0:00 This is going to be streamed live, so no, you can't say, hey, let's skip that, just deflect. Okay, here we go. Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are in the world. This is Strange Normal and a little strange episode as we're doing this early in the morning here on the eastern side of the United States. I'm here with Andrew Jones, who has been on the news quite a bit talking about Noah's Ark and where he is over there in Turkey, working on excavating and looking into what's actually happening there as he's found something very interesting. And so I thought I'd bring him on not only because he's been in the news quite a bit lately, but also because I know him personally. Andrew, good to see you again. Yes, how is life in Tennessee? Good, it's pretty good. If you don't mind, I'm going to give a little background on how I know you. Andrew and I were in California together, and Andrew was a former IT guy, I guess you could say. You're never a former IT guy. We were always IT guys at heart, I guess, but I am too. And so Andrew and I lived in the same area. We never worked together, but we roomed in the same house together before I was married.
1:28 And Andrew became a good friend of mine. He used to go to his Bible studies on Friday night, and he would open his whole house to a portion of the church. So Andrew, wow. Can you give me a little background on what happened since then, and why are you out in Turkey? Yeah, of course. Well, so I think what happened was the pandemic. That's why I'm here. Of course, that's all over. But when I was visiting a friend of mine, I was visiting a friend of mine, and I was owania, trying to stay here. I was in South Africa. And then I was living in buradan, Egypt. And then I found out that, as it turned out, here in 2020, in the February, the pandemic hit, and all the borders started to close. I was about to fly to Saudi Arabia for a tour to what people believe is the real Mount Sinai. And like, two or three days before the tour, Saudi announced that the borders were closing. And so I was Uppity it stopped at Saudi Arabia to South America for a tour to the people believe is the real Mount Sinai. And two or three days later, the borders were closing... out for the tour. And Saudi Arabia announced that the borders were closing. he had actually had a little condo that he had built on his property for me to live in so i thought well it's a good idea and he said we can basically pursue this nose art project that you've been wanting to do and this was six months after we had the science channel filming us here so everything uh was kind of lighting up to continue the scientific work so i decided to make the decision to not go back to california and to stay here and it was a good decision on for the nose art project i enjoyed it uh living out here too i'm here six months out of the year and the other um you know six or five or six months i'm in the middle east israel jordan saudi egypt doing tours and so it's been quite the travel life for me right now i'm single so it's easy to do this and so yeah that's what happened so i'm not stuck here anymore but i'm still here so that's it's good we got a little bit of a delay so i'm gonna i'm gonna try to fill in that gap a little bit but um i i i you're so since you're halfway around the world obviously but being out there in turkey i was just out in the czech republic and i thought man we're so close yet so far away but but i thought you know um being out there in turkey uh you do tours and that's what kind of started this whole thing you go to these different areas what are the areas that you tour uh people to and how do people find out about those tours yeah well through their website or social media uh nose arc scans dot com is our main research site which also has uh our tours listed under the menu uh so what do we do out here we have a three day five day noah's ark tour where we show the the country of urartu this is the ancient kingdom that we get the english word air rat from so you see their castles we even go to one of the traditional martyrdom sites of the apostle bartholomew we see christian churches out here we see we talk about noah's ark of course we see this site we're researching and we see the uh the drogue stones people show here uh we we also see the star of the euphrates river that's on the three and five day tour and then on a 12-day tour we go all the way through southeast turkey to the tigris river the euphrates river where it ends up in northern mesopotamia there we see biblical haran which is a favorite of mine where jacob went and got a wife and isaac's wife and abraham's father tara died uh we see gobekli tepe which is uh in the news a lot this ancient uh settlement cultic site maybe that they say the stone age farmers set up uh so yeah a lot of historical sites through southeast turkey and northern mesopotamia basically and that's on our 12-day tour and those who do want to add on extensions we go to the seven churches we do cappadocia with the underground cities and churches there so it's quite um some
5:27 people even go extra we take them to the hittite kingdom uh capital of hattusha and central turkey so you get a lot of biblical uh countries uh in on these tours uh turkey people don't realize how vast a country it is and how much history is here yeah it's huge and uh do you ever go to um maybe it's not legal but do you ever go to the top of the mountain where they gave the ten commandments god arrested on top of the mountain yeah i have a different website for that discovered sinai.com we do exodus route tours where those can do the if they want to they can do the full route from the lanagosian we see the pyramids uh and then we go through mount sinai or the bensala we even see the traditional mount sinai saint catherine's monastery and the manuscripts there and then we continue down to the crossing we head over into saudi arabia you see the lydian legethro lived and uh one of the proposed mount sinai sites which i think is the best candidate the jubbala laws the jabul makla and then for those we go through jordan we go to petra uh we go up the dead sea you see the dead sea we see uh they say is lot's cave and then we go to mount nebo where moses saw the promised land we go down ascended we see where christ was baptized we even go up on the jordan part of the tour to where jacob wrestled with god and i think that was on the um yeah i'm going to forget the name of the brook but it's up a valley it's a really beautiful area a lot of water and bedouins living there and jordanians uh and then sometimes depending on the interest we go into israel and we do what we call the end of exodus tour we see jericho uh gilgal uh shilo or shiloh and jerusalem and so you get a taste of israel for maybe three days or so uh so if you do a three-week tour we do the whole exodus route the most popular is the mount sinai it's like five days long and then of course our noah's ark tour is which are, we have the three, five and 12 day ones.
7:39 So that keeps me busy in the summer. This year it's been very hectic because I was doing those tours for Turkey, but also part of this, I was the vice president. I'm still the vice president of this research project under C. Voss University. And so I've been dealing with a lot of stuff there. Wow. Wow. So yeah, it does keep you busy. So I'm curious, how did, I mean, you told me how you went out there for the pandemic, but how did you- It looks like there's a delay. I want to switch back. There is quite a bit of a delay. And, but I'll try to fill in, cause I know you only have a little bit of time and we'll try to do our best to fill that in. If you can still hear me, just interrupt me if you can, but how, let's get straight into Noah's Ark instead of, cause I have questions about your past and filling the gaps in my head, but my audience doesn't probably care about that.
8:31 What is going on with the Noah's Ark thing? You, I don't know, I don't know. You have a drill bit that broke down, obviously. I don't want to, I don't want to say the same things that the news is saying over and over again. I want to know a little bit more about some details that maybe they don't have. And so we might have a little bit of delay here, but I want you to go ahead and tell me a little briefly what's going on and what happened. We might have dropped him. Oh, is this better? I switched to wifi. Yeah. Yeah. I can hear you now. Yeah. The hotel wifi I knew would do that. I'm sorry. Well, I was just saying, tell us about the Noah's Ark. What's going on out there. Yeah. So this year we were able to partner up with a local Turkish university, Sivas Cumhurate University.
9:27 And I met this professor through an acquaintance who I met in Cairo of all places. A friend of mine was having a dinner with this young lady and she was an archeologist or a student of mine. She was a professor of archeology from Turkey. And she spoke English. And so then we connected on Instagram. And from there, she was following my stories. At the start of this year, she asked me if I had a project put together for Noah's Ark. And I said, well, we're looking for the permits. We had to go through a Turkish university, a professor. And she said, she knew a professor who had an open schedule this summer and maybe you could work with me on this. So I contacted this professor, Dr. Janker Atilla, who is peer-reviewed, published, 25 plus years in the field. And he spoke English. And so we connected over WhatsApp and then finally we meet.
10:17 And he said, basically, I can get you the permits. And so he asked me, what do you want to do? And I said, well, so I thought I'll just strike while the iron's hot. I think this guy could do it. So I just threw everything I could. You know, not archeological dig. This is a geological, geophysical permit. But I threw in drilling down 75 meters. Soil sampling, different geophysical survey techniques. These are a way to peer below the surface and like scan the earth, non-destructive. And so based on that, he submitted it to the Turkish government authorities, who are the committee that approves this type of project. And they unanimously voted yes in the May. So we were so excited. It was seven to zero and they didn't even change anything. They're like, okay, you can't do this or that. They did question on the 75 meter drilling. This was an online meeting that he did with them.
11:10 And they asked him a question about that, but thankfully he had a great answer and why we wanted to go that deep. And they approved it within two weeks after that. End of May, we get the permit. And then we were scrambling, you know, year after year, we're trying to do this. And now it's all, we have a permit. So we need to find the foreign scientists we want to work with, the Turkish team, the funding, obviously, to get it all paid for. And the logistics, find out the vendors, the hotels, we're going to stay at the restaurants to negotiate good deals with these guys here in the town I live in. Transportation, yeah, everything. Security, you know, it was a one month of, and we just basically was playing catch up throughout the whole summer. And even after the field work just finished two weeks ago or a week and a half ago, it feels like it's never ending because of the media interest now.
11:59 So that's been the busy summer. Now I'll briefly tell you what we did. So in July, we brought in a Turkish professional survey team that made a, they mapped out the whole site, very highly accurate, you know, you think better than Google type map, subcentimeter accuracy, flew the drone over it, took 4,000 photographs, put them all together to make a highly accurate 3D model, to make an ortho map, so they can, a flat map that's rectified, and then they can underlay or overlay our data. They put in eight ground control points that are permanent. At each point, they had their professional GPS station running for two to three hours. So it's getting an exact GPS data from three or four different satellite networks or systems, I should say, the US, Russian, Chinese ones. Then from that, in 1st of August, the next team came in. This was Dr. Khosrow Bukhtar, who is American, originally from Iran, but as a kid, his parents shipped him to the UK. He got his initial education there, and then he moved to America and got his PhDs and masters and, you know, peer reviewed 200 plus papers military scientists, a rock engineer slash, I don't know what else, because he was on the team that modeled, he was in charge of the team that modeled the mother of all bombs, the Moab, our biggest bomb in the non-nuclear inventory.
13:21 He invented new cement for the US military. So when missiles come down and try to blow up our underground bunkers, the walls stay perfect. Yeah, this guy is amazing. He's an older general now, but he contacted us. And I'm going fast here, because I know, I have a short time. So he contacted us in April. What happened, a friend of his saw my interview on, I think it was GB News or OAN. And this friend contacted him and said, hey, weren't you also involved with the Nozark project, like 2005 or something? And this was the Finding Noah film that's out there where they're looking on air rats. He was advised not to participate. And some of the scientists that did participate got banned from Turkey because they did, according to the locals, they did not have a permit. So it was kind of a good thing. He didn't show up on that expedition looking for the ark on the top of the mountain and the glaciers.
14:12 But his friend remembered that episode. And they asked him if he could contact me. And so he emailed me. And I thought, oh, this is interesting. This scientist with all these degrees is interested in our project. And he claimed he had this type of radar that could see hundreds of feet below the ground, high resolution. Our traditional radar we used in 2019 with the Science Channel filming, that one, we got down 13. 13 meters, or 40 feet. That's like the bare minimum, or the maximum. We couldn't get any deeper. And the resolution at that depth, you're seeing blurry things. And so this guy is saying, look, I can get you a high resolution scan of that site. Very expensive proposal. And he was building this brand new antenna, 2 meters long, 6 feet long, that we would need a garden tractor to pull across the ark site.
15:02 So I had to go purchase a garden tractor. And so anyway, he said, well, I'm going to go. And he brought out his ex-military team to work with him out here. And in August, they had him and the two other guys, the Turkish archaeologists, and myself, and a couple helpers. We were here scanning the site for almost a whole week. Now, right away, he was telling us that he was getting data down to 95 meters, so a lot deeper than 13 meters. 95 meters is over 300 feet. In some locations, he was getting that. Other locations, he was definitely going. The deepest anyone has ever gone, like the 2014 ERT scans on our site done by John Larson, New Zealand, they went down. He was getting data at 30 to 38 meters, I think, or maybe close to 40. But this was like broad information, less resolution.
15:53 So you can't make out finite details at that depth with ERT. Bukhtar's radar, and he's based in Southern California, but this radar that he has used to find illegal tunnels 100 feet down on the Mexican-American border for the U.S. government, he's used with the U.S. Navy in water. So it doesn't work only on land. It works in water. He has found underwater mines in the Navy tests. He was able to scan and find nuclear material as a test. He got samples of material from the military. He scanned it, and he could find it. He could pinpoint it in different packages. So you can think of the implications. Why they're wanting to test for stuff like that. But anyways, this system, he applies it to Noah's Ark. Now, the preliminary results came out a couple of days ago.
16:44 And what we're seeing below the ground, or what he's seen, he says there's a whole pattern of anomalies. And this is what they call it if they're a geophysicist. Because, again, you're scanning. It's kind of like going to the hospital, and they see something on your chest or in your lungs. They don't call it an anomaly. They call it something else. But they have to get a biopsy, right? They've got to get a sample of that material to determine if it's cancerous or something. Same thing with this. So he's scanning it, and you're seeing high resolution these hot spots with really intense intensity. And he's masking out the surrounding soil so you're not dealing with the regular dirt there. And so that's why he said this is not geological. And he's never, and this is the quote from the PR piece, he says he's never in his 40-year career doing this, seen something like this.
17:38 He can't identify the material yet. That's why we need to sample it and get in there. But he said that it's either Noah's Ark or a spaceship. So that should be interesting to your audience. So I don't know what his beliefs are. So we have a ship shape. And we're getting these different areas of the ship where you're seeing layering. You're seeing right angles. You're seeing backfilled, probably, voids and a series of cavities. You can say what you want. Rooms on Noah's Ark or whatever. And then we scan from the outside to the inside of the boat with the radar in some places. And you don't see those same layers at the same depth across the inside, outside. So outside is different, which is really key. So the biggest thing out of that besides, of course, it's very exciting to see possible something that could belong to Noah's Ark. And these are at the same depths that are matching the ERT scans that were done in 2014.
18:34 These really deep scans. I started comparing this yesterday, the data. I was like, oh, wow, this is matching Larson's, some of his theories and scan results. But the biggest thing besides that is that he did not see bedrock. He did not see solid mass of rock. If you look on the internet or Facebook, all the comments, people claim it's a syncline of folded rock. They claim this is bedrock sticking up in the valley and mud just went around it. They claim it's a solid rock that came from above. On the mountainside, it rolled down to this place and then glaciers over millions of years carved into a boat shape. Those are the three or four main theories that are natural explanations for the site. Anything that deals with a rock, we have not seen with the scans or the core drilling. So then last month, September, we brought in the core machine and we drilled down in 12 locations inside, four locations outside, and we went down to 20 meters or 60 plus feet.
19:31 Some of those locations did not hit bedrock. They did not hit a solid limestone block under the surface there. So some of these theories will have to be revised. Two of them are peer-reviewed published papers by a PhD geologist. So they would have to change that or retract it. I doubt they will. But this is just the initial. We haven't even tested our soil samples, and we were hitting rich, dark, organic layers of material that we need to test to see what those are. Yeah, so we're very excited. We had Bear Grylls out here filming for a 90-minute Noah's Ark film. It was a busy week with the core drilling. We had Angel Studio out here. And then, of course, the news hit. And then now every day there's like four or five interviews being done talking about it. And soon, the professor, by October 15, 16, is the Noah's Ark Symposium, which is held every two to three years at the local university.
20:26 Noah's Ark scans, we support them. I've given papers there. This year, I'm not giving a paper, but some of our team members are. The professor will be giving a paper, and he has some surprises, he said. He won't even tell me, because he's probably just scared it'll be put on Facebook. But yeah, so we're hoping for some more news. This story will keep growing, I believe. And obviously, we didn't start it. I really believe that God has just like the perfect timing for everything because the way it went so viral that my whole news feeds are just about Noah's Ark. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just told you the other day, we've been talking, at least, once every week or every two weeks, I message you because we just keep in contact. But Andrew, I just told you the other day, you're the most famous person I know right now because you're in everything, every news feed. In fact, tell us where you're going right now because I've got to let you go because it's past time, and you've got to go do another interview. Where are you going now? Back to the Noah's Ark site.
21:25 So I'm 30 minutes away. Okay. Plus, I have to bring some supplies up there. It's okay, but yeah. So it's up there. It's perfect. I was going to do our interview up there, but it was kind of a rushed morning. Yeah, I get it. I get it. It's a perfect fall day here with partly cloudy skies, kind of cold temperatures. But this is where I spend six months, seven months out of the year is in this region here. You can see Mount Ararat around the corner. Most of the time, it's covered in cloud, but some days you have this perfect peak of the volcano. And of course, you have people always climbing, looking for the Ark up there or just climbing it for fun. But yeah, we're very excited. Season two is coming up next July. This is not going to be like, what do they call it? What's that TV show where they never find an answer? Oak Island or whatever? Ancient Aliens. Yeah, another version of Oak Island or whatever it's called that we'll just always be studying it and never get a definite answer.
22:25 I really think we'll have definite answers. Yeah. We just had the governor at the site and he put his full force of support behind us for next year. And the project will be bigger next year. So we have other surprises coming up dealing with archaeology in the region and right beside the site. That's very exciting. Plus continuing our scans and surveys and other types of techniques. We've had professors from other countries contact us with new type of technology that can scan, including the one professor from Israel. She's involved with looking for the Ark of the Covenant in Qumran. And they're using what was used at the pyramids called the muon, these muon particles from outer space where you let the device or scanner sit there for months on end and it's collecting this data that can show voids.
23:18 And so I know some of the people involved with that effort and they put me in contact with this lady and she contacted me and said, okay, this is what we can do for your project. Let's talk more over the winter. So who knows what will end up getting approved. We still have to make sure it's all approved by the Turks. So yeah, it's very exciting times we're living in and there's a lot going on. We're just happy to share with you guys some of these details. Very cool. And you answered my last question for you, which was when are you going to find the Ten Commandments for us? And I was sure you were going to find that. Well, there are many groups. Ron White claimed he already found it. There are others looking in Qumran. I have a friend from Israel even looking in Ethiopia. So one ARC is enough for me, so I'll let those guys find it.
24:10 You know, it's funny. We had this American company, I think they're fine with me naming them, Carlson, and they make a GNSS. It's the survey GPS equipment. And they brought out their whole team, not the whole team, but they brought out specific teams from Europe and America to help us. And they even donated their, they don't like me calling it, but they call it the snake camera. I don't want to call it a sewer camera, but their official brand is CALS, C-A-L-S. And this system was used to find, maybe this is a political sensitive topic, but they used it in Israel to find in Gaza, the Hamas tunnels. The military hired the company. They used it mainly for mining, but military purposes too. What it does, it goes down a borehole. You bore down to where you think there are tunnels. And then the camera goes in. It's not very big. It goes in and at the end, the head can turn at a right angle and it can go 360 degrees.
25:09 And it has mainly not the camera system, but it has scientific equipment on it that can then, like LiDAR, for example, that can then make a 3D map of the object, which you can then export. You can put it into like our base map we got created that can become a layer below the ground, showing the voids, if we scan it with a void. And also what it does, it can give you exact place on planet Earth, GPS wise, subcentimeter accuracy of where that is, which is very key if you're doing scientific or mining or whatever, or military purposes. And so they brought their latest beta model, plus the one they sell right now. They brought two models out to use at the site. So they measured all our boreholes. So the 12 we did inside, they stuck the camera down. So now we have the exact depth. We have images from the sides. We can show some of the changes if there's any in the material that we cored through.
26:05 We did hit a couple of voids. One was mud and water filled. We sampled the mud, but it was very difficult for them to use the camera in it. But at any rate, when these friends in Israel contacted me and asked that if I knew someone who could combine all their data, their cloud data, their LiDAR, photogrammetry, GPR, everything they're collecting themselves at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, now they're looking for the Ark of the Covenant. So I said, yeah, this company that just came out here, they're letting us use their software for free. And so I told the company, I said, yeah, you guys can become known as the company that found both Arks. That's right. They're going to be involved in both Arks. But it's very exciting because of the news. My email inbox every morning, I wake up and spend two hours replying to emails. Some are volunteers or people interested on tours. But then you also have scientists saying, hey, I have this new technology or I have this and that. We would like to help you next year. So who knows what will happen?
27:10 Wow, praise the Lord. That's awesome. Well, Andrew Jones, thank you so much. I know you got to run back to the Ark site and do another interview, so I'm not going to keep you any longer. But keep in contact. We'll do something when things slow down for you. Thank you. Yeah, let's do it. It'll be in the winter probably, and I'll probably be in Egypt. So we can do it in front of the pyramids. All right. Yeah, absolutely. All right, man. Take care and I'll see you later. Yeah, God bless. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. All right, folks. Thank you so much for hanging in there. We'll talk later. I'm going to definitely have Andrew Jones back on and we'll see what the update is when he gets his core samples back and of all the dirt that's coming up. I'm curious to see you that day. That elephant dung comes up from the bottom of the ground. We'll see what happens with those rich soil samples. Take care, folks. Bye-bye.