Examining the Mysteries of the Holy Arks (Full Episode) | EASTER SPECIAL | National Geographic

NARRATOR: From the Bible, two stories about very different arks. One burning question. GRAHAM: I wonder if that object really existed? JAMES: I believe the Ark of the Covenant was a real object, because the Book of Exodus takes great effort to give us the dimensions. PORCHER: There really might be a ship up on Mt. Ararat and it might be the remains of Noah's ark." NARRATOR: Are the arks of the Bible fact or fiction? ERIC: There is nothing, absolutely nothing to which you can point and say, "See? Look, the ark existed." FAROUK: I believe that things like that could have happened, and I also believe that none of these stories comes out of thin air. NARRATOR: The story of a man and a boat and a flood first appears in the Middle East, the same part of the world that gave birth to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It's told in both the Bible and the Quran, the account of a catastrophic event that happened very early in human history, not too long after the creation. MAN: And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were upon the Earth. And the rain was upon the Earth 40 days and 40 nights. NARRATOR: But how seriously should we take the story of Noah and his ark? Did it happen the way the Bible tells us it did? ERIC: Was there really a worldwide flood? I doubt it. I don't see any evidence in the geology or anything else for a worldwide catastrophe. -God's word can be taken literally. And in the beginning, God created in six days means he created it in six literal, 24-hour days. WADE: I believe the story about the flood. Now, if you ask me, do I believe that there was a 450-foot-long ark with all the animals of the Earth, you know, crammed inside of it, I, you know, I have a little, I, specifically, probably no. NARRATOR: The story of Noah and the flood is told in the Book of Genesis-an account of the origins of the Earth and man. The Bible says the descendants of Adam and Eve lost sight of why God put them on the Earth and fell into wicked ways. So God decided to do something about it. Everyone and everything was going to die, except Noah and his family. But can the story be taken literally? According to the Bible Noah received God's instructions about how he and his family were going to survive. God told Noah to build a boat. A very big boat. An ark. And the instructions were quite specific. MAN: The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits, the breadth of it 50 cubits, and the height of it 30 cubits. NARRATOR: A cubit is the length of a man's arm from elbow to fingertips, about a foot and a half. So, if the Bible's dimensions are correct, it would have been the largest wooden vessel in the history of the world, the original manmade wonder. And some people apparently believe it's still out there, somewhere, waiting to be found. In the past 100 years or so, ark hunters have descended on the Middle East and climbed various mountains, looking for the peak the ark might have settled on. The Bible isn't precise about the location. We're only told the ark came to rest on the mountains, plural, of Ararat. Ararat was a region, an ancient kingdom called Urartu. Mt. Ararat, that's singular, in eastern Turkey, wasn't named until centuries after the kingdom disappeared. The story has its doubters... ERIC: If somebody does claim to find the ark, it will be a hoax. I'll be very, very surprised if anybody ever finds Noah's ark. NARRATOR: And there are the believers. Porcher Taylor came up with a unique approach to the location mystery after hearing an interesting rumor when he was a West Point cadet. -In 1973, I was on the debate team at the academy and one day one of my colleagues on the debate team said, "Did you hear about the rumor ricocheting off the walls here that one of our space-based birds accidentally turned its cameras on too early flying over Mt. Ararat coming up on the Soviet Union, and the image would appear to be a bow of a ship sticking out of a glacier?" And I said, "Geez, there really might NARRATOR: The CIA called it "the Ararat anomaly." It took years, but in 1999 Taylor finally managed to get the photo declassified and convinced a remote-imaging company to point its hi-resolution Ikonos satellite at the boat-like shape. Taylor liked what he saw. Then in 2003, new satellite technology gave him even finer resolution. PORCHER: Here, for the first time ever, we really see that this is very much a shipshape, boat-shaped structure from end to end. It's 1,015 feet long. Now what about width? Roughly, 160 feet. Is there any significance to that? Yes, there is. The Genesis blueprint is six to one, length to width ratio, 300 cubits by 50 cubits. Our ship shape structure here is right in the ballpark of about a six to one, length to width ratio. We might really be on the verge of seeing something of biblical proportions on Mt. Ararat. NARRATOR: Taylor decided to show the pictures to some outside experts-including geologist Farouk El-Baz, a pioneer in interpreting satellite imagery. FAROUK: When I first got the Ikonos images, I knew that we'd be looking at something that's very different from the images that we had in the past. And that particular image was actually fascinating. We had a scene that's completely covered by snow, and then in one corner, there is a vertical ledge, something that is very peculiar, doesn't fit the general scheme. NARRATOR: But a closer more critical look reveals something else. FAROUK: The more I looked at it, the more I was convinced that it really is just a ledge of rock. The rest of the area around it is covered by snow and that little vertical face is not covered by snow because it stands up like that and therefore it is just a normal event, a normal structure. Nothing peculiar, nothing manmade. NARRATOR: For the moment, at least, Porcher Taylor is inclined to accept Dr. El-Baz's findings. PORCHER: It's not definitive as to what the anomaly might be. Based on the evidence so far, Dr. El-Baz is probably correct that this is not a manmade structure. NARRATOR: So are the ark hunters combing the mountains for a boat that might not even exist? Could Noah have even built a boat that big? Some modern shipbuilding experts have their doubts. PETER: Noah's project is pretty unbelievable, as far as the size, 450 feet dimensions and 75 feet wide. Being a boat builder, that would be a glacial task. How does it look, Don? Don: Just need one here. Looks good. NARRATOR: At the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard in Maine, it takes a 12-man crew about a year to build a wooden boat with a 60-foot keel. If a boat this big is possible, could such a gigantic vessel survive a mighty storm and a flood? PETER: In big seas, a big boat gets working and twisting, and it can break in half. Noah's boat could have withstood a moderate storm. I wouldn't say it would survive a catastrophic storm, boats can't even survive those now. NARRATOR: So what about the storm and flood the Bible talks about? Is there any evidence that can confirm the biblical account? The Bible tells us that the water rose a distance of 15 cubits, or about 22 feet, until it covered the land, even the highest hills. Over the years, different theories have been advanced by creationists to explain how Noah's flood happened. One theory holds that on the third day of creation, when God created the sky and separated the seas from the land, some water got trapped under layers of Earth. Under pressure, the water finally burst forth. Another popular theory was proposed in the 1960s by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb. They believed that prior to the flood a canopy of water vapor existed over the atmosphere. The flood waters were brought on when this canopy of vapor somehow collapsed through an unknown mechanism. Creationists say this water vapor canopy gave us a source for at least half the water that was needed for the flood. Another theory of where the flood waters came from has been developed by Bruce Masse, an archaeologist working at the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico. He thinks the flood may have been caused by something from outer space. Something depicted in Native American petroglyphs. According to Masse, it's likely that these horned serpents are depictions of something the rock carvers saw in the sky, something unusual, something the ancients associated with disaster. NARRATOR: A comet lands on Earth, and causes the biblical Great Flood. It's a theory believed by archeologist Dr. Bruce Masse. BRUCE: Based on the mythology, it's very clear to me that we are looking at a comet hitting the ocean somewhere as the basis for the Great Flood. NARRATOR: He's identified a possible impact site 900 miles southeast of Madagascar. The scenario is not that far-fetched. A comet about two miles wide enters the solar system and takes dead aim at Earth. It plunges through the atmosphere at over 100,000 miles an hour and strikes water. That's when all hell breaks loose. BRUCE: It would have shot a volume of water up, maybe nine or tens times the mass of the comet itself, up through the atmosphere. NARRATOR: Such an impact would have the energy of 10 million megatons of TNT, 500 million times the energy released in the bomb that hit Nagasaki. It would eject excess water vapor into the atmosphere causing catastrophic rain for six or seven days. A massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean hitting the coasts 1500 miles away, with waves over 600 feet high and cyclonic storms happening across Earth. Water falling out of the sky would combine with the ocean storms to create catastrophic hurricanes. BRUCE: What my data tell me are that May 10th, 2807 B.C., there was actually a comet that hit the Earth. There's no question in my mind that it relates to the myths surrounding a great flood, worldwide, including Noah's flood. NARRATOR: Masse's theory is a radical one, and he knows astronomers are dubious. But mainstream geologists can't rule it out. They see the evidence of impacts all over the Earth. FAROUK: This is actually the most plausible of all theories. The fact that it would have been possibly caused by a comet's encounter with Earth. We know that these things happen. We know that there are large craters formed because of meteorites and comet impacts on Earth. NARRATOR: The Earth has been catastrophically hit since its creation, bombarded by asteroids and meteorites. One impact probably caused the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And impacts still happen today. At least that's what most geologists believe. But not those who regard the Bible as supreme authority. Tom Vail is part of a movement that's challenging the scientific orthodoxy that the Earth is billions of years old. To Vail, the Grand Canyon is a laboratory that proves Earth was created in the last few thousand years, and then blanketed by a worldwide flood. And the evidence is in the rocks. TOM: The Grand Canyon exposes more sedimentary layers than I think anywhere else in the world. And we see here lots of evidence that points to the fact that the canyon was carved catastrophically. The tepete sandstone was laid down horizontally, but right at the fault line, it turns vertical. NARRATOR: To Vail, the folds in the layers of sediment are a dead giveaway that they were wet and malleable when they were bent. TOM: If this material was hard rock at the time, then it would have cracked. But being flood deposits, this material would have still been moist, so when the shifting of the fault happens, the sandstone is still somewhat fluid, and it can move and shift, and create this folding. NARRATOR: Vail's theory is not widely accepted in the scientific community. But there is one thing the creationists and the evolutionists agree on; that the canyon was carved by water. ALAN: The fact that the rocks of the Grand Canyon are largely laid down by water doesn't mean that the entire planet at some point in its history was covered by a giant flood. TOM: All the evidence that we see here in the Grand Canyon, if you look at it with an open mind, points to a global flood. This was the flood of Noah's day. ERIC: It's absolutely ridiculous to suggest that the Grand Canyon was caused by a global flood. The Bible is not a history book. It's not a geology textbook. WADE: The Bible is like a person and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say. But it's not a science book. NARRATOR: In the Bible story, Noah can see nothing but water once the storms abate. MAN: And it came to pass at the end of 40 days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made. NARRATOR: Noah sent a dove to scout the Earth three different times. The third time, the dove didn't return so Noah knew the Earth was now safe for habitation. And if the Bible story is right, Noah stepped off the ark onto land he'd never seen before. But where? NARRATOR: In 1996, two geologists were working off the coast of Turkey in one of the most mysterious bodies of water in the world. A huge saltwater sea, more than 700 miles across from east to west. The Black Sea. Bill Ryan and Walter Pittman were mapping the Black Sea's underwater topography when they noticed something curious. Beaches hundreds of feet below the surface. That meant that water levels had been much lower in the past. BILL: We found a whole number of beaches, because, as the water body shrank under evaporation in the very arid conditions of the Ice Age, it would leave old shorelines like bathtub rings. So we found them at 90 meters, 110 meters. Our deepest shoreline was amazing, it was 156 meters. NARRATOR: Core samples of the seabed showed that at some point in its history, the Black Sea had been a freshwater lake. The core samples also showed an abrupt transition from freshwater clams to the marine kind. And carbon dating provided a date. BILL: The results were stunning. The marine mollusks all seemed to have appeared at all depths in the Black Sea at the same time, 7,600 years ago. So something big had happened there. NARRATOR: What happened was a flood, of biblical proportions. And it probably happened because of global warming. At the end of the last Ice Age, millions of tons of water were locked up in polar ice. But as glaciers retreated, and polar ice melted, sea levels rose. That included the Mediterranean. Its rising waters looked for a place to go and found it on the other side of a thin isthmus of land, where a huge freshwater lake sat waiting in low-lying ground. That could only mean one thing. The law of gravity was about to take over. Water from the Mediterranean started to cut a channel through the Bosporus, seeking lower ground. Once the channel was established, the pent-up waters in the Mediterranean broke through, wiping out everything in its path. WALTER: As it cut, it made a channel that was progressively deeper and deeper and deeper, and the deeper it got, the faster it flowed. And it probably took, I would estimate, anywhere from 30 to 90 days to cut a full-fledged roaring flume. NARRATOR: Was anyone around to experience such an Earth-shattering event? Archeologist Fred Hiebert thinks the answer is yes. FRED: Back about 10,000 years ago, when there was no Bosporus and the Black Sea was still a freshwater lake, its level was hundreds of feet lower than it is today. NARRATOR: That means a huge area around it would have been dry land. FRED: It would have been wonderful areas for either hunter-gatherers or early agriculturists to live. There's no reason that people wouldn't have lived there. NARRATOR: Those Neolithic people would have experienced something almost incomprehensible to them. One sea emptying into another through a gap several miles wide. WALTER: What the people would have detected is the noise. The ground probably would have shaken. And that they probably would have felt for 100, maybe 200 kilometers. An incredible amount of energy was being released, just an incredible amount of energy. NARRATOR: As the water surged through the Bosporus at 60 miles an hour, it unleashed a volume of water 200 times that of Niagara Falls. Anyone living within a few miles of the Bosporus would have been swept away. And those at a greater distance would have seen their world transformed by a flow of water that seemed endless. If Ryan's and Pittman's hypothesis is correct, nearly 5,000 years passed between the time of the Great Flood, and the time the distant memories of it would have been written down. FAROUK: It certainly would have been a devastating flood that would have covered everything and everywhere. And is probably the cause for the legends of the floods. NARRATOR: Such a catastrophic event would seem like it was encompassing the whole world. People would have taken the stories with them as they migrated. And those stories, perhaps, became the Mesopotamian flood legends, the epic of Gilgamesh and eventually the story of Noah. FAROUK: It must have been a flood, a very large one. Not necessarily one that would cover the whole Earth, but that covers the vast majority of the land they knew about then. NARRATOR: And in the hands of the ancient Israelites, the story would have inevitably acquired a moral dimension. In the Bible, the story ends with a show of gratitude from Noah and a promise from God to never again curse Earth and its inhabitants. And so the story of Noah and his ark gets passed on from one generation to the next, just as it's been done for the last few thousand years. Everyone gets to have his own interpretation about who he was, and what the story means. FAROUK: I believe that things like that could have happened. And I also believe that WADE: It's a story that helps us to make sense out of our human experience, and that's why it's still powerful. TOM: The Bible can be trusted right from the very first of Genesis all the way through Revelation. And, you know, it starts off with truth and it ends with truth. FAROUK: Whether or not we have scientific evidence for it, that's okay, because we can believe in it emotionally. NARRATOR: In the end, the story of Noah and his ark and a flood lives on for a reason. WADE: It speaks to us. If it ceased to speak, we would cease to listen. NARRATOR: But we do listen. And from the Old Testament comes another story about a very different ark. This one with mysterious and dangerous powers. NARRATOR: Jerusalem. A city perhaps too sacred to too many. At its heart lies a hill called Mount Moriah. Now the site of the magnificent Dome of the Rock. From here, Muhammed ascended to heaven, and Muslims revere it. Before that, Jesus healed the blind and the sick here. And so the Christians call it holy ground as well. But 1,000 years before that, Solomon built the original temple on this mount to house the mysterious object called the Ark of the Covenant then the centerpiece of the Jewish religion. The story of the ark begins more than 3,000 years ago. One man has led some two million people into the Sinai Desert, and they grow restless and short-tempered. He could use some divine intervention on a most spectacular scale. And he's about to get it. The man, of course, is Moses, leading his people out of enslavement in Egypt, according to the Old Testament. Three months of wanderings after the parting of the Red Sea have brought the Israelites to Mount Sinai. God is about to bestow a gift upon humanity unlike anything it has seen before. Of the hundreds of laws contained in the Old Testament, all seem to be handed down from somewhere. But not the ten astonishing laws Moses brought down from the mountain. ERIC: The Ten Commandments are unique. They are not only original, but they are unique. For example, if you look at Hammurabi's law code. He's got all kinds of laws in there, including an eye for and eye, a tooth for a tooth, which shows up in the Bible about 1,000 years later. NARRATOR: Moses also came down with a divine blueprint for something to carry them in. The Ark of the Covenant. God's blueprint for the ark was exceedingly specific. It was to be a portable wooden chest, about 4 feet long, by 2 feet wide, by 2 feet high, made of an extremely resilient wood called acacia, and plated inside and out with pure gold. At the corners of the ark there would be four gold rings into which gold-plated poles could be inserted for carrying the ark. Its lid, God's footstool, would be pure gold with golden winged angels called cherubim at each end facing each other. The ark served as Moses' direct line to God. How exactly, the Bible does not make clear. It seems a brilliant cloud would appear just above the golden lid, between the cherubim, when God had something to pass on to his people. Only priests of the tribe of Levi could carry it, God commanded. No one, not even the Levite priests, could look upon it. So they covered it in blue cloth and animal skins at all times. From the first, the ark revealed a dangerous side. Within days, two of Moses' nephews tried to make an offering before the ark and were promptly incinerated. Legend has it that the cherubim sparked incessantly, charring nearby people and objects. And with the ark leading them in 40 years of wanderings and battles, the Israelites conquered the Promised Land. ERIC: It was an object of unspeakable power, and unspeakable importance. According to the stories that we get in the Hebrew Bible, the ark was carried at the front of the army in virtually every battle. Every battle that took place during the Israelite conquest of the Land of Canaan. (trumpets) NARRATOR: The ark's first and most famous military triumph: The felling of the walls of Jericho. The Levite priests in charge of transporting the ark carried it around the walled city once a day for six days. On the seventh day, they circled seven times and ordered the trumpets to blow. And the walls famously crumbled. 300 years later, the ark abandoned the Israelites with devastating effect. When the high priests ignored their sacrificial obligations to the ark, it failed to protect them in a great battle against the Philistines. 30,000 Israelites died, and the Philistines took the ark. Seven months later, the Philistines sent it back. Plagues of tumors and rats had broken out in the ark's wake. Eventually under King David, the Israelites managed to defeat the Philistines and take a last stronghold of opposition. The city of Jerusalem, which he would make his capital. God spoke to David and told him that a temple must be built to house the ark. But it would fall to his son, Solomon, to do the building. The site: Mount Moriah, the highest point in the city and the place where legend had it that Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. Solomon placed the ark at the center of the temple, its Holy of Holies, after checking that it still contained the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Thereafter, only the high priest could approach the Holy of Holies and would have to enter the windowless room burning incense to protect himself from the brilliance of the presence of the lord. And there the ark stayed, mentioned again in the Old Testament, but never as a weapon or a communication device. Eventually, references to it cease altogether. An almost unimaginable lapse. And now we are left with what many scholars have called the greatest riddle of the Old Testament. One thing is clear. Only a crisis of catastrophic proportions, internal or external, could have driven the ark from the Holy of Holies. NARRATOR: Here is the critical hope for virtually all who believe the ark still exists somewhere in the world. Somebody was sharp enough to smuggle the ark out of the temple between its last mention in the Bible around 620 B.C., and the Babylonian destruction of the temple about three decades later. The ground under Jerusalem, especially under the Temple Mount, is riddled with networks of caverns and tunnels. Some have suggested that the priests hid the ark under the mount. And there is a passage in the Talmud saying the ark was hidden "in its place", wherever that might be. This is where most ark hunters, including the famous Knights Templar, have concentrated their efforts, apparently without results. Another favorite site is Mount Nebo in Jordan, since one passage in the Old Testament has Jeremiah hiding it there. Still others think the ark is somewhere here, in one of the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Revelation, imagination, hallucination. People have found reasons to look for the ark as far away as Ireland, Japan, Ethiopia, and Utah in the U.S. Tangled webs of intrigue. Clues left in church windows. The writings of ancient knights. All have sent people across the globe in search of the ark. Including journalist Graham Phillips. GRAHAM: The reason I decided to go in search of the ark, to be quite honest, is because I saw the film Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I thought, "I wonder if that object really existed?" NARRATOR: Phillips' first stop in his quest to find the ark was the Shara Mountains in Jordan. Here, according to a local Bedouin legend, arrived a group of men on horseback. They called themselves the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. The Knights Templar claimed to be in the Holy Land to ensure the safety of European pilgrims headed toward Jerusalem after it was taken from the Muslims. But it seems there was more. They were in search of treasure. GRAHAM: They claimed to have found what they describe as biblical treasures. A golden chest. What this golden chest was is not described. I couldn't help but wonder if these Knights Templars had in fact discovered the Ark of the Covenant itself. NARRATOR: We do know that the English Knights Templar did indeed return to England as wealthy men. Could the Ark of the Covenant have been among the treasures they brought home? Here's where things get complicated. Phillips found himself chasing a dizzying series of supposed clues left in churches to where the Knights Templar hid their treasure. Church number one. Temple Herdewyke. In an old village record, Phillips found an entry for 1192 concerning sacred artifacts. GRAHAM: Whatever they brought back, it was fairly impressive, because they built a chapel at Temple Herdewyke to contain what are described in the old records as "sacred relics." NARRATOR: But today, Temple Herdewyke is a private residence, with no sign of relics. That brings us to church number two. All Saints Church in nearby Burton Dassett. There's no record of this being a Templar church. But there are these strange murals found during renovations, including a man holding a severed head. The Knights Templar reputedly revered the severed head of John the Baptist. And Phillips discovered a local legend to go with these murals. Supposedly, an amateur historian named Jacob Cove-Jones deciphered their meaning more than a century ago. Then he re-encoded the clues in a stained-glass window in yet another church. This little church in Langley. The code window is called the Epiphany Window. GRAHAM: It didn't take me long to realize that there was some rather peculiar imagery in the picture. The window depicts the famous story of the three wise men visiting Jesus with the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. What is it about the three wise men that was important? Well, in the Bible, the three wise men had to search for something, the birthplace of the baby Jesus. And they found it by following a star. This star is depicted here, but it does seem to be two stars, one on top of another. Now, two stars are associated with the Ark of the Covenant. The two angels that are depicted on its lid are traditionally supposed to be Michael and Gabriel. They are the two tail stars of what we now call the Big Dipper, or the Plow, and they are now called Benetesh and Mitzar. It just so happens that right next to these stars, we have two letters, B and M. And I thought, do I have to follow a certain star? NARRATOR: But when and where to start following the stars? Epiphany is traditionally celebrated on January 6th. Tradition has it that the cock crowed at midnight to announce the birth of Jesus. And this other bird is a phoenix. GRAHAM: And I suddenly remembered that the name of the beacon on top of the Burton Dassett hills, right between the two places the Templars had built, is called the "Phoenix Beacon". NARRATOR: So Phillips went to the Phoenix Beacon at midnight on January 6th. And the tail stars of the dipper led directly to, well, something like this. GRAHAM: I knew I was looking for a red brick arch, but I thought it was going to be big. I didn't know what size this arch was going to be. But as I drove along the road, suddenly I saw this little arch. And it matched exactly, and I was exhilarated. If I'm right, what is at this spot is buried here somewhere, the Ark of the Covenant. Now, if this is right, this would probably be the most sacred spot on the earth as far as most religions are concerned. And if the Ark of the Covenant is found here, then it would probably be the archaeological discovery of all time! NARRATOR: Okay, it's red, and it's an arch, but if you're underwhelmed by the evidence, join the club. Phillips' convoluted trail of clues baffles, well, make that annoys, the caretakers of the key local churches. Back at All Saints Church in Burton Dassett, remember those murals that might or might not be clues left by the Knights Templar? Well, they almost certainly weren't visible when amateur historian Jacob Cove-Jones supposedly decoded them in the 1890s. PHILIP: I find it amazing how Graham can make this claim that in the 19th century Cove-Jones found wall paintings in the church. We have factual evidence about the parish, about its origin, the date of this building. We have factual evidence interpreted by art historians. wall paintings were only uncovered in 1966. NARRATOR: And the Langley Church window? There's no evidence that Cove-Jones commissioned the window. And there's nothing here that isn't standard iconography found in almost any depiction of the Epiphany. Especially the cock and the phoenix. RICHARD: It's perfectly straightforward in my opinion. I think that one can find answers to all of the symbolism that is within the window from straightforward Christian understanding. NARRATOR: For Graham Phillips this may be the end of the road. Local authorities won't let him dig here. NARRATOR: Throughout history people have clung to the possibility that the high priests of the temple hid the Ark of the Covenant somewhere under the mount, sometime after its last mention in the Old Testament, and before the burning of Jerusalem 30 years later. But where could they have hidden it? ANDREWS: So, let's suppose for a minute that the ark, before the Babylonian destruction, was hidden. Where could it have gone to? To move the ark from the original Holy of Holies and not be seen, there must have been a tunnel to go from the Holy of Holies underground. So, my theory and my honest opinion is that the ark, if it still exists, would be somewhere inside the Temple Mount. NARRATOR: The Knights Templar, religious zealots, bumbling amateurs, legitimate archaeologists, all have excavated under and around the mount. All have led nowhere, except into the complicated water system under the city. And with the mount under the control of Muslim authorities, as it has been for 13 centuries, it's unlikely further excavations will be allowed. Not least because of Jewish fundamentalists' plans for the mount. Here is where science and faith part ways with apocalyptic repercussions. ANDREWS: The ark now has a potential not to hurt anybody who might touch it, but the concept of the ark has the potential to explode the whole situation. The whole of the Middle East. GERSHON: He's expecting from his people of Israel, to build his house! 2,000 years he waited. He has no more patience. NARRATOR: Gershon Salomon, founder of the Messianic Temple Mount Faithful Group, eagerly awaits the return of the Ark of the Covenant, and the events it will herald: the rebuilding of the temple on its original site and the subsequent coming of the Messiah. The fact that this would require the destruction of the magnificent Muslim Dome of the Rock bothers him not at all. In keeping with God's will, he and his compatriots are preparing to recreate the temple and its contents, down to the last candle. GERSHON: We prepare vessels. We prepare architectural plans for the temple. We want to be ready, because we know that God is ready, we know that time is short. NARRATOR: Gershon Salomon even has the cornerstones prepared for the third temple. What he doesn't have... GERSHON: The Ark of the Covenant waiting for us, underneath the Temple Mount. NARRATOR: According to Salomon, the finding of the ark will bring the arrival of the Messiah. And as for the Muslims and their Dome of the Rock? GERSHON: The Dome of the Rock and the mosque. They should be removed from the Temple Mount. NARRATOR: So much for world peace. According to some, the destruction of the Dome of the Rock could be a likely candidate for the cause of World War III. All this because of an object that scholars still can't agree actually existed. to give us the dimensions, how it was to be constructed. It was to be made of a particular kind of wood, acacia wood, it was to be covered with gold foil. So it seems to be describing something very genuine. Not something that was just an abstraction. It was a real object. ERIC: There is no physical evidence today that the ark ever existed. There is nothing, NARRATOR: After much investigation and obsession, questions about the and Noah's Ark, remain unanswered. Fact or fiction, these riddles of the Old Testament are some of the most enduring stories of humankind. Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.