The US Durupinar Expedition's "Rock Scanner" Finds "Petrified Wood" Rock

"Died Suddenly" (@DiedSuddenly_ 15/9/2016) writes

" Died Suddenly is proud to be an official partner of this world-shaking scientific study".

 But, ah, ... "This one came back as haematite", uh-oh. Guess they don't learn much about rocks in US schools... 

Died Suddenly @DiedSuddenly_
Possible Petrified Wood identified at the Durupinar Noah’s Ark Site. ..

Possible Petrified Wood identified at the Durupinar Noah’s Ark Site.

They are taking the sample in for further testing, and begin core drilling into the boat site in September. pic.twitter.com/bT0WR5EWGH

— Died Suddenly (@DiedSuddenly_) September 1, 2026

.. They are taking the sample in for further testing, and begin core drilling into the boat site in September. 5:38 PM · Sep 1, 2026 · 32.1K Views

So the US expedition's off to a good start, with full MAGA-professionalism. 

US Biblical Literalists Go to Turkey to Sit on a Rock and Fantasise.

                

   US Biblical literalist Lauren Witzke  

This stridently racist, xenophobic MAGA-christin lady seems to've bought new blue jeans and a new Meryka-meryka top to join an archaeological project in Turkey: (@LaurenWitzkeDE 15 Sept 2026)

Earlier this year in a landmark decision, Turkish officials voted unanimously to give a group of American Christians permits to study the remains of Noah’s Ark.

It’s been the greatest pleasure of my life to be a part of one of the most important scientific expeditions in world history (sic). American exploration in the Mountains of Ararat where creation (sic) began anew.

It’s been so surreal. The evidence is overwhelming. It’s all real. The Bible is real, the global catastrophic flood happened… and the researchers and scientists at Noah’s Ark Scans are going to prove it to the world.

The Durupınar investigation is a joint project between Noah’s Ark Scans and Prof. Dr. Cenker Atila, Professor of Archaeology at Sivas Cumhuriyet University in Turkey, who serves as President of the project./

GPR and ERT scans are finding organized corridors and patterns, and what appears to be a massive vessel beneath the surface with 3 tiers or layers.

Soil samples consistent with decomposing wood.

This is NOT a rock formation. Keep in mind it’s over 4000 years old and buried in mudflow.

Please consider chipping in to help us make the evidence irrefutable, and bring down the demonic teachings of evolution and Darwinism.

"GPR and ERT scans are finding organized corridors and patterns..." No, they are not. They are more likely finding fissures in a rock slab. Drawing outlines on a printout with a sharpie does not change the evidence - just the extent of your self-delusion. Duh.

"....and what appears to be a massive vessel beneath the surface with 3 tiers or layers", er, n-o-o-o.... It shows a slab of rock.

"Soil samples consistent with decomposing wood". Or donkey shit, bat shit, decomposing dead grass, actually anything with organic carbon in it [actually READ the report with the understanding high school sciences gave you]. 

"This is NOT a rock formation"  It sure as hell is not wood.

"Keep in mind it’s over 4000 years old and buried in mudflow". That all-American 'dating' comes from what?

Her illustration of this bowl-shaped round-bottomed vessel with no keel is from 2017 not a 2026 expedition:

Note the research agenda "to make the evidence irrefutable, and bring down the demonic teachings of evolution and Darwinism". The Noah's Ark story is related to neither of those things. What do they teach them in US schools? Critical thinking apparently not a lot.

It's the Fault of the Illuminati and their Bicycles?

Guess which site this is about?
I_Am_CyberSmith ( @I_Am_CyberSmith 6:13 PM Sep 9, 2026)

The Turkish government has closed part of the site off.

The Illuminati don't want us to learn about the Previous Cycles.

If we knew how they did It before, we might stop them from doing It again.

Archaeologists used to be independently wealthy aristocrats, answerable to nobody. But now, they are people like @internet_hottie with modest means, dependent on grant money, in a field that doesn't directly produce any revenue. This makes them vulnerable to institutional capture.

They know they will lose funding if they tell us the truth about Atlantis, Nephilim, and the Mudfloods that buried Tartaria.

Where could one even begin to address this?

Another Pseudoarchaeology get-together

Quest for Ancient Civilizations Austin 2026 "The Quest for the Future — The Future is Ancient".

Quest for Ancient Civilizations brings together researchers, authors, and explorers in a 3-day conference on lost civilizations, forbidden archaeology, and the questions mainstream research won't touch — in one room, with an audience that actually wants the answers (Austin, Texas USA, October 16–18, 2026). "Featuring the voices rewriting history: David Hatcher Childress; Randall Carlson; Billy Carson; Dan Richards (DeDunker); Hugh Newman; JJ Ainsworth; Drew Brophy; Duncan Trussell; Kurt Metzger; Tyler Engle; Dr. Heather Lynn; Brent Pella; Enrique Chaug; James Vieria + More TBA".

The Great Flood

 

When you listen to the hancockian and other pseudoarchaeologists, what strikes me is the number of folk who talk about "the Great Flood" as though it was a real, geologically-tested, historical global event that really happened. What's more, they never qualify that phrase, they seemingly do not even conceive that there might be a reason why many of their potential listeners do not share that conclusion. For them, the event is seen as a foundational, universally accepted baseline. For example US YouTuber Jimmy Corsetti  writes several times of the site at Gobekli Trepe (admittedly in the same country as Mt Ararat!) as potentially the site of THE altar that Noah built when the Ark came to rest (Genesis 8:5-21). Because their algorithms, podcasts, and books cross-reference each other as objective fact, they genuinely lose the cognitive perspective required to realize that mainstream science views the global deluge myth as entirely unsupported by any evidence.  

Google n-gram of Google-Book content also gives food for thought, the mentions of this myth-as-event increases dramatically after 1987. It is odd that there was rather a low incidence of use of the term when it was more 'mainstream' in the nineteenth century (possibly other terms such as "Noah's Flood" supplemented that). 

This is pretty shocking. What could be causing it? There are a number of (unrelated?) reasons. A lot of it is due to influence from the USA. The Anglophone "alternative history" market is structurally, financially, and rhetorically dominated by American cultural exports. 

In Europe, the ground was prepared by related processes. In particular chanbges in the book market (away from more serious literature to ephemeral train-station paperbacks) and the blossoming of the New Agey approach to the world that grew from beginnings in the late 1970s and 1980s, developing the "Earth Mysteries" movement. By 1987–1988, this movement crossed over from radical counter-culture into mainstream British publishing.

Unlike in the US, where climate anxieties were largely academic or simply dismissed, Europeans were led to change their views in the mid-eighties. Although climate change and related threats had been discused in Europe since the late 1960s (Silent Spring) the threat was seen as rather an abstract situation that "someone" would have to deal with eventually. But when the explosion of the Soviet-built Chornobil in April 1986 suddenly blanketed Europe in radioactive fallout, a whole continent experienced an overnight, invisible environmental cataclysm. Arguably this led to an abrupt shift in thinking about humanity's vulnerability to sudden, invisible, global ecological ruin. This seems to be one of the roots of a vein of neo-cataclystic (apocalytic) fears - into which the pseudoarchaeologists like Hancock tapped. One corollory of this was the increasing prevalence to see ancient myths not as religious dogma, but as historical warnings. "The Great Flood" stopped being viewed as an ancient Sunday-school story and was re-interpreted through a secular, ecological lens: it became the ultimate archetype of a highly advanced society destroyed by planetary upheaval. 

In the US, there had long been attempts to get the Biblical account of the human past accepted as absolutely literal events, though until the late eighties this was largely confined to fundamentalist Christian circles (for example under the banner of "Creation Science). In June 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching "creation science" (sic) in public schools was unconstitutional because it advanced a specific religion. This legal loss seems to have forced a massive, highly funded intellectual migration. Creationist organizations could no longer use standard educational channels, so they heavily shifted resources toward pop-science literature, alternative documentaries, and alternative geology books too promote their pseudoscientific views. This included encouraging seeing the Biblical deluge myth instead as a real "historic, global cataclysmic event".

As in Europe, in the late eighties there was greater interest in New Age and related ideas and this period marks the birth of modern mass-market alternative history to cater for the massive, commercially viable demographic of consumers hungry for books that validated ancient wisdom over traditional, mainstream history and geology. In this period too, the conceptual framework for pseudoarchaeology transitioned from ancient astronauts (the fading 1970s Chariots of the Gods era) to Earth-based cataclysms.Writers and researchers in the late 1980s realized that audiences were weary of UFO explanations but deeply responsive to ideas of lost human greatness. By treating the Great Flood as a purely physical, geological event caused by crustal displacement, comets, or ice age melting rather than the wrath of God they made the myth palatable to a secular, scientifically literate but conspiratorially minded public. This laid the exact structural groundwork that writers like Graham Hancock stepped into in the early 1990s.

Othala and neo-Nazi Migration Fantasies

Internet user  ThoughtfulWitz (@ThoughtfulWitz Sep 4, 2026) with reference to undiscovered archaeology in northern Africa, says:

"Especially when you look at some of the cultures and ethnicities who have inhabited NW Africa since pre-history.. like the ancestors of the Berbers (The Amazigh, etc).. who you’d look at and think were from Europe… similar to the Guanches (the primitive, ancient people who inhabited the Canary Islands and the Azores.. who the Portuguese came in contact with centuries ago, went to war with and eventually enslaved/killed… they mummified their dead, and built pyramids… and they were Tall, Blonde/Red haired people, who also in some cases had tattoos….

They were believed to be survivors of Atlantis.. and the Amazigh as well as the Berbers seem to be the genetic descendants of these people.. it’s fascinating.

I’m wondering if, considering the climate changes, etc.. if these Guanches, are the surviving remnants of a vastly ancient civilization that was wiped out by a cataclysm so brutal, that it separated them from the mainland of Africa.. and the island which they inhabited, were simply the peaks of the mountains of the Atlantic landmass that they lived on for Millenia.

Look into the Guanches and the Amazigh. They’ve been in Africa and the Azores (sic) since before written history.. yet they look almost Germanic or even Celtic."

Good grief. What does "being Germanic" or "being Celtic" look like? There is a fair bit of Ahnenerbe in that. So they "wore tattoos" did they (source?)? Why does his picture show tattoos like the Elder Futhark Ōþala-rune (apparently corresponding to the notion "inheritance, home, native land" in Old English) and much used by the Nazi SS and currently by far-right groups? Instead of going on what they "look like" the typical pseudo-science standby, why not use the actual genetic evidence (conveniently summarised here)?

There is no accepted evidence that the island groups Cape Verde Islands, Madeira and the Azores off the coast of north-western Africa had an indigenous population in the deeper past. Specifically, the Azores, mentioned above, were uninhabited when Portuguese explorers arrived in the 15th century. As any history book would have told Mr Witz before he set out to lecture us all, the bloody conquest and decimation of the Guanche population of the Canary Islands however was not by the Portuguese but was a Spanish/Castilian initiative. 

As for the idea that the Guanche "mummified their dead and built pyramids", Mr Witz has got confused. The Guanches did practice mummification of some of the deceased, preserving bodies with leather and herbs in burial caves. The "pyramids" claim refers to structures like the Pyramids of Güímar in Tenerife. However, mainstream archaeology dates these specific step-stone structures to the 19th century agricultural era, not to the ancient Guanches, though romantic and pseudohistorical theories (promoted by explorers like Thor Heyerdahl) often tied them to the indigenous population and external influences. The mention of tall, blonde / red-haired people with tattoos selectively quotes from earlier accounts but is mixed with fantasy from 19th-century racial mythmaking. Nineteenth and and early twentieth century racial anthropologists had exaggerated these traits to claim the Guanches were a "lost white tribe," attributing Nordic, Cro-Magnon, or Atlantean origins to them. Mr Witz just follows along.

Last Glacial Maximum

Mr Witz also ignores the huge depth of the ocean between the island groups that he idly speculates (but does not fact-check) might have been joined as a larger landmass when the sea level was lower. Reality is more modest. Why do people write such crap without thinking it through first?

The so-called Pyramids of Güímar

The so-called Pyramids of Güímar are a tourist attraction in the southeast of Tenerife (Güímar, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain). The site is a 64,000 m² series of stone-built terraces (now partly destroyed). They seem to be 19th-century agricultural terraces and field walls. They seem to have been formed during the 1800s when local landowners cleared rocks from arable fields to prepare the land for cultivation by piling the stones systematically into structured terraces, a common regional practice known as majanos (but of course terraces appear whenever areas of stony land on hillslopes are cleared for fields). Excavations conducted by the University of La Laguna in the 1990s uncovered 19th-century pottery shards and domestic items buried directly in the soil layers underneath the terraces (Gómez and Mederos 1996).

Some of the terraces have been claimed to have astronomical alignments (Belemonte, Aparicio and Estaban 1993 etc.), but why modern terraces should be aligned this way is not clear. The site was opened to the public in 1998, sponsored by a Norwegian investor, Fred Olsen, who owns the largest ship and ferry company in the Canary Islands.

The famous Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl became fascinated by the site in 1991, when he moved to Tenerife with his third wife (Jacqueline Beer) with whom he became very actively involved with several archaeological projects until his death in 2002 [this was well after his Kon-Tiki stunt (1947), the 1955–1956 expedition to Easter Island and the Ra sailings of the 1970s]. Heyerdahl argued that the structures were meticulously designed step pyramids that shared uncanny structural similarities with ancient temples in Peru, Mexico, and Mesopotamia. He proposed that the Canary Islands served as a crucial geographic stopping point for ancient Mediterranean or African mariners who sailed to the Americas thousands of years before Christopher Columbus. He believed the indigenous Guanches of Tenerife originally constructed the pyramids based on these seafaring connections.

REFERENCES
J. A. Belmonte, A. Aparicio and C. Esteban 1993, 'A solsticial marker in Tenerife: the Majanos de Chacona', in: Archaeoastronomy (supplement of Journal for the History of Astronomy), No. 18.

Antonio Aparicio Juan/César Esteban López 2005, 'Las Pirámides de Güímar: mito y realidad'. Centro de la Cultura Popular Canaria, La Laguna 2005, ISBN 978-84-7926-510-6.

Aparicio, A., Esteban, C. 2015, 'A Modern Myth - The “Pyramids” of Güímar' In: Ruggles, C. (eds) Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8_107

Maria Cruz Jiménez Gómez/Juan Francisco Navarro Mederos 1996, 'El complejo de las morras de Chacona (Güímar, Tenerife): resultados del proyecto de investigación', XII Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana (1996), Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 1998, vol. 1.