanches on Mount Ararat,

detailed that they had seen Noah's ark

protruding from a glacier.

- Prince Nouri declared

that he had found the ark, high on Ararat,

that he walked within its walls,

and that it's measurements

were exactly as described in the Bible.

- There are nine reports of a melt-water pond,

eight reports sitting on a ledge,

10 reports of a ravine, valley, gully --

- In 1902, as a boy,

Armenian, George Hagopian,

was taken to the ark by his uncle.

- You saw it how many times?

- Twice.

- Twice?

- Mm hmm.

- In 1916,

Russian aviator, Vladamir Roskovitsky

described how he saw the ark,

while on a flight over Mount Ararat.

The czar sent soldiers up the mountain

to confirm the sighting.

They brought back photographs,

displaying hundreds of rooms with cages.

But, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred shortly thereafter,

and the photographs were destroyed.

- You could see a large vessel there,

laying on its side --

- These guys didn't even know what they had seen.

They just described it to us.

They realized it was a huge boat.

- He said he saw this object,

this murky object in the snow,

and he said it looked like timbers from Noah's ark.

- And then, off to the left back here,

is the part that broke off.

And it is laying slightly down.

You could see in the back of it.

- Of all the people that have said they've seen Noah's Ark,

Ed Davis has the most reliable eye-witness account.

- He had been there as part of the Army Corps of Engineers,

building roads.

He rescued the grandson of one of the Kurdish chieftains.

- The only way that they could say thank you,

was to share with them their most precious possession,

which was the remains of Noah's Ark.

- He got within about a hundred yards of it.

Storm kept them from getting closer,

but he viewed it with the army field glasses.

- Comes back after the war, tells a few people about it.

I find out about it, I go give him a lie detector test,

we give him three lie detector tests.

He passes all three of them.

- He passed one with flying colors.

- I mean, you just can't dismiss this.

- Okay, three reports of a stream and a pond.

The point is, we have so many reports,

and many of them say the same things.

- They describe it in the same fashion.

As a long rectangular shape,

with a catwalk on the top,

found on a very rugged area of the mountain.

- And, there's no chance of collaboration here.

They come from different sources, over different years.

- Everyone tells the same basic story.

- The structure is there.

- We got the word from a military guy,

that says, "We know where it is".

You go, just a little bit, to the north,

about seven meters, and you'll hit it.

- Okay, but our window is closing.

We've got, just over 30 days.

Our window is gonna be closing very quickly.

- You've got 'til the first week of September,

before it starts getting nasty.

- Cowboy's in agreement with me,

but I want to get your permission

to go, and to climb.

- Just as soon as you get those drills,

soon as they arrive,

absolutely, you got it.

It's gonna be a good year,

and we're gonna find something.

- Alright. - Goodnight.

- Thanks Richard.

Thank you, thank you very much, gentlemen.

Appreciate it.

- Alright, goodnight.

We're going. - Yep.

- The moment we got the news that

we were gonna be leaving the next day,

I did scramble to find a computer

so I could Facebook my wife.

- I thought you were calling at two,

and we were at the bank, and the car overheated,

and everything else.

- That's what Andrew told me.

- So, how are you?

- I'm terrific.

I'm gonna climb a mountain tomorrow,

so you guys can be praying for me.

- There's very little privacy at Murat Camping Inn,

unless you had your own room.

You're sleeping in a room that has

three or four other guys in there,

and they're getting ready to climb a mountain,

so they're throwing everything in a bag.

I'm getting ready to throw all my stuff in.

I was in my little bubble, talking to my,

I call her my girlfriend.

I was focused.

'Cause I knew it was my only chance

to talk to her for awhile.

I thought I was climbing later, but,

it's kind of like military around here, You just uh..you know

they tell you they're shipping out, you're shipping out.

So, I'm shipping out in the morning.

Just wanted to see y'all's faces

before we leave.

You don't know if this may be the end.

It's a great expedition, but something may happen.

I don't know when I'm gonna talk to y'all next.

- You want me to pray for you, first?

- Yes, please.

- Father, I pray, right now, for my sweet husband,

that you'll protect him --

- I did take this very seriously,

knowing it was a treacherous climb,

and anything could happen.

- Bless him, Lord,

and may this be a blessed time, and that he find the ark.

And be home safely.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

- Amen.

We prayed, and signed off,

and the next morning, we were out the door,

on our way up.

- We begin our journey,

try to get up to the first base camp.

And then, overnight.

We're on our way.

♪ Long live the young at heart

♪ You know who you are

♪ With your spirit burning

- At 17,000 feet,

Mount Ararat's dangerous terrain

is a challenge for even the most experienced adventurer.

Living atop a glacier at altitude,

you're combating fatigue and hypoxia,

working in white-outs,

and 100 mile per hour winds.

But, advancing technologies allow explorers

a better glimpse into the ancient ice

that legend says entombs the ark.

♪ Long live the young at heart

♪ You know who you are

♪ With your spirit burning

- I didn't expect that long of a walk

just to get up to the first camp.

♪ Long live the soul set free

♪ Don't be afraid to dream

♪ While the world's still turning

♪ Every moment, make it happen

♪ Two left feet, keep on dancing

- Precisely six hours

on the first day.

And we

have made it to base camp one.

♪ Beat by beat

♪ Breath by breath

♪ Walking hand in hand

♪ Step by step

Time to overnight.

- Six hour trek up to the first base camp.

It was long, but I'm glad I'm here.

I'm tired, but I'm glad that I did it.

- Been a forensic architect for 27 years,

and in my forensic architecture, I go around,

and look at buildings, what's wrong with them.

It's the equivalent of being a doctor,

but to buildings.

My background in architecture has been,

a lot of it has been in water proofing materials.

I told them I was interested in doing my dissertation

on the waterproofing of Noah's Ark.

As it says in the Bible,

it was covered inside and out with pitch.

- When I was even 17 years old,

I remember seeing a documentary

on the search for Noah's Ark.

- This may be the most incredible film you will ever see.

- Even as a young boy, I thought,

"I want to do this someday."

And then, 20 years later,

I'm sitting at home, watching another documentary,

the same documentary comes on T.V. again.

I'm watching that, and thinking,

"They've still not found Noah's Ark."

And, really, that's when I took my

skills as, really, a wilderness explorer,

being in the woods,

and took them to the mountaineering,

kind of started to train in mountaineering,

because I wanted to bring a tool to the team.

- Get rested up,

get re-hydrated, and get some food,

and we'll spend two days here,

and on up to camp two.

- Everybody's gonna sleep real well tonight.

- There are a number of different kinds of volcanoes.

on earth.

Some of them are actually underwater,

most vulcanism goes on on the sea bed,

and we see very little of it.

Tectonic plates, that meet in the middle of oceans,

have hundred, and hundreds, and hundreds of volcanoes.

On land, we can classify volcanoes into

ones that have built up over a long period of time,

with successive eruptions, they might have layers of ash

and lava flows,

so the whole thing gets built up like a layer cake.

We often call those strata volcanoes,

or composite volcanoes.

And that would be the kind of volcano

that Mount Ararat, in Turkey, is.

If you pile up a big mountain,

then there are all kinds of erosive processes

that bring it down again.

And, particularly in the case of Ararat.

It's glaciated,

and will have been even more heavily glaciated,

back in the ice ages. and that

The action of those glaciers is to remove material,

all the rocks and boulders,

and carry them down the slope.

And that's reflecting the erosive processes

that have occurred.

- So, this is base camp.

We're about 10,000 feet.

Camp two is, what?

1,000 meter?" - 1,00 meters up.

- 1,000 meters up.

- Yesterday was our easiest day.

Took us about --

Took us about six hours

- There's some gunfire.

- Yeah, we just heard some ...

... just heard some gunfire.

Just right up above us, there,

so somewhere ...

That's interesting.

- You get the feeling

this is not a place you wanna get hurt.

This is not the place you wanna do something stupid.

Because, it's a long way to help.

Not a great environment for anything to go wrong.

- So, Jim's hurt, he's busted up,

can't move.

- It nearly killed him, nearly took his life.

- Jim Irwin was a dedicated astronaut,

a very fine man,

a highly reasoned individual.

He worked very hard on the Apollo 15 mission.

- Dave, an extraordinary television picture, here.

Okay, Huston as I

stand out here, in the wonders of the unknown,

at Hadley, I grow to realize,

there's a fundamental truth to our nature.

Man must explore.

And this is exploration at its greatest.

It was just a very significant time in my life,

to be on another world.

A world where there's no life,

there was no sound,

there was no sky,

just looking up into the blackness of space.

Looking up and marveling at the beauty of the earth.

And, there it was, in the blackness of space,

but, so small that I could hold it between my fingers,

like a little marble.

In a spiritual sense, I felt magnified.

Because, I was holding God's special creation

between my fingers,

and really seeing it with his eyes.

- Splashdown, we have splashdown.

- His mission on Earth,

after being an astronaut on the Apollo mission 15,

is to find Noah's Ark.

- He said, "You know, I'm planning a trip to Mount Ararat,

"to look for Noah's Ark,

do you think you'd want to go?"

- Here was a man who stood on the moon,

and he said that wasn't the greatest achievement

of his life.

Standing on Mount Ararat was.

- He was disappointed, of course, when he'd come down,

but, keep going back, year after year.

- He just wanted to find out the truth.

- So, today, we're gonna move camp,

and go on up to 4200.

And spend a couple of nights there to acclimate.

And then, on the way up to the summit.

- I found an anomaly, organic,

on Mount Ararat.

- He says, "There's two rectangular forms,

"up on that mountain,under the ice.

"I've seen them,

"on this special satellite imaging that we got

"that can penetrate ice."

- It's a man-made object, organic.

It's not a rock structure, or anything like that.

How it got there, I don't know.

And that's not for me to find out,

it's for whoever goes up there and does it.

But, it's definitely a man-made object.

- Mr. X was

a man who worked for NASA,

and had access to a radar

that could penetrate the ground,

and go into the ice.

- My relationship with the man we call Mr. X

goes back about six years,

to the beginning of our current project.

- Said, "Well,

" actually it's up there on the eastern plateau."

- It is, in fact, the leads he gave us,

that lead us to the site we're at.

- It's in two pieces,

now it's three,

because the glacier's moving all the time.

- And when the glaciers move,

they start grinding things up.

- And, I feel whatever this object is,

here in the next four to five years,

probably, that will be the end of the exploration,

because it will be pretty well crushed.

- He's also helped me with a project in Israel,

not just on Mount Ararat.

So, I've had a secondary type of

means of testing his accuracy.

We actually have dug, and been able to determine things.

- There is photographs, taken by a branch of the government,

years ago.

- During the late 50s and early 60s,

the American spy plane, the U-2,

was making its global reconnaissance missions

for military intelligence.

Many of the flights passed over Ararat,

on their way to Russia,

and a number of pilots reported seeing,

what looked like, a ship, locked in the ice below.

- Irwin and I stood at the front of Incirlik Air Force Base,

and the commanding general came out to the gate,

and knew Irwin.

They knew each other from times past.

And Jim said,

"Yeah, we're here looking for Noah's Ark".

And the guy said, "Well, I've seen the ark."

And, I said, "What?"

And Jim's face was incredulous as well.

And he said, "Yeah, I've got pictures of it".

And we said, "Well, let's see them".

He said, "Oh, no.

"It's all classified."

- For decades, the pictures remained classified

but then, in 1995, the CIA finally released the photos.

- The photographs are taken way back when,

were U-2 and SR-71,

which one I looked at, probably was a U-2.

I couldn't find nothing that didn't look like a rock.

- This report came from here in 1917.

They came over from Russia,

and they went up and took it apart.

I mean, there was so much intrigue,

and shadows.

- In 1980, I served onboard the U.S. nuclear submarine,

U.S.S. Casimir Pulaski.

As sonar supervisor, I carried top secret clearance,

and was in charge of classified material.

- Somebody would say, "I have pictures,

"here's the documentation."

- In the year 1968,

a friend and I were employed at the Smithsonian,

in the vertebrate and paleontology section,

and they had some photographs,

which I went over and looked at,

arranged on a table, that had been taken from a balloon,

they told me,

showing a ship-like object down in some ice.

- Mount Ararat had been experiencing

the warmest weather on record.

As a result, the ice on the top of the mountain

began to melt.

Lo and behold,

there sat a large ship.

- They, pretty well, came out,

and told everybody to keep their mouth shut.

- The U.S. military science, and intelligence community

were in complete agreement,

that this was, in fact, Noah's Ark.

- Many, many people believe the Ark

has already been found.

It's a done deal.

- In 1959,

a mysterious boat-shaped object

was photographed by a Turkish reconnaissance pilot.

A team of Turkish explorers and scientists

examined the object,

and discovered that its dimensions were indeed

near those of the Ark,

as stated in the Bible.

The September 5, 1960 issue of Life Magazine

carried the story.

Then, in 1977, Ron Wyatt, an amateur archaeologist,

inspected the site with a metal detector.

- What we actually have found,

is physical evidence that this is a boat.

My personal feeling is, that it is Noah's Ark.

- Is that Noah's Ark?

No. What is it?

It's the push-up in the earth of Riolite.

And that was established by a geologist.

- And, there have been people

that have been up and down Mount Ararat,

and have come back, and told lies.

There have been movies filmed

that have been outright deception.

Back in March, Noah's Ark Ministries International,

or NAMI,

claimed to have found and entered Noah's Ark.

- I mean, they had film footage,

and they were inside the mountain, in a cave.

And, they were knocking on these wooden panels.

So, Don was really intrigued with this.

"Is this real, is this genuine?

"I must find out."

So, that is the reason he went.

- Donald Mackenzie was described

as a Scottish Indian Jones,

who had been to Turkey's Mount Ararat many times,

in search of proof of Noah's Ark.

But, in 2010, he failed to return

from a trip up the mountain.

- Went with the intention of

getting answers to his questions,

and then, he simply disappeared.

- Inside of a cave,

they found the remains of the ark.

What's it doing in a cave?

Noah didn't drive the ark into a cave.

- They build that stuff.

They talked to people that said,

"Yeah, they had us up there, carpenters doing this,

"They said this was gonna be a Noah's Ark,

for a film,

a movie set."

- "Oh, yes, yes, yes."

"Everybody knew, yes, yes.

"There were paid money to carry the wood up

"to the mountain,

"and construct the false ark.

"Yes, yes, oh yes."

- I think it probably got to the certain point

to where they had so much invested in it,

that they couldn't admit that,

eh, this could be a hoax.

- If it's God's will that I don't see

the answers to my questions,

then I accept that.

I must accept that.

But we don't know what God's will is for the future.

So, we just continue seeking.

- Here comes our gear on the horses.

Up to camp two, at 4200 meters.

So, I'm getting out of the way.

Here goes the last horse.

They are much more faster

than we are.

But the Kurds

can keep up with them,

at the horse's pace.

Plus they smoke.

I don't know how they do it.

No wonder they call this Agri Dagh,

The Painful Mountain.

And, I can tell you,

that it is.

- At 4200 camp,

it was almost like the environment really changed.

We went from rocky slopes, and what have you,

to really rocky.

Not even hardly a level place to put a tent.

Like being on the surface of a Star Trek moon, out there.

It really felt like you were on a different planet.

I did have some fears the first night.

When we first got up there, what happened?

A guy had already fallen,

and broken his shoulder and his leg.

- The Kurds around here tend to yell a lot.

But this was a gut-wrenching scream.

Several of them.

- We got a guy who fell down the ravine, on the snow.

Looks like he's got a compound break in his leg.

We're back at camp,

trying to find stuff to make a stretcher.

He's a big fella.

We're gonna bring you along for the ride.

- Gotta get to the rock, It's most steady.

- He's got it, he's a doctor.

- It's coming.

Yeah,

Okay?

Just stay warm, are you warm?

Okay.

He was very uncomfortable with his shoulder dislocated.

I tried to set it.

But shoulders are very difficult to set.

I tried once, I told him, "no more",

because it will just

knock you out with pain.

- So, what we're waiting for,

is a military helicopter to come.

At the moment the visibility is good,

but in these conditions, you never know

when the helicopter arrives,

it may cloud over, and we'll have to wait.

- A helicopter here is not normally supposed to happen.

Because, any one, of a number of fighting factions,

could shoot it down.

- The weather just started clouding up,

and there was zero viz.

So, after about an hour of loiter time,

they decided that they'd have to move the casualty down.

They were going towards 3200,

but there's another place between here and 3200,

only about a quarter of the way down,

and the helicopter was able to land there.

- So, a big fella.

He had, not very good equipment.

He was alone.

- He did not have crampons on.

- Physically, not in the best of conditions

to be doing something like this.

He must have lost his footing,

and it cost him.

- On the top of that mountain, life slows down a lot.

You have time to think.

But, when you have that time to really reflect,

and to chew on stuff,

and you run out of the simple little decisions

that you have to make in a busy life,

and all you are left with is the big stuff,

you have the chance to, kinda, explore that,

if not with others, at least personally.

- Snowed last night.

It either blew off, or started melting already.

It's very beautiful up here.

It was kind of windy last night,

but the wind has died down, yet again.

Feeling good.

I think we're starting to physically get ready

for the next part of the climb,

which is going up to the top.

- What is hopeful, is that there is enough ice up there

to entomb

a vessel of quite some size.

I think that most people would agree

that we could be dealing with

a hundred feet of ice, or more, in some areas.

So, it could be saved for all of perpetuity,

somewhere to have a woolly mammoth would be saved,

after digging that up in the Siberian wilderness.

So, that's the theory, at least.

- For remnant wood to be preserved

for long amounts of time,

generally you need an oxygen free environment.

You need that piece of wood to be locked

or entombed in sediments, like in a bog,

or underneath a lot of marine sediments,

that is oxygen free.

Because when you have oxygen in an environment,

you have fungi, and you have bacteria, that,

once that organism dies, that tree dies,

bacteria and fungi are gonna attack,

and start eating and decomposing that piece of wood.

- What we don't know,

is how long the ark was exposed to the elements

prior to being entombed in ice.

- If organic material, or wood, or other features

was locked in the ice,

and remained cold and dry,

it would have the potential to last very long.

- There's no reason to think that wood

of any kind of density or size,

wouldn't be able to survive, locked in ice

for 4,360 years.

I mean we have the frozen mammoths in Siberia,

and if you believe evolutionary time scales,

they've been there for 25,000 years.

- I think the only slam dunk that we have

is that we've just gotta drill something up.

And it's gotta be wood.

- 1:00 breakfast, 2-2:30 departure?

- Yeah, 2:30, or so, departure.

That seems to usually work.

Now, my biggest concern is,

I'm not too worried about what's happening up top,

but if you see a lot of clouds come up from below,

that may cause us to delay.

But, if it's clear below,

but cloudy up top, I'm not as worried about that.

'Cause it usually blows over.

But, if it's coming from below,

then that could be a less than ideal day, to start.

- It's trending about 10 to 15 degrees colder

than I've ever seen it.

That little plaque up there, that shiny thing,

that's actually a commemorative.

There was a Iranian climber that disappeared

a couple years ago.

They never found him.

- Right before you make your ascent up the mountain,

they have that plaque up there, of all the people who died.

And that was terrifying for me.

I was like, "Is my name gonna be on that plaque?

"What am I doing here?"

Those kind of emotions run through you.

And then the fact that you think

you may just die from the Kurd food

always crosses your mind.

Basically, whatever they put in front of me, I'd eat it.

Who knows what it was.

- It's gonna be

and adventure, I think, for me, at least.

I've been eating, drinking well.

I think going up is gonna be

a whole lot different

at that altitude.

I'm not used to it.

- We got up about 1 a.m.

We packed up, had a light breakfast

that the Kurds prepared for us.

And, about 3 a.m. we started to make for the summit.

It's dark, it's cold,

you got your headlamps on.

You want to be back in your sleeping bag.

You know you're gonna have to climb this trail in the dark.

You can't see.

These steps are steep.

The journey from 14,000 feet, to nearly 17,000 feet,

this is the steepest part of the climb.

Somewhere between 15,000 and 16,000 feet,

altitude hit me.

And I was really fatigued.

I was tired, I was slowing down.

I was getting nauseous, and actually stopped to throw up.

My hands are completely numb.

- Cold or just tired?

Or both?

- I think the lack of oxygen.

- Yeah.

- Look at the mountain's shadow now.

- Oh, yeah, that's gorgeous.

- It was about six in the morning,

and the sun had just started coming up,

and I turned around,

and I saw the shadow of Ararat below me.

It really inspired me to say,

"Aaron, you can do this.

"Keep going.

"You just got a little bit further to go.

We're up here at the

glacier,

putting on our crampons.

It was

a pretty miserable climb.

Got another hour on the ice, here.

And, I'm freezing.

♪ God knows you question your courage

♪ Some days I can't walk for stumbling

♪ If we could only see what we're becoming

- Boys,

we're almost to the top of the first false summit.

- I really thought about

turning around and going down.

I just thought, "I don't know that I can do this."

- To the left are some pretty serious crevasses.

We were warned by the Kurds to stay right.

Apparently it's pretty dangerous.

♪ When you feel it

♪ Once you see it

♪ And you breathe it

♪ It's unforgettable.

♪ When you know it

♪ Once you know it

♪ And you hold it

♪ It's unforgettable.

- Well, this is it.

♪ God knows you question your courage

♪ Some days I can't walk for stumbling

♪ If we could only see what we're becoming

♪ So, keep on keeping on

♪ Keeping on

♪ And sing along

♪ Sing along, sing along

- It's my turn.

♪ To the dreamers

♪ Wide-eyed believers

♪ Hanging on to hope by a thread

♪ To the soulful

♪ Heart open and hopeful

- This is it.

It's once in a lifetime.

♪ When you feel it

♪ Once you see it

♪ And you breathe it

♪ It's unforgettable.

♪ When you know it

♪ Once you know it

♪ And you hold it

♪ It's unforgettable.

♪ When you feel it

♪ Once you see it

♪ And you breathe it

♪ It's unforgettable.

- We're at the summit!

I never though I'd make it.

I have to give credit to Bill and Will for pushing me.

I think the last

part of it was mental.

I just wasn't

really mentally prepared to push myself.

to the summit, but,

I made it, and I'm really glad I did.

- Once you summit,

and you realize that you've actually accomplished

something that is very hard to do,

it stirs the soul.

And I was stirred.

- This is a place that very few people have ever been.

This is a place where civilization started again.

And, it was, you know,

just chills were all over me.

- I couldn't say a word, I was like,

"I'm really here.

"This is awesome".

♪ And you breathe it

♪ It's unforgettable

♪ When you know it

♪ Once you know it

♪ And you hold it

♪ It's unforgettable.

- The ark has a very, very strong pull to it.

I think, if one is not careful, it can become an obsession.

- Part of you wants to fold the dream up,

just put it away, and think, "Why am I wasting my time?"

But there's still a part of you,

that's always looking for this sliver of hope.

Well, we look for more information,

and we take the leads that we're given,

and we work with them.

- I'm not religious, and that sense that

I'm gonna have my emotions put me somewhere there,

I do it strictly technical and scientific.

And, if I say there's something there,

it's there.

Period.

- Based on the GPS coordinates given to us by Mr X

in 2009, and then in 2010,

what we did, was we set up a grid,

and started surveying with the ground penetrating radar.

Knowing this is in ice area, in a locked glacier,

we concluded GPR was the go-to investigation tool.

What ground penetrating radar does,

it sends continuous bursts of short wave length

electromagnetic energy into the ground.

It basically penetrates the ice,

and when it bounces off something that's either harder,

or of a different material,

it will reflect.

This is the bedrock, down here.

This is the ice, up in here.

And, as you see, this green circles

around a very unique-looking straight line,

that's at an angle of approximately 30 degrees

to the horizontal.

These two anomalies were symmetric,

in other words, almost like they would be,

this shape in the ice.

So, the results of 2010 were promising.

In 2011 we did all the red lines.

This data we collected in order to get

more of a three dimensional diagram of what was there.

The bedrock is gonna be blue.

This is all filled with ice above it,

where the grey is.

And then, the pink things are basically the anomalies

that are in the ice, itself.

If you take three dimensional data,

you get a little bit better idea

of how that would look in reality.

- I felt like we had a fairly

strong expedition in 2011.

We had good support from the Kurdistine.

We had the ground penetrating radar,

and we were prepared to dig,

and made an attempt at one of the dig locations

that we were told, "This is where you need to go".

We spent another 10 days trying to dig down

to this location,

but we were inexperienced in how to make that happen.

So, we didn't have the right kind of hoists, and so forth,

to help us in the process,

and so we failed, during our permit time,

to get down deep, to where we thought we needed to be.

- We would go back and talk to Mr. X, and say,

"Okay, where were we?

"Were we close, were we not?"

In this 2011 work, he said "You're right next to it".

- 2012 we came back, more prepared than ever.

We had a great plan.

Assembled, I think, a rock star team.

- 2012, we found more anomalies,

in this case, because we did three dimensional techniques,

it was easier to take slices,

both horizontally and vertically,

so we could see more information.

I was looking, initially, at these red zones,

as being the areas to go concentrate on.

And, we see this, sort of, red and yellow square area,

and we're thinking that is interesting,

because it keeps showing up

at the 30 to 40 foot range.

And we say,

"Okay, we have satellite imagery saying it's there.

"We have an anomaly there.

"we have all this information."

So, we're thinking that's probably

the best place to excavate.

- Anomaly here, here, and here,

at the depths that the satellite said.

We've got two for two confirmations, so far.

Let's go ahead and drill for the first one,

the closest one to the surface.

So, we get the drill out,

and we start going down,

and right at the 32 foot mark, we --

I'm on one side of the drill, we felt it,

and we hit something hard.

- And then, John Bryant came down, and said,

"Okay, hold.

"We think we're at it.

"All you gotta do is take a dig team up there,

"and put the tent over the drill bit,

"and you guys will work your way down to it.

"You'll find it 34 meters down."

- We got a team of Kurds cutting,

we got a team of Americans cutting.

We're switching because communication is important

with chainsaws in small spaces.

- So, for ten days, we chopped away at this.

Taking this thing apart, one core drill bit at a time,

which is very to meter long.

- So the hole is growing,

because we were going one meter a day,

which is the length of each auger bit.

So, taking off a meter is like our victory trophy.

We have achieved our goal.

- Randall Price was with us,

and we were doing core samples out of this

eight foot by eight foot hole.

- With every meter, we got more and more excited.

- Hopes were just really high.

We knew all we have to do was get down to this object.

- We knew we were on the brink of,

what could be, the greatest archaeology discovery so far,

or of all time, for that matter.

- So, we decided, since the sun was going down,

let's wait 'til tomorrow,

it'll be better for the cameras.

Let's just make this big reveal tomorrow.

I remember going to bed that night,

and just laying in the tent, and just thinking

how this is gonna change my life,

and change, really, so many things.

- And, the night before, thinking, "This is gonna be great!"

- The next morning, we got up.

We all went over to the meal tent,

just pumped up,

patting each other on the back.

Talking abut this great moment

that we were gonna be a part of.

So, I got down into the hole and,

cut away the last meter.

And, just as we were working that last block out --

- The last auger, with the bit on the end,

fell over.

- Just fell over, on the ice.

- But, it's supposed to be stuck into something, right?

I was on the drill, I remember feeling it.

We all looked at each other, like "Nothing happened".

Oh!

What now?

- I remember picking it up, and looking inside it,

and it was chock full of ice.

And, just, disappointment, just, all over me.

I wanted just to set it back down in the hole again.

I didn't wanna be a part of this bad moment,

where, of course, everybody's wondering

what is going on.

We didn't really say much,

we just set it over to the side, and we thought,

well maybe we were off, obviously,

that's not stuck in the object but,

ground penetrating radar seems to think it's this far deep,

so maybe we're just off a couple feet,

so we dug another couple layers out.

- We dug down past it, and there was nothing there.

- Then we had them drop the drill bits down into the hole.

We began to just punch holes

all around the bottom,

just thinking, "Maybe we'll pull up something."

- I remember drilling five meters --

Three meters?

I know there were meters in every possible direction.

- Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

- Everybody's heart just plummeted.

We went from the night before,

giving testimonies on how we really felt the Lord

directing us all here,

and how everything had gone so well,

and this was the biggest expedition to date.

And we had all the right people, and the right equipment.

It had gone so well.

- From being, what I thought, just hours before,

was gonna be just a big highlight of my life,

to this huge disappointment.

In this case, three years prior

of freezing cold temperatures,

unbelievable weather, devastation,

people being hurt.

And, you're so ready,

and it just, it wasn't there.

- We got full grown men crying.

They've staked a lot,

emotionally, in their fields of study.

- I climbed out of the hole,

I grabbed my pack,

and I just walked down the mountain that day.

- Had it been there, we would have found it,

but it wasn't.

And that led to an emotional --

and down they went.

And, after we cleaned things up, down we went.

- We're not done yet.

We're just taking a bit of a break.

- I'm excited.

This new, special ground penetrating radar,

that is supposed to be specific for ice.

- We're gonna put all the lessons we've learned,

from these five years,

be more prepared, better technology.

We have, basically, secret GPS coordinates,

- Just downloaded the GPS data,

that's a good sign.

- We're gonna finally hit, what we have missed

in previous years.

- This excites me.

We've built special drills, this year.

And special corers to be able to pull this stuff out.

I know how to drill.

My people know how to drill.

I want to find organic matter.

- Every year that I go up to the Eastern Plateau,

I walk down Shok-mok Peak, and look down at the Ahora Gorge,

and think, "This is where you need to go".

You never feel like you've finished the ark search,

if you don't get down into the Ahora Gorge.

We've never had the kind of permissions

that we've had, to get this close.

- This year we will either prove,

the "Yes, it is here", or "No, it is not".

- Good morning from high camp.

It's about 5:45 in the morning.

On our first full day, here.

We slept pretty well, last night.

We were able to put in a well,

and get the chainsaw, generator,

and several other things started yesterday.

This morning, we're gonna try and set up the big gear tent.

The wind is

not at all, which is quite unusual,

so we want to take advantage of that,

just to get somewhere to have the equipment,

and a kitchen, and get out of the wind,

when it starts back up again.

Looks like it's gonna be a beautiful morning.

See you out there.

Right here?

I think that sounds good.

- We've organized most of the expedition's equipment,

and, this afternoon, after lunch,

which we're about to head up to,

we hope to start drilling.

Here we go.

- We won't be doing that for about an hour.

Let's see, it's now 12:10.

- This will be the real practical part of the dissertation.

- Yep.

Let's see, it's now 12:10,

probably about 1:00 sir.

The would be the time to get ready.

- A lot of people were on the mountain

for different reasons,

my reason to be on the mountain,

was I wanted my portion of it to be

as scientifically accurate as possible,

so that when the scientific community

looked at our expedition,

they could say this was done according to

good science, and not junk science.

Drill and hit wood.

That's what we're gonna do today.

Speak it into existence, that's what I always say.

- Okay.

- If the ark is truly intact,

it'll be approximately 45 foot high.

- "The ark is to be 30 cubits high,

"300 cubits long, and 50 cubits wide."

- What is a cubit?

A cubit, historically, has been recognized,

generally, as the length from the elbow,

to the end of the index finger of the reigning monarch.

We've averaged the historical values,

and come up with 20.5 inches for a cubit.

Which means that the original ark

was 500 feet long,

86 feet wide, 52 feet high.

God said to Noah,

"Rooms are to be placed in the ark".

There would be three levels.

Bulkheads were a vital part of the structure,

these room dividers,

which encompass the dimension and the hull,

and some of the floor levels.

And that gives it a superior structure.

- "And build under our eyes,

"and according to our inspiration,

"the ark that shall save thee, and those who follow thee.

"And do not appeal to me on behalf of those

"who are bent on evil doing.

"For, behold, they are destined to be drowned."

- The guys are gonna start drilling, Bill, Will, to Bruce.

And, Jose and I are gonna start completing this grade,

and make sure this is all in alignment.

We're just gonna hit all though this area,

and see what we can come up with today.

But, we got a good work day today,

we're gonna take advantage of it.

- Howdy friends from the U.S.A.

We've come to drill with Bill and Will.

Woohoo!

- Got it. - Lock it.

- The first thing you gonna hit on Noah's Ark

is not gonna be wood.

It's gonna bituminous materials.

Bituminous, meaning something black and gooey.

An oil based product.

The Bible's clear,

inside and out of Noah's Ark was covered in pitch.

So, it'd probably gonna be something

that's ingrained in the wood,

and so if you hit it,

it should show you some.

What I had decided to do,

is everything that came out of the hole,

I was gonna put it in a pan, heat it up,

and see if any of it melted.

All bituminous materials

are temperature susceptible,

meaning, at a very low range, they'll melt,

or they'll become gooey.

Well, the foil is melting.

Looks like all rocks.

We did a quick field test,

just to verify, to make sure that we weren't

looking at something than just bedrock.

- So, it's just gravel.

- This was verification that

where we were last year, is, in fact,

not where we wanna be.

- Now, we're moving on th the next spot.

And, we'll keep doing that, until time runs out,

and Lord willing, we'll find it

before our time runs out.

- Today is August 14,

and hopefully it's a day that will be remembered in history

as a great day to commemorate

what was done, thousands and thousands of years ago.

That God flooded the earth,

preserved eight people,

so that the earth could be repopulated.

I hope and pray that today is the day.

- Because, now time is of the essence,

we have to get this right.

We can't just be pock-marking around on this ice.

We need to know precisely where to go,

and we're gonna see if we can hit wood.

- This is the RB-1 hole.

Good news, we didn't get stuck.

So, another hole accomplished.

So far, negative results, we'll see,

collecting samples, labeling it,

and then we'll move on the the next hole.

- We drill, we drill.

It breaks my heart to see these guys --

We get our hopes up, and we drill,

and then, to miss, every time.

Because I feel like I'm letting them down.

I tell them, "Drill here, we see something".

And, when we don't hit it,

they're going down 17 meters and

19 1/2 meters, and they're not hitting anything.

We keep seeing anomalies,

but for some reason, every time we drill,

we don't hit anything.

With all the ice, we get a lot of false readings.

It's like I'm making them do all that extra work,

and I do feel like all that weight is on my shoulders.

I know, deep down in my heart,

the ark is laying up here somewhere.

- One thing I've learned,

the weather can change very quickly here,

from sunny to freezing rain.

Socked in by fog and clouds.

- Our energy is pretty low.

We've been up here a long time.

- We were able to get three more holes in today.

They were between 13 and 14 meters.

Unfortunately, we didn't come up with anything exciting.

- That's a big disappointment, but I understand.

Just proceed with the drilling,

and extending it per Dr. Bryant.

That's about all that can be done, right now.

- Will do.

- We appreciate it.

- Alright, thank you.

Bye.

- Today we've drilled three bores,

and in those three, we went all the way to bedrock.

The drilling went great,

but, unfortunately, we didn't have positive results,

what we're looking for.

- The air is much thinner.

Breathing is hard.

That takes its toll.

- I do have a hard time breathing.

Working conditions yesterday was,

miserable for me.

I'm still not acclimated up here.

- We're able to get the three holes in today,

and then a storm came in,

we just got pounded with about

six inches of 1/4 to 1/2 inch hail, snow,

with lightening.

- We put a lot of effort into working earlier in the day,

so we got our three holes drilled,

which was our goal.

- Yeah, we'll see what happens.

Probably some cards tonight.

- Probably so.

- I'm real excited that Dr. Bryant's here.

he already got here before we did.

- How you doing?

Good to see you, Adam.

- Adam.

- How you doing man?

- Come here to eat breakfast.

- Alright.

- Hey Bryant.

Good to see you.

- Can I get this pack for you?

- How you doing?

I couldn't wait to get here.

- Having other people around boosts the morale.

I like that.

- The perspective of where you are, here, is unbelievable.

- I could show you the 3-D data.

There it is.

- Okay.

- A lot of noisy data,

but it seems to ...

- This is a very interesting shape.

- So what's the possibility that that could be wood?

- Well, based upon the knowledge that we have

of what was here, an ancient ship,

and knowing that trees don't grow at 17,000 feet,

nor even at above 11,000,

the tree line's usually 11,000 feet,

would dictate, and say to me, that was a boat.

But, it doesn't say boat on the GPS,

it says reflection of a pattern of interesting material.

That's why we're gonna go drill it.

- And I see those layers.

- Yeah.

- Ice lays down flat.

And, as it lays down flat,

it will take the contour of the ground.

But, anything that's oblique, or got an angle to it,

from my experience, can't be ice.

- So, Bruce was examining this piece

that came out of the boring, RB-7.

And, what he has found,

he was using his fire sample test,

the ASTM test,

and, go ahead and tell them what you found, Bruce.

- Well, I was heating everything up,

and I noticed that this thing was starting to melt,

which indicates a bituminous material,

or an asphalt or petroleum based material.

So, with discretion, I said, "Whoa, wait a minute."

This could be something that we could get to a real lab,

and get some real data on.

- What I see, as well,

is there's some fibrous edges along the side,

which means that, to me, it's not a mineral material.

- Like you're looking at a piece of

asphalt felt paper.

- They did hit something, at about 50 feet.

- Send it to a laboratory.

They'll be able to break it down,

and tell us what kind of material it is.

- Okay.

Thank you.

- It'll be quite rare for an organic material

to be this high up on this mountain.

- Strange.

It almost looks like a crystal.

- When you're looking at in a microscope,

and here's this vitreous, refractive material

that's not a rock.

It looks like a piece of amber, almost.

It's not wood fiber,

but it would fit resin, perfectly.

It's something translucent,

almost crystalline,

exactly what I thought pitch was.

If I had imagined something exciting,

it would be hard to do it better.

It's very encouraging.

We need more, and I'm ready.

I want the big piece.

- It's very encouraging.

I'm excited about it,

but it's not enough.

We need to have more of this.

We need to find more samples.

We just have to keep pushing forward, and hope for the best.

- It's all over the mountain.

I don't believe you're going to find a gigantic ark,

you're going to find chunks of it.

Some will be in the Abba Glacier,

some may be in the Ahora Gorge.

- I've always been curios about the Ahora Gorge.

And the stories of, there's an object in the Ahora Gorge.

- Portions of the Ahora Gorge, itself,

are not accessible.

- The Ahora Gorge is just riddled with crevasses,

which are areas of the glacier that have collapsed away.

- The void, basically,

where the ice is sliding off the mountain.

- For a crevasse to form, you do have to have movement.

You are exceeding the strength of the ice,

and that could be exceeding that,

either in shear, or in tension, or in compression.

When we see crevasses,

it is evidence that some motion has occurred.

And it's occurred in a way

that imposed stresses that exceeded the strength.

- Always moving.

With some, hundreds of feet deep.

Entering the crevasses offer some of the team a unique,

but dangerous perspective to the bedrock below.

With time running out,

others prepare for an equally perilous descent

into the Ahora Gorge.

- It's a very dangerous place,

Ahora Gorge.

- Here we are at the western plateau.

We're about to go exploring,

and try to get in the gorge as far as we can.

We plan to go down, as best we can,

and route-find.

And then, up and out of the way of any rock fall,

or any danger, and still keep some stable snow.

Here we go.

Belay me!

Getting some crevasses here!

I think if we go left, it we'll be better.

- We're not going down any further, are we?

We went down what we did yesterday on the anomaly,

I hit something hard,

but it wasn't gravel,

and the bit got stuck.

- We're hitting something.

We're hitting resistance.

What we don't know, is what it is we're hitting.

The scans and satellite says there's something there.

And the people from that are saying there's something there.

And we say, we're drilling, we're hitting something hard.

- Is there wood, is it rock, what is it that we're hitting

when we drill?

Because we're hitting something,

but we don't know what it is.

- Until we get the core, we don't know.

But, we're not giving up yet.

We'll be able to identify with the diamond cores

that we've got coming from China.

- What we're trying to do is,

based on the information,

drill core, so that we can retrieve,

a far more substantial sample

with the drill coring tool that we have.

What we have here, is the drill.

This is it.

It's a coring bit,

diamond tipped,

goes on the auger,

hopefully we can get some samples.

There's a lip on each side.

And, as it goes down,

the material is pulled down, inside here, 'til it stops.

And, they pull it out,

and then they take this off,

and they pop it through the hollow part.

And they get a nice, kinda like this,

they get a nice core of whatever we're trying to core.

- Let's go!

Let's go find an ark.

- We need him up there.

- As the days get shorter,

the climbing window on Ararat begins to close.

The permit from the Turkish government

is for a clearly defined time,

to protect lives from the unexpected,

that comes with the change of seasons.

Finishing up the uh..

- Finishing up our time, up here.

- Yeah, we're supposed to have another three days

before this starts up.

We'll see about that.

Hopefully the guys who are trying to head up to help us,

are doing okay at 4200.

- It's Wednesday the 28th.

Getting ready to start a new day of drilling.

First thing off, is we're gonna get the generator going.

Get our stuff charging.

We had quite a snow yesterday evening.

We've got good weather.

And, hopefully, it should go well.

- We've been sent up a reinforcement

with a fancy drill bit,

out of China, or somewhere.

We're hoping to get down.

We've re-dug RB-7,

which is where we pulled the flake out

of whatever that was.

They've asked us to penetrate through

the fluvial flow or rock, or whatever it is on top,

try and get a better sample.

We will lower down into place,

hook up the motor,

grind on it a little bit,

and get something done.

- We did running belays,

trying to find a good vantage point into the gorge.

Finally we did.

After five years,

I'm finally standing on the western edge of Ahora Gorge,

here on Mount Ararat.

Let me give you a shot of what that looks like.

As you can see, it's full of crevasses.

It's a fast moving glacier.

This is really crazy crevasse

in the center of this gorge.

And, if the ark had come to rest

anywhere near the lip of the Ahora Gorge,

It would be chewed up

You stare right into those huge crevasses,

and you say, "There's just no way".

If it is anywhere in the gorge,

it's got to be lower down.

- My primary goal, at the summit,

was to get two drill cores.

And, we were able to get two cores within three hours.

But, they were covered in, of course,

all the mud from the coring.

I just said to the boys,

"Let's not tamper with the samples.

"Let's let the scientists look at the samples.

"What it is, it is.

"We'll find out when we get down."

- The got the core, he came back down.

That was his purpose,

and he did exactly what he was supposed to do.

- I had one task.

I believe that I accomplished it,

and I'm happy for that.

- This is the core.

This is obviously basalt.

What were we hitting?

We were hitting basalt.

Now we know.

What we were looking for is not there.

- Thomas Edison once said,

"I have not failed,

"I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Failure is a teacher.

Just a stepping stone

on the road to success.

- Okay.

Dr. Bryant and I

has agreed that

it's done.

We have to call it finished.

Doesn't mean it's the final chapter in search for the ark.

- Just because we don't find something,

doesn't mean it's not here.

It means it's more difficult to find.

Today is not the chapter closing day,

it's just another day that we can add more information

to the components that we have,

and build upon that.

- We drilled, we got cores,

and the evidence was very negative.

We don't understand why.

- We've exhausted all of our options

at this particular time,

with the technology that we have available,

and the time that we have available.

- We're off.

- Yes, disappointment,

but that's not the important thing.

The important thing is finding out what the facts are.

And if we've accomplished that,

then that's good.

- Few things are as universal

as man's need for exploration.

Something ingrained in our DNA

calls us to search.

To find.

To discover things unknown about our past,

which then become our guide for the future.

It's a long walk.

It is a long walk.

For thousands of years,

man has embarked on this incredible journey

of discovery.

And in doing so,

ultimately finds himself.

- We may find it one day.

We may find it next year.

But, us being together,

and our journey up there, and back,

and how that changed our lives is really the story.

- So, for me, it's really been a journey of

trying to discover what's in my heart, what motivates me.

I feel very happy without even discovering the ark.

- When you're coming down the mountain,

a lot of things are rolling through your mind.

Were we successful?

Did we come up with anything

to take us further down the road?

In my mind, scientifically,

did we just waste a lot of money?

Did we waste a lot of time, and risk people's lives?

But, there were times I just felt like,

"Wow, I'm as closest to heaven I can be on Earth.

I do feel like

I had a mountain top experience with the Lord.

- When you come back down, and you didn't find it,

it's kinda like going to the Superbowl and losing.

You're still a player, you still gave it all,

you left it all on the field,

but you just didn't win.

- The expedition was not a disappointment.

We scientifically ruled out the eastern plateau.

And we got our team down safely.

- We did it together.

I could not have made it

without the guys that I climbed with.

- The men I've been on this expedition,

you can get deep with them,

and that's what you look for in life.

- Very glad to be back down here,

I need to get my strength back.

- Eat!

- The ark, to me, represents a dream.

If you want it,

and you feel called to it,

go do it.

- The most emotional experience for me

was the summoning.

I was overwhelmed with it.

I'm gonna get emotional right now,

because it was a goal I set out to do.

And God blessed me to be able to do it.

And I knew, even if we didn't find the ark,

just climbing a mountain of that magnitude

is something I'm gonna remember,

and my family's gonna remember

for the rest of our lives.

- I may not have found Noah's Ark,

but, I found, I think, something much more important,

and much more lasting, and that is,

I believe that,

in the process of trying to discover the ark,

I've discovered more about myself,

and I discovered more about God.

- There will be a time

that structure will be revealed.

It's there.

It's been there for a purpose, and for a certain time.

It will be revealed.

- Why would God want you to find the ark?

- I don't know that he wants us to find the ark,

but I am fairly convinced that he wants us to look.

And in that sense, yeah,

it's very much more about the journey, than discovery.

- With the Kurdish men,

it's some of the closest friendships I've got.

I mean, when you go through

what we've gone through together,

it does something to you to make you close.

- As the shepherds return with their flocks,

and families prepare for the winter ahead,

the beliefs they hold

remain unchallenged.

- I'll never regret being able to say,

"I've been there, I've done that.

"I stood up there on the mountain.

"I've looked for Noah's Ark."

- The hunger's still there.

It's still something that needs to be searched for.

- Will we find it?

I don't know.

Will it be found?

I don't know that it's there to be found.

Does it exist?

Yes, I believe that.

Does that change whether or not we should be looking for it?

Not at all.

♪ Inside your head

♪ You got a voice that says

♪ You won't get past this one

♪ You won't win your freedom

♪ It's like a constant war

♪ And you want to settle that score

♪ But, you're bruised and beaten

♪ And you feel defeated

♪ This goes out to the heaviest hearts.

♪ Oh, to everyone that's hit their limit

♪ It's not over yet, it's not over yet

♪ And even when you think you're finished

♪ It's not over yet, it's not over yet

♪ Keep on fighting

♪ Out of the dark, into the light

♪ Hope is rising

♪ Never give in, never give up, it's not over

♪ Yea-et-et, whoah

♪ Yeah-et-et, whoah

♪ Yeah-et-et, whoah

♪ Yeah-et-et, whoah

- I don't think it matters

whether or not you could ever find the ark.

I think the value today is,

what could it teach us about

our responsibility to safeguard creation

the way Noah in the story safeguarded creation.

Brought all the animals through the flood.

You look at what's happening to the earth today,

in terms of the massive extinction event that's going on,

on our watch,

and we're not doing the job that Noah was tasked with doing.

So, to me, the resonance and value of the story today,

is that it's a powerful message

about what our responsibilities are to safeguard creation.

♪ Life is a race we run

♪ So run 'til the race is won

♪ Don't you ever give up

♪ We will never give up

♪ To everyone who's hit their limit

♪ And even when you think you're finished

♪ To everyone who's hit their limit

♪ It's not over yet, it's not over yet.

♪ And even when you think you're finished

♪ It's not over yet, it's not over yet.

♪ Keep on fighting

♪ Out of the dark, into the light.

♪ Hope is rising

♪ Never give in, never give up

♪ It's not over

♪ Yea-et-et, whoah

♪ Yea-et-et, whoah

♪ Yea-et-et, whoah

♪ Yea-et-et, whoah

- The search will continue.