Expedition to the Ark as told by Mrs. Gladys Evans
Mrs. Gladys Evans, a relative of the Russian discoverers remembered that her father entertained three former Russian pilots that were part of the Russian search team. The pilots had been part of the expedition that reached the Ark and had actually been inside of the ship and examined it. Pictures had been taken, but “the Russian government had confiscated all the film and destroyed it.” They told how the Ark was "half in and half out of a lake like a log floating in water. It was an immense thing, and it had cages, some with metal on them. It had a catwalk on top and the door was off. The door was nearby and had apparently been struck by lightning because it was partly burnt. The ark was just as good as the day it was built." The wood reminded them of oleander. It was painted inside and out with some kind of lacquer. When they first saw the ark from the air, they thought it was a submarine, but couldn't figure out why someone would be building it on a mountain. On the later reconnaissance expedition, these three pilots actually went inside the ark where they took pictures and measurements. The film was turned over to the Russian government.
Joe Kulik with Russian Army at the Ark
Joe Kulik told to Rex Geissler in a phone interview that he was born on March 15, 1902 and was then ninety-seven years old. He said that at the beginning of World War I, his family fled Austria and moved to Russia in the Ukraine region. Kulik stated that as a fifteen-year-old in 1917, the Russian Army Patrol expedition hired him to feed the horses and the troops while the Russian troops searched for a boat on a mountain. The Russian expedition took him to the Russian border with Turkey where they went up a great mountain. Joe told Geissler that they left the horses behind at one point and went toward the top of the mountain where they saw a huge, long boat with a hole in the side of it. Kulik stated that the boat had moss growing on the top of it. Joe said that nobody took a picture because no one had film at that time. He said that it was like a huge building or three times the size of a small house in width.
Kulik’s granddaughter has videotape from a 1997 of him briefly discussing this part of his life. On the videotape Joe Kulik said that: ”Yes, I saw the Noah's Ark. It was like a building, just about round from rock. That boat stayed on the border of Russia and Turkey. I went not inside that building, just saw it. There were no snow because it was summer time and hot. There was moss all over the Ark, covered with it like a mountain rock.”
Testimony of Nikolai Valentinovich about the Noah’s Ark
Al Jenny was doing research in Moscow on the Russian Expedition in 1992-1993 and received the following information from a reader in 1994:
My name is Zalesskii Nikolai Valentinovich. I have just read the article “Noah’s Ark found by Russians” from your magazine N1, 1994 and I want to tell you that my grandfather Karabaza Yegor Yerofeyevitch (born in 1888, Cossack, military rank - Vakhmister, St. George Cross winner) was on Caucasus in 1914-1917 during World War I and personally participated in Russian expedition to Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. What do I know about this from his stories? I know that he and other soldiers climbed on Mount Ararat and they saw Noah’s Ark, that the wood which the Ark was made of was dark due to age; that there was a crack flowing from under the Ark and the water in crack was like “life” water.
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Armais Arutunoff and the Russian Expedition to Noah’s Ark
The wealthy Armenian from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Armais Arutunoff, stated to Dave GuMaer in 1970 that in his youth he lived in Erivan (now Yerevan, Armenia) at the time the men from the Czar’s expedition returned from their investigation of the ark. Arutunoff vividly recalled hearing the men’s excited story in the streets of Erivan, of how they had climbed the mountain twenty-five miles away, had entered the great ship, and verified the aviator’s report. The sketch of a photo given to Arutunoff in Don Shockey’s book ”The Painful Mountain” showed three Russians standing in an open doorway of the ark. Following is what Arutunoff said to GuMaer in Shockey’s book.
Shortly before the overthrow of the government, the Czar had commissioned some one hundred White Russian soldiers to undertake an investigative trip to Mount Ararat in search of the fabled Ark of Noah that was described in Genesis. This group of soldiers made their trek up the Russian side of Mount Ararat and after much difficulty reached a point on the mountain where the Ark was said to be buried under ice and snow. This was exactly what they found: a petrified barge extending from beneath an ice peak. The Ark of Noah was real and was located on Mount Ararat. Mr. Arutunoff said that some years later he met a Russian soldier, one of the survivors of this expedition, who informed him in great detail of what they had seen, the measurements of the boat, the photographs which had been taken, along with many other facts and details concerning the expedition. This soldier described the surveyors, photographers, artists and scientists who were on the mountain specifically to find the Ark and to prove that it existed on Mount Ararat.
It was at this point when Mr. Arutunoff reached into a drawer in his desk and very casually removed two photographs which he laid in front of Dave GuMaer. Here were the photographs of Noah’s Ark taken by the Russian photographer on Mount Ararat. Dave remembers them as being grainy and enlarged but clearly showing the barge Arutunoff had just described. The pictures were of a large, barge-type craft protruding from the ice. The barge was on a shelf overhanging a frozen lake below. About three-fourths of the structure was still encased in an ice pack. The Ark was tilted at an angle. In the doorway of the Ark stood three Russian soldiers linked arm in arm. The doorway appeared to be about twenty-five feet high and some twenty-five or thirty feet wide. Off to one side of the Ark was some type of wooden altar.
Arutunoff then continued his story of the expedition. These Russian soldiers were on direct orders from the Czar to measure, photograph and survey everything they found. After this was completed, their samples taken and their sketches carefully catalogued, the soldiers proceeded to leave the site on Mount Ararat and return with all this important data and immediately report to the Czar.
Bill Crouse and the ”Ararat Report”
Bill Crouse in the ”Ararat Report”t stated the following about the story by Yavuz Konca, who reported that an elderly Kurdish tribal chief remembered just such a Russian discovery in the summer of 1917. At the time, he was a young man of 18 years of age and was employed in old Bayazit by the Russians who were building a railroad around the western pass of Ararat. He recalled an unusual event that summer in which returning Russian soldiers came into the village throwing their hats in the air and shooting their rifles. When he inquired as to the celebration, he was informed that they had discovered Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat
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John Schilleroff also told about the Ark
Jim Frazier wrote in a letter written April 4, 1940 : Yes, my Father-in-law, John Schilleroff, told me at different times about the Ark of Noah. While in the Russian Army, they were ordered to pack for a long tramp up into the Mountains of Ararat. A Russian aviator had sighted what looked to him like a huge wooden structure in a small lake. About two thirds of the way up, probably a little farther, they stopped on a high cliff, and in a small valley below them was a dense swamp in which the object could be seen. It appeared like a huge ship or barge with one end under water, and only one corner could be clearly seen from where these men stood.
New Eden Magazine tells about the expedition to the Ark
Around 1939, an issue of the New Eden Magazine reported that Russian pilot Vladimir Roskovitsky saw the Ark while flying a plane around Ararat in 1916. The Czar sent a detachment of men who found and photographed the ark in 1917. The article described the expedition as follows:
When the captain [of the Air force Detachment] sent his report about the discoverer of the pilots to the Russian government it aroused considerable interest and the Czar sent two special companies of soldiers to climb the mountain. One group of fifty men attacked one side and the other group of one hundred men attacked the mountain from the other side. Two weeks of hard work were required to chop out a trail along the cliffs of the lower part of the mountain, and it was nearly a month before the Ark was reached.
Complete measurements were taken and plans drawn of it as well as many photographs, all of which were sent to the Czar of Russia. The Ark was found to contain hundreds of small rooms and some rooms very large with high ceilings. The large rooms usually had a fence of great timbers across them, some of which were two feet thick, as though designated to hold beasts ten times as large as elephants. Other rooms were lined with tiers of cages somewhat like one sees today at a poultry how, only instead of chicken wire they had rows of tiny wrought iron bars across the fronts.
Everything was heavily painted with a wax-like paint resembling shellac, and the workmanship of the craft showed all the signs of a high type of civilization. The wood used throughout was oleander, which belongs to the cypress family, and never rots, which, of course, coupled with the facts of it being painted and it being frozen most of the time, accounted for its perfect preservation. The expedition found on the peak of the mountain above the ship, the burned remains of the timbers that were missing out of the one side of the ship. It seems that these timbers had been hauled up to the top of the peak and used to build a tiny one-room shrine, inside of which was a rough stone hearth like the altars the Hebrews used for sacrifices, and it had either caught fire from the altar or been struck by lightning as the timbers were considerably burned and charred over and the roof was completely burned off.
A few days after this expedition sent its report to the Czar, the government was overthrown and Godless Bolshevism took over, so that the records were never made public and probably were destroyed in the zeal of the Bolsheviks to discredit all religion and belief in the truth of the Bible. We White Russians of the air fleet escaped through Armenia, and four of us came to America, where we could be free to live according to the “Good Old Book,” which we had seen for ourselves to be absolutely true, even to as fantastic a thing as a world flood.
Noah's Ark found
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