xingu wrote:DigitalGlobe's QuickBird commercial remote sensing satellite imaged the Mt. Ararat "anomaly" in 2003. This image has never seen by the public until now. The anomaly is surrounded below by very rugged-looking strato-volcanic rock; however, the texture of the feature in question is relatively smooth and appears to be made of a different substance. Credit: DigitalGlobe (emphasis added)
Note the language emphasized above--it is a hallmark of hucksterism. What is alleged to be apparent in that blurb may not necessarily be at all apparent. Given that the easiest way to determine what the conmposition of the formation referred to is on the ground, and not from a satellite, i was immediately reminded of Van Daniken.
In referring to the giant egraved figures on the plains of Nazca in Peru, Van Danikan asserts that, give their size, they could only have been laid out from above. To this, a group of scientists (at the least, self-described scientists), using a NSF grant, set out to demonstrate that the technology of the day (estimated to be about 1700 years ago) could have produced hot air baloons. Of course, they did not then demonstrate by what means people in the basket of a hot air baloon, no matter how constructed, would have communicated with people on the ground. Imagine, though, if modern men attempted to make such figures, and to control the layout by instructions radioed from an aircraft overhead (the implied method to which Van Daniken refers, as he attempts to suggests that the biomorphs at Nazca are evidence of alien visitation). It would be a classic "chinese fire drill" scenario.
Rather, however, than to accept a crackpot theory, and attempt to demonstrate it is wrong in its own terms, it is a much simpler matter to simply reject those terms. In the case of Nazca, there is a method which children can be taught--grid transfer--which allows a small design to be made into a very large design. A drawing is made, and then overlaid with a grid. On the ground, the grid would be replicated at ten-to-one, fifty-to-one, even one hundred-to-one, and,
voilà, you have your giant monkey or hummingbird without neef for or reference to aircraft, human or alien.
The same applies here with this Mount Ararat dodge. Anyone who uses only that rather imprecise photo and attempts to explain "the anomoly" is playing the BS artist's game. On what basis is one correct in describing the marked area of the photograph as evidence of an anomoly? It is essential to hucksterism, including and especially religious hucksterism, to turn rhetoric on its head, and, using an illicit premise, attempt to force the sceptic to disprove a thesis which, by its nature, need not be accepted without proof.
The photo provided is not evidence of an anomoly, it proves nothing--nothing about "Noah's ark," and nothing about geology. As things stand, it's simply a photograph, which may or may not be interesting, depending upon how one feels about pictures of mountains.
