Other Proposed Landing Sites

Summary

Three sites get their own articles:  Mount Ararat, the Durupınar formation and Mount Cudi.  This article covers the rest, and the boat-shaped landforms that make Durupınar look less special than it first appears.  The text itself, Genesis 8:4's "mountains of Ararat," belongs to the parent article, Searching for Noah's Ark.

The verdict:  no other proposed landing site holds up.  The only one with a physical case is Iranian, and it fails on its own laboratory result.  The others are readings without objects.  And the boat shape that made Durupınar famous turns out to be common in the terrain around it.

1. Cornuke's Takht-e Suleiman (Part 1). In 2005 and 2006 Bob Cornuke's BASE Institute photographed a dark outcrop with "an uncanny beam-like appearance" on a ridge near 4,000 m in Iran's Alborz range, and called it a "candidate."¹ His reason for looking in Iran, Genesis 11:2's "from the east," does not hold: the same Hebrew word and the same Greek phrase describe Lot's journey eastward in Genesis 13:11. Creationist geologists who studied the photographs saw "thinly bedded silicified sandstone"² or sheared rock. A sample from the object held a marine microfossil. The wood his team brought down was dated by Beta Analytic to AD 1440-1650, and Cornuke himself wrote that it "would not be fragments directly from Noah’s ark."³ The petrified-wood result came from an unnamed laboratory and was never released.
2. The other candidates (Part 2). Kuh-e Alvand near Hamadan, the Dasht-e Kavir desert, the Saudi al-Jūdī, a Mount Judi near Haran, Apamea Kibotos in Phrygia, and Mount Nimush of the Babylonian flood story all rest on a reading of a verse, a word or a town's name. None offers an object or a sample. Apamea shows how such sites arise: a local flood legend and a town nicknamed "the Ark" became a landing place.
3. The lookalikes (Part 3). At least eleven boat-shaped forms are on record near Ararat: three in a Turkish Air Force photograph of Lesser Ararat's footslopes,⁴ at least three beside Durupınar in Don Patton's photograph,⁵ and a cluster of five on Greater Ararat's south-west slope, about 21 km north of Durupınar, the largest about 650 m long. Two young-earth writers say outright that the length, not the shape, singled Durupınar out.⁶ An Ark-length form is to be expected in a district with a few dozen such forms, so the outline is not evidence of a hull.
4. The comparison (Part 4). Eleven candidates have a named proposer or a written tradition. Three have had their physical evidence tested, and none survived; one, Cudi, is unsettled; one, Cornuke's earlier Mount Sabalan, was abandoned; six have never offered anything to test.
5. The pattern (Part 5). Since at most one candidate can be right, at least 91 % are wrong by arithmetic alone. Every laboratory date published in full on wood from Ağrı Dağı and Takht-e Suleiman falls within the last 1,700 radiocarbon years, against the 4,800 a young-earth geologist says Ark wood must show. Every result said to favour an Ark has lacked a named laboratory or a full report. The next announced site should be judged by what it releases: a thin section, a species, a dated sample from a named laboratory.

Part 1: Bob Cornuke's Mount Suleiman in Iran

The claim, in Cornuke's words

Bob Cornuke is president of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration (BASE) Institute, a Christian group that looks for places and objects named in the Bible.⁷  He searched on Ağrı Dağı in the late 1980s² and later concluded that the Ark was not in Turkey at all.  His first Iranian candidate was Mount Sabalan in the north-west, which his 2001 book calls "the object of a rich local tradition as the true resting place of Noah and the ark."⁸  Gordon Franz of Associates for Biblical Research summed up what followed:  "Apparently he did not find Noah's Ark on this mountain so he sought the ark on Mt. Suleiman" in the Elburz range.⁹  In July 2005 and June 2006 he led teams to Takht-e Suleiman ("Solomon's Throne"), a peak in the Alborz (Elburz) range north of Tehran.  The BASE Institute's own account, written in the first person, reads:  "In July 2005 and June 2006, I traveled with BASE teams and found the object believed to be the Ed Davis object perched on a ridge at 13,120 feet."¹  That is about 4,000 m.  Ed Davis was an American soldier who said that in 1943, while stationed at Hamadan in western Iran, local men took him to see the Ark.¹⁰

The 2006 team of fourteen included Arch Bonnema, president of Joshua Financial, the apologist Josh McDowell and the former Avis chief executive Barry Rand.  They returned with photographs of a black outcrop about 400 ft (122 m) long.⁷  Bonnema told reporters, "These beams not only look like petrified wood, they are so impressive that they look like real wood—this is an amazing discovery that may be the oldest shipwreck in recorded history."⁷  A web report by Brannon Howse said that "some of the wood-like rocks were tested just this week and actually proved to be petrified wood."⁷

The BASE Institute's own summary is more careful.  Its list of findings says:  "The object consists of dark rock with an uncanny beam-like appearance in several places";  "The object fits the approximate dimensions of Noah's Ark";  "Some samples tested by an independent lab showed signs of petrified wood. (Not the entire object.)";  and "We found microscopic sea life in a rock sample from the object (a foram, which is normally only found at the depths of the sea)."  It closes:  "The BASE Institute does not make the claim that we have found Noah's Ark. We'll let you draw your own conclusions. In our opinion, it's a candidate."¹  The page also states the premise behind the search:  "if anything from Noah's Ark has survived, it might now be in the form of petrified wood."¹

So the claim has four parts:  Genesis points east of Mesopotamia;  Ed Davis saw the Ark in Iran;  the object looks like beams;  and a laboratory found signs of petrified wood.  Each is taken in turn below.

Why Iran: "from the east"

Cornuke's case starts from Genesis 11:2 in the King James Version, "And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar."¹¹  He reasons:  "If the survivors of the flood journeyed from the east, they would have come from the land in the direction of present day Iran."  A journey from Ağrı Dağı down the Euphrates, he adds, "would be a contradiction of Genesis 11:2."¹  He quotes Roy Knuteson that the Septuagint, the Greek translation made in the third century BC, uses a preposition "that only means 'from,' not 'in,' or 'towards,' or 'eastward.'"¹

The Hebrew word is miqqedem.  The standard Hebrew lexicon of Brown, Driver and Briggs gives its sense with a verb of motion as "eastward," and lists two places:  Genesis 11:2 and Genesis 13:11.¹²  Genesis 13:11 settles what the word can mean, because its direction is known.  Lot was at Bethel, chose "all the plain of Jordan," which lies east of Bethel, and moved there.  The King James Version itself translates the same word "and Lot journeyed east."¹¹  The Septuagint uses exactly the phrase Knuteson relies on for Lot:  apērēn Lōt apo anatolōn, the same apo anatolōn it uses in Genesis 11:2.¹³  The Greek translators wrote "from the east" for a journey that went east.  So neither the Hebrew nor the Greek fixes which way the builders of Babel were moving, and modern translations divide:  "from the east" and "eastward" are both defensible.

Cornuke concedes part of this on the same page:  "It is very possible that the term 'from the east' (Genesis 11:2) does not indicate a compass direction. It is probable that the author intended to refer to a geographical region."¹  Rick Lanser of Associates for Biblical Research answered that even the strict reading does not rule out Turkey:  Noah's family could have moved east along the Araxes valley first and come back into Mesopotamia "from the east."¹⁴  His colleague Gordon Franz made the simpler point:  "does the text state that the Ark landed east of Shinar? The Biblical passage does not state that Ararat is east of the Land of Shinar."⁹  And the geography cuts both ways.  Takht-e Suleiman lies about 740 km from Babylon on a bearing of about 53°, north-east, not east;  Ağrı Dağı lies about 800 km due north.¹⁵  Anne Habermehl, a young-earth writer, put it plainly:  Cornuke "gets around that by arguing that “east” refers to the whole country that lies to the east of Babylon," and his peak lies outside ancient Urartu, "being much too far east."⁶  The textual question of where "the mountains of Ararat" were is the parent article's;  here it is enough that Genesis 11:2 cannot carry the weight Cornuke puts on it.

The Ed Davis link

Cornuke's object is the one "believed to be the Ed Davis object."¹  Bill Crouse and Steven Anderson, two creationist Ark researchers who examined the eyewitness stories, judge Davis unreliable.  Davis "has changed his story several times in the telling," turning his guides from Lurs into Kurds once researchers told him that Lurs do not live near Ağrı Dağı.¹⁰  They suggest that locals near Hamadan showed Davis a block of rock on Kuh-e Alvand, "and to many in that area of the world this mountain is the one on which the Ark landed."¹⁰  Crouse also reports that Davis claimed the locals found edible honey and beans inside the Ark.  A story that has changed in its key details cannot locate a mountain, whether in Turkey or in Iran.

What the object is

The creationist geologists who looked at the photographs did not see wood.  John Morris, a geologist and then president of the Institute for Creation Research, was a friend of Cornuke's, and Cornuke sent him the 2005 photographs.  Morris wrote:  "Unfortunately, he had no samples to show us, and thus it was not possible to be certain of its identity."  But "In our unanimous opinion, the formation was of geologic interest only. ... Most likely the rock material is thinly bedded silicified sandstone which has been mistaken for wood grain. Regional fracturing has produced the superficial look of thick beams."²  Tas Walker, a geologist at Creation Ministries International, read the same photographs as rock that had been "sheared by tectonic movement, causing folding and metamorphism," whose "beams with their hewn surfaces at right angles look like rock that has fractured along cleavage planes."⁷  Even the expedition's own geologist, Reg Lyle, is reported to have said:  "The object appears to be a basalt dike, however, it is absolutely uncanny that the object looks like hand hewn timbers."⁷

Three facts from the BASE page itself point the same way.

1. The foraminifer. A foram is the shell of a single-celled marine organism. BASE found one "in a rock sample from the object."¹ A marine microfossil inside the object is what marine sedimentary rock contains. Morris made the young-earth point: "While the fossil (as well as the rock) is probably from the Flood, certainly it was not on the Ark." The Ark landed after the Flood's sediments were laid down and was never under water again.²
2. Petrification. The search assumes Ark timber would now be petrified wood. Morris noted that "petrified wood is found in thousands of places around the world. Finding it here means nothing," and that wood petrifies best "when buried in volcanic ash."² Walker added that timber sitting on a mountainside would be soaked by rain and snow, which carry too little dissolved mineral to petrify it.⁷ Lanser added that the pitch of Genesis 6:14, by keeping water out, would tend to prevent petrification.¹⁴
3. The only date. The 2005 team brought down real wood from high on the mountain, and Cornuke had it radiocarbon dated. He reports the result himself in his 2005 book Ark Fever: "I had these wood samples tested by Beta Analytic, of Miami, Florida ... Beta determined the age of the wood to be between 355 and 565 years old," that is, AD 1440 to 1650. He draws the fair conclusion: "Obviously, wood that is only several hundred years old (rather than several thousand years or more) would not be fragments directly from Noah’s ark." He suggests instead that local people built a shrine near the object a few centuries ago.³ The BASE page lists the same wood as "Wood at the Summit, which may be from the shrine," dated "to be around 500 years old."¹ It is the only laboratory result on the claim that names its laboratory, and it dates the wood to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries AD.

The laboratory

The case for the object itself rests on one sentence:  "Some samples tested by an independent lab showed signs of petrified wood."¹  The page does not name the laboratory, the method, the samples or what "signs" means.  In August 2006 Cornuke told a Colorado Springs reporter that the June samples had been "delivered to scientists in New York for analysis."¹⁶  No report from that analysis has been found in print or online, and in July 2006 a skeptical blogger already noted that the team "have never revealed who did the testing, what tests were performed, or released the actual lab report."¹⁷  Morris named the test that would settle the question:  "Determining if the material is wood or not can best be accomplished by examining a thin section under a microscope. If specimens were taken, they need to be studied for remaining wood cells."²  Petrified wood keeps its cells when it is silicified, and a thin section shows them.  A test that could have settled the matter in an afternoon has not been published in twenty years.

Where the claim stands

Cornuke deserves credit for one thing:  he has said, more carefully than his teammates, that he does not claim to have found the Ark.  Morris noted it too:  "Cornuke is careful to insist he does not claim the Ark has been found, but the viewer or listener often comes away with that impression anyway."²  But a candidate is only as good as its evidence.  Here the text does not point to Iran, the eyewitness is unreliable, the geologists on Cornuke's own side see sandstone or sheared rock, the object holds a marine fossil, the one named laboratory dated the wood to AD 1440-1650, and the petrified-wood result was never released.  Even the object's height differs between Cornuke's own accounts:  Ark Fever puts it at 12,500 ft,³ the BASE page at 13,120 ft.¹  The Institute for Creation Research, Creation Ministries International and Associates for Biblical Research all declined to support the claim in 2006.  Searches found no published assessment by Answers in Genesis or by Randall Price.

Part 2: The other candidates

Beyond Cornuke's peak, the published proposals fall into two kinds.  Some are old traditions that name a place but offer no object.  Others are modern readings that put the Ark where no one has looked.  None of them offers a physical object that anyone has tested.

Kuh-e Alvand, near Hamadan, Iran

Alvand is a high mountain beside Hamadan in western Iran.  Crouse and Anderson report a local belief that "to many in that area of the world this mountain is the one on which the Ark landed," and they suspect it is where Ed Davis was taken in 1943.¹⁰  B. J. Corbin, who joined four expeditions to Ağrı Dağı (1988, 1989, 1990 and 1998), later turned to ancient texts and now names "Alvand Mountain as the most likely landing site of Noah's (Ziusudra's/Atrahasis'/Utnapishtim's) Ark."¹⁸  His case rests on Genesis 11:2 and on identifying the Sumerian land of Aratta with Ararat.  He reports no survey, find or sample.

The Dasht-e Kavir desert, Iran

Habermehl summarises a proposal by A. Groebli in a 1999 collection of Ark explorers' essays:  "Groebli believes that the Ark landed in the central plateau of Iran in the Dasht-e-Kavir desert and is hidden under sand dunes there; he bases this belief on his chosen criteria that the Ark should be located east of Babylon and on a pre-Flood mountain."⁶  The essay itself could not be obtained.  It applies Cornuke's reading of Genesis 11:2 and offers nothing that could be examined.

Arabia

Habermehl notes "Al-Judi mountains in central Saudi Arabia, and some Muslims believe the Ark landed there."⁶  The Qur'an, 11:44, says the Ark came to rest on al-Jūdī, and the name has been attached to more than one range.  The only published modern case for Arabia is a personal web page of about 1999, signed only "Brian," which argues that "the Al-Judi of Sura 11:44 is definitely NOT a mountain" and that "Noah's ark has been a great canopy atop the preserved remains of the preflood city of Cain called Al-Judi and Chanoch," buried under sand about 62 statute miles north of Tayma'.¹⁹  Habermehl called it "a truly bizarre interpretation of the Bible and Quran."⁶  She adds that she "could not find information about any Ark search expeditions" for the Saudi Al-Judi or for a Mount Judi near Haran.⁶

No published case was found for a landing in Pakistan's Salt Range, where a range is also called Judi.  It is mentioned online without a source and is left out here.

Apamea Kibotos, Phrygia

The one ancient rival to the eastern mountains is in western Turkey.  The city of Apamea in Phrygia, near modern Dinar, carried the by-name Kibotos, "the chest" or "the ark."  A Jewish or Christian poem in the first book of the Sibylline Oracles places the landing there:  "There is in Phrygia on the dark mainland / A steep, tall mountain; Ararat its name ... Thence streams of the great river Marsyas spring. / There on a lofty peak the ark abode."²⁰  From about AD 193 to 253 the city struck bronze coins showing Noah and his wife in a floating chest with doves on the lid, and the name Noah in Greek.²¹²²

William Ramsay, who mapped the cities of Phrygia, explained how the tradition arose.  The by-name Kibotos "occurs first in Strabo about A.D. 19," and "there is no evidence whether the by-name ... was derived from the tale, or the tale was localized here because of the name."  He concluded that "the hill of Kelainai was considered by the Apamean Jews to be the spot where the ark had rested, because an Apamean legend of a deluge was already connected with the hill."²³  Apamea is a clean example of how landing sites are made:  a local flood legend, a Jewish community, and a town name that meant "ark."  Nobody has claimed a physical object there.

Mount Nimush, in the Babylonian flood story

In the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, the flood hero's boat grounds on Mount Nimush, once read Nisir.  Andrew George, the epic's modern editor, writes that "the ark ran aground on one, Mt Nimuš," and that Assyrian inscriptions make "the most obvious identification of the peak as that now known as Pir Omar Gudrun," near Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan.  He adds that "The mountain of the ark crops up differently named in different traditions."²⁴  This is the landing place of a different hero in a different story, but it shows that the oldest flood tradition outside Genesis put the landing in the Zagros mountains north-east of Mesopotamia, and that the name of the mountain changed from one telling to the next.

What these have in common

Every candidate in this Part rests on a reading:  of Genesis 11:2, of the Qur'an's al-Jūdī, of a Sibylline verse, or of a local name.  None comes with an object, a sample or a survey.  They cannot fail a test because none has been put to one, and most are placed, by their own proposers, where no test can be made:  under desert sand, or on an unvisited peak.

Part 3: The boat-shaped forms around Ararat

The argument from shape

Durupınar became a candidate because of its outline.  When the 1960 expedition reached it, "One scientist in the group ventured that nothing in nature could produce such symmetry, although nothing man-made was discovered."²⁵  Every later promoter has leaned on the same point:  a pointed end, a rounded end, raised sides, and a length near 300 cubits.

The shape is evidence for a hull only if nature rarely makes it.  So the fair test is to look at the terrain around it.  If the same district makes boat shapes without boats, the outline tells us how material flows around an obstacle, and nothing about what the obstacle is.

The best defence of the shape's uniqueness comes from Salih Bayraktutan, the Turkish geologist who co-led the 1987-1988 surveys.  Lorence Collins and David Fasold reported his view in 1996:  "Other streamlined rock-shapes have been found in the area (Guner, 1986), but according to Bayraktutan, these shapes do not display the same morphological and internal features."²⁵  That is a fair point as far as it goes.  The report does not say which features differ, and the internal structure that the radar suggested at Durupınar was not confirmed when the site was cored in 1988 (see The Durupınar Formation).

The lookalikes on record

Three sets of similar forms are documented, by three different people, without anyone having surveyed the district for them.

1. The Turkish Air Force photograph. Andrew Snelling, a young-earth geologist, wrote in 1992 that "this particular boat-shape is far from unique. The Turkish Air Force released another photograph several years ago showing three similar boat-shapes in the mudflow material on the footslopes of nearby Lesser Mount Ararat."⁴ The reprint of his article at Creation Ministries International shows the photograph, an oblique view below the cone of Lesser Ararat with arrows on three forms. It is undated, and the forms are neither located nor measured.
2. Don Patton's photograph. In October 2026 the Institute for Creation Research published a photograph from Don Patton, a creationist who has visited Durupınar many times, showing "at least three nearby outcrops of similar shape and material." Patton's comment was that "Noah was not an admiral of a fleet."⁵
3. A cluster of five on Greater Ararat. Satellite imagery shows five streamlined, boat-like forms close together on the lower south-west slope of Greater Ararat (Ağrı Dağı), about 21 km north of Durupınar and 9 km from the summit. The largest sits near 39.625° N, 44.279° E, at about 2,470 m. Its smooth inner "deck" is about 650 m long and 300 m wide, and its concentric outer ridges make the whole form about 1 km long. The other four are a third to a quarter of its size. The slope around them is covered with lobed and streamlined flow forms.²⁶

Two cautions keep this from being overstated.  The five on Greater Ararat lie on the flank of a volcano, not in the Telçeker earthflow where Durupınar sits, and no source read for this article maps whether they are lava lobes or debris lobes.  They show that flows here make boat outlines readily.  They do not show that those outlines are made of the same rock and mud as Durupınar.  And none of the eleven forms has been measured in the field.

What singled Durupınar out

Two young-earth writers say plainly why this one form, out of several, drew the attention.  Snelling:  "if it wasn’t for the fact that this particular boat-shape is the approximate length of the biblical Noah’s Ark* then little attention would have been paid to it."⁴  Anne Habermehl, in a review for the 2008 International Conference on Creationism, wrote that the main objection to the Durupınar ark "is that it appears to be a naturally occurring geological formation, and is only one of several in the area; the reason that this particular one attracted attention as a possible Ark is that it is about the right length (155 m, using an ancient longer cubit)."⁶

So the shape did not pick out Durupınar.  The length did.  And the length window is wide.  Three hundred cubits is 133 m at the common cubit of 44.45 cm and 164 m at the longest cubit fitted to Durupınar, 54.7 cm.  That window spans 23 %.²⁷

Pricing the coincidence

How surprising is it that one boat-shaped form in a district of many happens to fall in a 23 % length window?  No source has counted or measured the streamlined forms around Ararat, so the answer can only be illustrated.  Suppose, for scale only, that the lengths of such forms are spread evenly on a logarithmic scale between 50 m and 1 km.  The documented forms run from Durupınar's 150-164 m to about 1 km, so the range is not invented, but the distribution is an assumption.  Then any one form has about a 7 % chance of landing in the Ark window.²⁷

On any reasonable count, a district like this one produces an Ark-length boat shape without help.  The coincidence that made Durupınar famous is the expected result of looking at enough mudflows with a ruler in hand.  The width does not rescue it:  Durupınar is 3 to 4 times as long as it is wide, against the Ark's 6, and its sibling article shows that even a splayed hull settles nothing, because the outline cannot decide the question.

What the number does

The lookalikes do not prove that Durupınar is not the Ark.  The 1988 cores and the thin sections do that, and they are argued in The Durupınar Formation.  What the lookalikes do is narrower and firmer:  they remove the shape from the evidence.  An outline that the district makes again and again cannot count in favour of one example of it.  If the 2026 cores turn up identified, dated wood, that wood will carry the case by itself, and the shape will add nothing to it.

Part 4: Every candidate compared

The table lists every landing site with a named proposer or a written tradition behind it.  The boat-shaped forms of Part 3 are left out, because no one has proposed them as the Ark;  they are the control group, not candidates.

Eleven candidates.  Three have had their physical evidence tested, and all three failed.  One, Cudi, has a single reported sample whose details belong to its own article.  One, Sabalan, was given up by the man who proposed it.  Six have never offered anything that could be tested.

Part 5: What the pattern shows

At most one can be right

The candidates exclude one another.  If the Ark survives at all, it rests in one place.  So of the eleven sites in the table, at least ten are wrong whatever any test shows:  91 % of all proposals are wrong by arithmetic alone.  A new, twelfth claim enters that field with a ceiling of 1 in 12, about 8 %, before its evidence is weighed, and that is on the generous assumption that the Ark survives somewhere.³¹  The young-earth geologists who have weighed the question do not assume it will.  Snelling wrote that "the Bible in no way says that Noah’s Ark would be preserved as a witness to future generations."⁴

The tested record

Three sites have had physical evidence tested, and none has survived.  Laplace's rule of succession turns "0 of 3" into an estimate that the next tested site passes about 1 time in 5.  Three cases is a small record, and the honest reading is that it cannot by itself rule a new claim out:  the 95 % upper limit on the pass rate is still 63 %.³¹  The record matters more for the way the claims failed than for how many failed.

How the claims failed

The failures follow two patterns, and both are visible across sites.

1. Every laboratory result published in full puts the wood within the last 1,700 radiocarbon years. Navarra's oak from Ağrı Dağı: 1,190 ± 90 radiocarbon years, about AD 760, with the laboratory's own comment, "evidently not the Ark,"²⁸ and five more results from four laboratories between 1,210 and 1,690 years.³² Cornuke's wood from Takht-e Suleiman: AD 1440-1650, from Beta Analytic.³ Three of the four Hong Kong samples from Ağrı Dağı: modern to 610 radiocarbon years.²⁹ Snelling, who holds a young-earth chronology, sets the bar a real Ark sample must clear: "a wood sample from the Ark must carbon-14 date older than 4,800 years."³⁰ The oldest of these published results, 1,690 years on half of one sample, reaches about a third of that.³³
2. Every laboratory result said to support an Ark at these three sites lacks a named laboratory or a full report. Wyatt's "wood" at Durupınar came with an assay of three elements, and the laboratory "was adamant that they were not asked to give an opinion on what the object was."⁴ Cornuke's "signs of petrified wood" came from an unnamed laboratory. The one old Hong Kong result, sample D, came from a laboratory that, Snelling reports, "did not follow standard procedures and did not measure the δ13C value or report a ± error margin."³⁰

So the record divides cleanly.  Where a sample went to a named laboratory and the full result was printed, the wood was centuries old, not millennia.  Where the result was said to favour the Ark, the full report was missing or the laboratory unnamed.  That is the pattern the parent article, Searching for Noah's Ark, describes for the whole search.

What it means for the next claim

A new announcement should be judged by what it releases, not by how it looks.  The tests that would settle any of these claims are cheap and standard:  a thin section to show wood cells, a species identification, and a radiocarbon date from a named laboratory with its sample number, all on material collected by someone who did not fund the expedition.  On the record so far, a claim that offers those has never pointed to the Ark, and a claim that does not offer them has never been checkable.  Until a candidate breaks that pattern, the base rate is the best guide:  the next proposed landing site is almost certainly wrong, and its promoters' description of it is not evidence that it is right.

Objections and responses

1. "Bayraktutan said the other streamlined forms differ from Durupınar in shape and internal features." That is the best reply in the literature, and it is reported second-hand, without saying which features differ.²⁵ The argument from shape rests on the outline, which the lookalikes share. Internal features are a separate test, and at Durupınar that test was run: the 1988 cores found mud and rock (see The Durupınar Formation).
2. "The five forms on Greater Ararat are lava lobes, not mudflows, so they prove nothing about Durupınar." They may well be a different material, and Part 3 says so. They show only that flows on this mountain make boat outlines often. The Turkish Air Force forms on Lesser Ararat and Patton's forms beside Durupınar are reported in mudflow material in the same district, and they make the point without the five.⁴⁵
3. "Cornuke never claimed he found the Ark." True, and this article credits him for it. But his own flyer, as Gordon Franz quotes it, said he was "sharing photographic and laboratory data, and letting audiences draw their own tentative, informed conclusions."⁹ The photographs were shared. The petrified-wood data were not. A reader cannot draw an informed conclusion from a report that has not been released.
4. "The King James Version and the Septuagint both say 'from the east,' so the Ark must lie east of Shinar." Both use the same words for Lot's journey from Bethel to the Jordan valley, which went east.¹¹¹³ And even on the strict reading, the verse describes a later migration, not the landing. Franz: "The Biblical passage does not state that Ararat is east of the Land of Shinar."⁹
5. "Radiocarbon cannot date pre-Flood wood, so the young dates mean nothing." Young-earth models predict the opposite error. They hold that the pre-Flood atmosphere had less carbon-14, so Ark wood should date too old, not too young: Habermehl writes that pre-Flood wood "should show abnormally ancient ages."⁶ Wood that dates to the fifteenth century cannot be explained by a low pre-Flood carbon-14 level. The contamination needed to make Ark wood look that young is priced in Mount Ararat and the Ararat Anomaly.
6. "The Ark may still lie at one of the untested sites, under the Kavir dunes or on Alvand." It may. But a site with no object offered is not evidence of anything, and it is not a rival to sites that were tested. The base rate in Part 5 is a ceiling on every untested claim, not a finding about any one of them.
7. From the skeptic: "Every candidate failing shows the Flood never happened." It shows that no candidate has produced the Ark. The young-earth writers cited here did not expect the Ark to survive: Snelling says the Bible does not promise it would be preserved,⁴ and Habermehl allows that "not much of the Ark exists today."⁶ Whether the Flood happened is argued elsewhere on this site, from the rocks and the text, not from a boat.
8. "Apamea and Mount Nimush show the landing story drifted from mountain to mountain, so Genesis is one more local legend." They show that later communities attached the landing to mountains near them, which is how Apamea's Jews read their own town's name. Genesis itself names no single peak: "the mountains of Ararat" is a region, as the parent article explains. The drift is in the traditions, not in the text.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The lookalikes have not been studied in the field. The five forms on Greater Ararat were located and measured here from satellite imagery, to within about 10 %, and the four smaller ones were not measured one by one. Whether they are lava or debris lobes is not mapped in any source read. Yılmaz Güner's 1986 paper in Jeomorfoloji Dergisi, which Collins and Fasold cite for "other streamlined rock-shapes" in the area, could not be obtained, and it may describe them. The Turkish Air Force and Patton photographs are undated and give no positions.
2. The length illustration in Part 3 rests on an assumed spread of lengths. No one has counted and measured the streamlined forms of the district. A survey that did so would replace the illustration with a number.
3. The 2006 samples. Neither the "independent lab" of the BASE page nor the "scientists in New York" has been named, and no report has appeared. Beta Analytic's report on the 2005 wood is known only from Cornuke's own summary.
4. Habermehl misreports Morris. Her review says geologists believe Cornuke's object "is nothing but a natural basaltic rock formation (Morris, 2006)."⁶ Morris's article says "thinly bedded silicified sandstone."² The word "basalt" comes from the expedition's own geologist, Reg Lyle, as reported by Walker.⁷ The article cites each source for what it says.
5. Groebli's essay was not seen. His case is known only from Habermehl's summary. The book that holds it, B. J. Corbin's The Explorers of Ararat, is dated 1998 on Corbin's site and 1999 by Habermehl.
6. No assessment by Answers in Genesis or by Randall Price of the Iranian claim was found, though both have written on the Ark search. If one exists, it should be added.
7. The Cudi row depends on its sibling. The single wood sample reported from Cudi Dağı is assessed in Mount Cudi and the Older Tradition; if that article finds it decisive one way or the other, the count in Part 5 changes by one.
8. Three tested sites is a small record. The rule-of-succession figure in Part 5 is soft, and the article leans on the pattern of failure more than on the count.

Verdict

None of the other proposed landing sites holds up.  Cornuke's Takht-e Suleiman is the only one with a physical case, and that case is a rock outcrop that young-earth geologists read as sandstone or sheared rock, a marine microfossil inside it, wood that Cornuke's own laboratory dated to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and a petrified-wood result that was never released.  The rest, from Alvand and the Kavir desert to Arabia and Apamea, rest on readings of a verse, a word or a town's name, and offer nothing to test.  The boat-shaped forms around Ararat show that Durupınar's outline is common in that terrain, so its shape is not evidence of a hull.  At Ağrı Dağı and Takht-e Suleiman, every wood date published in full is centuries old, not millennia, and at all three tested sites every result said to favour an Ark has lacked a named laboratory or a full report.  The one old date reported from Cudi Dağı is weighed in its own article.

Sources