"The movie everybody's talking about!" at the
moment is Noah, a Biblical epic by
Darren Aronofsky starring Russell Crowe, Anthony Hopkins and Emma Watson. I've
not seen it and don't feel inclined to, and so will comment no further on the nature
of movie itself until I do, for reasons I state here: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/critics.html.
The film is based on one of the oldest stories in the world. It appears most
famously in the Book of Genesis, but
that is actually only its most recent edition. The same basic plotline:
Virtuous man living in a sinful world, God decides to destroy the world through
a giant flood, God saves the good guy and his family by instructing him to
build a boat to ride out the flood, good guy gets into boat taking animals with
him, after flood good guy and his family repopulate the world with lots of
little good guys; it's a constantly recurring theme. This is the basic story of
Manu in the Indian Rig Veda and part
of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.
The tale was probably inspired by even older folk histories and oral traditions
dating back to the people who witnessed the end of the last ice age in 12 to
10,000 BC. I can find no other source for the word ark referring to any kind of boat or ship; but it is clearly boat,
one without sail, engine, oars, or any other kind of propulsion; it was designed
merely to float. The Bible describes it in some detail; it was 450 feet long,
75 feet wide and 45 feet high, putting it in the same size category as some modern
ocean-going vessels. As the flood waters receded the Ark
eventually grounded on Mount Ararat in what is now
eastern Turkey .
After that we don't know what happened to the Ark ,
whether Noah and his people broke it up or whether it deteriorated to nothing
from the wear and tear of nature; or did Noah's people preserve it as a
historical relic? Many people have travelled to the location to try and find the
Ark , starting as long ago as the
First Century with the Roman historian Josephus. Marco Polo and Sir Walter
Raleigh also tried to find it. The best known of these
"Ark-eologists" in modern times was the Apollo astronaut James Irwin,
a devout Christian who also tried to locate the Exodus route and the footsteps
of Moses on Mount Sinai . On June the 17th 1949 a US Air Force plane flying over
Ararat took a photograph of a large black object sticking out of the snowy
flank of the peak. It has been dismissed as nothing more than a rocky outcrop,
but others say it is a part of the Ark. There are many unsubstantiated claims
of people who reported that have found petrified wooden beams etc, but that is
hearsay alone.
There is only one expedition that has produced anything
substantial in terms of evidence and that was the one led by Ron Wyatt which
investigated the Durupinar anomaly. This is an oval shaped rocky structure
lying on a piece of flat land near Mount
Judi Iran
and has been inside a recurrent war zone for many decades, making study of the
site difficult. The anomaly was discovered by the Turkish military in 1948 and
was first visited by Ron Wyatt in 1977. It is roughly the size of the Ark
as described in Genesis and has
curved lenticular sides ending in a point at either end, which is an elementary
feature of ship design. However it is heavily eroded and most geologists think
it is nothing more than a curiously-shaped rock. A study with a metal detector
revealed the remains of an iron framework in a regular pattern and nearby
carved slabs were discovered that resemble drogue stones; these are flat stones
with a hole bored through them that were used as ship anchors in ancient times.
These are curious objects to turn up two hundred miles inland. However
researchers soon lost interest in the place after nothing decisive came about
from a full excavation. The drogue stones turned out to be grave stones from an
early Christian cemetery and the iron grid is just minerals deposited from a
volcanic eruption. I'm not surprised that the Durupinar anomaly has been
explained as natural. The thing is, the story of Noah's Ark ,
as it is related, is impossible. There has been a global flood, as I said, when
the last ice age ended, and this caused the sea level to rise three hundred
feet. Vast areas of coastal land were taken by the oceans, but the survivors
didn't need to build boats, they just moved to higher ground and got on with
their lives. At no point in the geological history of the Earth has the entire
planet been submerged by the ocean. If this did happen then all life on land
would be wiped out and once the water receded, aquatic creatures would have to
evolve legs again before things returned to normal. Noah could not possibly have
saved life on land from the flood. His Ark
was far too small for even a handful of animals, let alone the all food, fresh
water and other supplies they would need. The movie Noah gets round this illogicality with a clever plot device: Noah
puts the animals into a deep sleep with magical incense. But
"two-by-two" wouldn't be enough; you'd need several hundred of each
species to restart a breeding population from scratch. Even with the animals
all in a God-decreed mystical coma you'd need a ship the size of London .
And what about the plants, the fungi, the bacteria? It cannot be done. However,
many of these ancient stories are symbolic; I don't think their authors ever
intended them to be taken literally. Could they be a reference to some form of
life preservation measure carried out either by a human mystery school or
extraterrestrials? When serious UFOlogy began in the 1940's, for the first time
those who have had contact with beings from another world were listened to and
taken seriously, if only by a small community of supporters. One of the messages
contactees are often given by their extraterrestrial friends is their concern
for the Earth's environment. They are deeply worried that it is under threat
due to human warfare, toxic waste, radiation etc. They say that they are
harvesting DNA, or other kinds of life essence, from the Earth's biosphere to
preserve it. In this way they're creating a non-genocidal and non-evil equivalent
of Bill Gates' seed vault. It's also not unlike what Noah did with the animals
and humans on the Ark. Could the story of Noah's Ark
have been inspired by an archetypal or subconscious memory of contact with
extraterrestrial beings?
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