Every few years the headlines come back around. “Noah’s Ark found.” “100% confirmed.” This time the buzz is around the Durupınar site in eastern Turkey, and the claims are as confident as ever.
So I sat down with Kevin DeVries, a man who spent five summers on Mount Ararat looking for the Ark, and produced the documentary Finding Noah, narrated by Gary Sinise. I wanted to know what he makes of all this.
“We know where Noah’s Ark is not”
That’s how Kevin sums up five summers of searching. It sounds like defeat until he frames it the way Edison did — every failed attempt is one more thing crossed off the list. They didn’t find the Ark. But they narrowed the map.
Two very different sites
Durupınar is low, drivable, and sits on dirt. There’s already a visitor center there called Noah’s Ark Park. Kevin’s geologists looked at it and saw a basalt mudflow formation — and pointed out you can spot similar shapes all over Google Earth. He also notes the Hebrew word for the ark describes a box or a barge, not a pointed-prow ship like the one the Durupınar outline suggests.
Kevin’s own dig site was on the eastern plateau of Ararat, at 16,800 feet, on top of roughly a hundred feet of glacial ice. Base camp was near Doğubayazıt, around 5,000 feet.
“We felt like it was a slam dunk too”
Here’s the part that should give everyone pause. Kevin’s team had ground-penetrating radar anomalies. They had drill bits that stuck at depth. They ran electrical resistivity tests and pulled core samples. They cut ice trenches eight by eight by forty feet. He calls it a trifecta.
And they never went to the media claiming confirmation — because lab work takes months, sometimes years. The current team’s results reportedly won’t be in until the end of 2027.
A mountain that wants to kill you
Ararat is freestanding, so it makes its own weather. Electrical storms roll through nearly every week; John Morris’s team was once electrocuted and thrown. PKK militants camped on the slopes. A Turkish tank battalion sat at the base. Something like thirty to thirty-five thousand people have died in the regional conflict since the mid-eighties.
Kevin guided about fifty people up that mountain over five summers, and brought every one of them back alive.
Why Kevin believes the flood happened
Simply put: because Christ treated it as history. Beyond that, he points to Josephus, to marine fossils found at altitude, and to Robert Ballard’s submersible work in the Black Sea and the ancient shorelines he documented there.
The ark he was actually meant to find
Ararat’s Turkish name is Ağrı Dağı — mountain of pain. At 16,800 feet, Kevin wrote in his journal: “I feel more animal than human.”
Somewhere in there it clicked. He wasn’t meant to find the Ark. He was meant to find the arc — of his own story. That turn led to a men’s ministry, a global storytelling movement, and his latest project, The Third Man.
Hope is not a strategy
Kevin borrows the line from Shawshank Redemption. Hold hope loosely. Let the science speak on its own timeline. Put your ultimate hope in Christ, not in a discovery.
Or as he put it: “Allow God to let you see what you need to see, not what you want to see.”
Maybe the Ark is out there, and maybe someone will find it. But Kevin’s five summers on that mountain suggest the better posture is patience — letting the evidence come in on its own schedule, and remembering that our faith was never resting on a boat.
Dave Almgren- Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie Podcast
Watch the Finding Noah trailer at FaithAndFamilyFlicks.com, and catch the full conversation on Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie.
