Recently released satellite images of an unknown formation or object on Mount Ararat in Turkey have added fuel to archeologists’ ongoing quest to find Noah’s Ark.
The “new and significant development,” an image from a QuickBird satellite, is relevant because the high-resolution view shows clearer detail of a “ship-like object … 1,015 feet in length,” Porcher Taylor, a professor of national security law, told Space.com.
Taylor has spent 13 years investigating the mysterious item.
“I’ve got newfound optimism … as far as my continuing push to have the intelligence community declassify some of the more definitive-type imagery,” Taylor told the online science news forum.
Taken over the northwest corner of Mount Ararat, the picture shows a long, dark object — or rock formation, some say — resting sideways in glacial ice at an elevation of 15,300 feet.
Taylor, a national security analyst for more than 30 years, works in the paralegal studies department at the University of Richmond in Virginia.
According to Associated Press reports, he calls this work his “satellite archeology project” and has devoted himself to getting to the bottom of the Ararat mystery.
While Taylor says he has no agenda for his investigation, he aims to expose the irregularity in the mountain’s geography for whatever it is. And then he wants to make it visibly accessible for public, scientific and scholarly critique.
To that end, Taylor has lobbied to use previously classified satellite imagery and systems like QuickBird, GeoEye’s IKONOS spacecraft and RADARSAT-1 in order to prove or disprove the ark rumors.
“We’ve got three new birds [satellites] that are going up,” Taylor said in the online article. “I’m using all my clout, rapport and lobbying to, hopefully, have them at least fly calibration runs over Mount Ararat.”
Despite some enthusiasts’ conviction about the object’s history, others hesitate to declare it the biblical ark — or any kind of man-made object.
Still the new intelligence and satellite imagery are sure to lend Taylor a hand with the object’s verification. And that keeps him motivated, he told Space.com.
“I maintain that if it is the remains of something man-made and potentially nautical, then it’s potentially something of biblical proportions,” he said. (ABP)
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