Comments Concerning the alleged rebuttal to Amazing Ark Exposé

We were aware of the rebuttal of the Amazing Ark Exposé article in Creation Magazine, but this is the first time that we have actually seen a copy of it. Consequently, we have not prepared a response to it and wouldn’t intend to do so, given that we prefer not to waste valuable time on endless disputations with people who give a pretense of being humble and having integrity.

It is all very convenient to be unable to include the 20 pages of accompanying documentation about their claims, when it is just this documentation that has never been released publicly which is at the heart of the dispute. What we mean by that is that they could silence their critics if they publicly released these documents, but to date they haven't done so, and therefore they have something to hide (that is, the documentation doesn’t really show what they are claiming). Anyway, we have never been given this document before and had the opportunity to reply, but we are amazed how “slippery” the reply is.

The fact of the matter is that the Wyatts keep on dragging out the same worn out and recirculated claims without producing any of the hard evidence.

First regarding other boat-shaped formations in the area. We know nothing about the photo in question being “touched up”, and unless they name the person who did the touch-up work their claim is unverified. Anyone can make such a claim and get away with it. Ron and Mary Wyatt need to produce the person who made the claim of doing the touch-up work for such a comment to be believed. In any case, John Baumgardner admits in the interview they quote from that there are several formations that have a superficially similar shape, which is exactly the point being made about the shapes in the photograph. In any case, what is so deceptive is that they do not admit in this reply that John Baumgardner no longer believes in the site or any of the evidence as being genuine, and he is quite prepared to testify that Ron Wyatt is an outright fraud. To quote John Baumgardner in a favourable light as being in agreement with them is outright deceit. The same is true when they use him to testify that the metal readings were regular instead of random, as we claimed. John Baumgardner’s statement, in any case, is not an outright statement and he would repudiate the tape of the 1985–1986 field investigations that are advertised as being available from David Fasold.

We stand by our comments regarding the supposed molecular frequency generator. There may well be such a device as claimed by Ron and Mary Wyatt, but if it achieved what they claim then every mining company would own hundreds of them. As for the radar scans, we don’t have copies but an original set of the scans that were given by Ron Wyatt to William Shea, who passed them on to us. Producing a copy of a radar permit for 1987 does not prove that radar scans were actually done on the site. This is a smokescreen to try and prove our claim wrong, but we stand by what we have said.

Tom Fenner definitely made that statement, and it is interesting that in Mary Wyatt's response she brings another party in to the controversy, namely, Joe Rosetta, to refute our comment about Tom Fenner. The claimed use of their radar work at this claimed Noah's Ark site in their advertising package is neither here nor there, given that Joe Rosetta did not visit the site whereas Tom Fenner did. Furthermore, Joe Rosetta was involved at an administrative level and therefore has his company's image to protect. Besides, Mary Wyatt admits that GSSI did not conclude the evidence proved it to be Noah’s Ark at all, but that it was definitely indicative of a man-made structure. But how would they know that for sure unless excavations were made? The fact is that they do not claim that Joe Rosetta is a geophysicist or a geologist, yet Tom Fenner is. When we tried to get Tom Fenner to verify his original comment he backed away and Joe Rosetta came into the picture—it makes one rather suspicious.

Nothing in the response goes in any way towards proving the sample to be supposed deck timber. So what if testing has been videotaped - it's the results that count. And less than 1 per cent organic carbon in a rock does not make it petrified deck timber. There can be organic carbon in a lot of rocks for a lot of reasons, not because they are fossilised wood. Even volcanic rock can have organic carbon in it from plant and other material trapped by the lava flows. Basalt is such a lava. In any case, this testing was done six years ago, and still they haven't made public all the thin sections, etc.

We are amazed that the response should quote Baumgardner saying that as a scientist he isn’t going to report to Los Alamos labs something he doesn't know to be fact, which is exactly the point I was making. That is, it is not a fact that Turkish scientists found four foot long metal rods at the site, because Baumgardner can’t verify that is fact. Can the Wyatts really seriously believe that people are going to buy their story when they shoot themselves in the foot like this?

Dr Bayraktutan made the claims directly to us that Wyatt may have even put some of the “evidence” on the site himself. So what if people in their 1990 tour group personally witnessed Ron’s discovery of a claimed fossilised rivet while others in the tour group found other items? It doesn’t negate the possibility that Ron planted those things on the site before the tour group came. Again, this reply does not answer our claims and we stand by them.

What has organic carbon have to do with a fossilised rivet? If it is a metal rivet then metals such as iron would surely be one way of verifying what the object is. A carbon content of less than 2 per cent is hardly definitive about anything, let alone dismissing the sample as mere basalt. The analyses quoted in the response are for carbon and not organic carbon anyway, and carbon can be in basalt in the form of carbonate minerals. The response jumps from analyses for carbon to claims about organic carbon which shows confusion about the two. Can anything the Wyatts say be factual?

The response about the anchor stones is sheer nonsense. Among others, William Shea has seen these claimed anchor stones and published photographs of them years ago in the journal Origins put out by the Geoscience Research Institute attached to Loma Linda University. In fact, William Shea's careful documentation puts paid to all of the claims made on this issue in her response.

We never claimed that what they regarded as basalt was in fact manganese nodules from the sea floor. That is just mere twisting of words. Yes, we did refer to John Morris’s claim about manganese nodules, but the Wyatts have completely misunderstood and distorted what we and John Morris were referring to. It may well be that manganese nodules on the ocean floor today have the characteristics described in the response, claiming the Encyclopædia Britannica as support, but what we and John Morris were referring to is the potential for manganese ore in the basalt on the site as a result of the basalt originally being on the ocean floor and having manganese nodules on it. Being exposed to the weather at the site would upgrade the original nodules by supergene alteration to increase their manganese content. Thus the Wyatt response is far from adequate and does not negate the suggested possibility.

We stand by what we said about the lack of complete Turkish government recognition of the site. To be sure, tourism literature would take an opportunistic approach to entice foreigners to the site by such claims about it being Noah’s Ark. Such Turkish newspaper hype and Turkish tourism literature does not constitute scientific proof about the site. As for highway construction, the road was never to the site but referring to a nearby highway designed to improve transport and communications across the nearby border. It was just fortuitous that the highway goes near the site, and once again the Wyatt claims are totally misleading. Any activity by the local Turkish authorities were only efforts to cash in on the Wyatt claims to make money.

Selective quotation from the Baumgardner and Bayraktutan 1987 report cunningly tries to evade the fact that Baumgardner believes the site is totally disproven. Equally deceitful is the quote from the Baumgardner newsletter in 1988, when there are clear alternative explanations for what was obtained in the drillholes given elsewhere by Baumgardner. Yes, we did make phone calls to Bayraktutan prior to writing the article, and on more than one occasion he asked us to help him with the research effort and we did, including sending him copies of some of the raw seismic data sent to us by John Baumgardner. In any case, the paragraphs in the response on this issue following the quote from the Baumgardner newsletter are not a quote from anyone, but are deceitfully put in the sequence in the response to make it out that these are the comments from Bayraktutan, when there are no quote marks shown or acknowledgement to Bayraktutan for those comments. So one can only conclude that these comments are made by the Wyatts in order to accuse us of bullying and putting pressure on people who once believed that the site was Noah’s Ark. We have done nothing of the kind. It is sheer nonsense to frighten would-be doubters with the claim that scientists and archaeologists would lose their livelihood if they stood by the claim that this was Noah’s Ark. Where’s the evidence that that would be the case? Someone like John Baumgardner, for instance, would have been delighted if the site was in fact Noah’s Ark, and that’s why he was originally involved in the research. When he found that the evidence wasn’t there and he had been deceived by the Wyatts, he has been a firm denouncer since. And he wasn't threatened with any loss of livelihood.

The nonsense about the “gopher wood” is re-hashed verbatim from previous claims. The fact is that no Hebrew expert knows for sure what gopher wood is in modern terminology, so claims about it being laminated wood is sheer nonsense, as is the claim that pieces of fossilised deck planking were found on the site. Remember that an Australian television crew went to the site with Fasold, Ian Plimer and Bayraktutan, and that none of the claimed evidence were found at the site. In fact, when they drilled a metre into the top surface with the cameras rolling they actually came up with pieces of plastic in the drill cuttings. Bayraktutan was made to look like an idiot for seemingly standing by the Wyatt claims, and for once we had to agree with Plimer! Even Fasold had to change his mind in the face of not only lack of evidence, but contrary evidence.

Well, that’s a few quick comments on the Mary Wyatt “response”, such as it is. We hope they are of use to you, but again we don't want to be drawn into this controversy yet again. The fact of the matter is that the Wyatts keep on dragging out the same worn out and recirculated claims without producing any of the hard evidence. We have been through all these claims before, and nothing new has surfaced to change our minds about Wyatt’s lack of integrity and all those associated with him. Remember that we too have a vested interest in finding the Ark.