Word: ark
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jammal had obtained the wood, he unblinkingly told the network audience, during a 1984 search for Noah's ark on snow-covered Mount Ararat in Turkey. With his companion "Vladimir," he had crawled through a hole in the ice into a wooden structure. "We got very excited when we saw part of this room was made into pens, like places where you keep animals," he recalled. "We knew then that we had found the ark!" To prove he had been in the fabled vessel, Jammal hacked out a chunk of wood...
...fact, Jammal is an actor who has been telling versions of this story for years but has never been on Mount Ararat. Vladimir is a fictitious character, and the supposedly venerable hunk of "ark" wood is a piece of contemporary pine Jammal soaked in juices and baked in the oven of his Long Beach, California, home...
...Jammal's tall tale was not the only misleading part of the special. Sun filled the two hours with a mixture of fact, conjecture, fantasy and arrant nonsense, while offering no clues as to which was which. "Eyewitnesses" who claimed to have seen or even touched the ark paraded in front of the camera. Unfortunately, the audience was told, an earthquake, attacks by terrorists, the Russian Revolution and other inopportune events had frustrated various attempts over the years to bring back clear pictures or other definitive proof of the ark's existence...
Actor Darren McGavin, host of the special, called it "an archaeological quest." Indeed, one conventional archaeologist and a few other skeptics were allowed a sentence or two expressing doubt about the reality of the ark and the Deluge. But their views were quickly swept away by another deluge -- of dubious testimony by "experts," many of them creationists who take the Bible's revelations literally and reject much of modern science...
...biblical scholar, was furious after seeing the special. He had been asked to appear in a subsequent Sun International production called Ancient Secrets of the Bible II, which aired on CBS in May. Zindler backed out of his taping appointment and fired off a letter to CBS, calling the ark program "an attempt to show that modern science is wrong and Bronze Age mythology is correct." Earlier, Zindler began having qualms about his interview when he received instructions from Sun International revealing that "most of the pro-con arguments are pre-scripted and are already approved...