Does a real video filmed from a helicopter show the excavation of Noah's Ark near the top of Mount Ararat? No, that's not true: This video is AI-generated. The OpenAI Verify tool found a SynthID watermark indicating that the video was made with OpenAI tools.
The video appeared in a post (archived here) by the @JohnmichealC1 account on X on Oct. 5, 2026. It read:
Mount Ararat, Noah's Ark
This is what a screenshot of the video in the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @JohnmichealC1 on X.)
A search of Google News for Noah's Ark (archived here) and Yahoo News shows that the topic has been receiving quite a bit of news coverage in the first week of October 2026. This news is largely driven by a media campaign from Noah's Ark Scans (archived here), a group that calls itself Guardians of the Ark and is fundraising to continue its research. Noah's Ark Scans and a team of archaeologists in Turkey, are drilling to take samples of the ground at the Durupınar formation.
The place pictured in the video on X does not resemble the Durupınar site (pictured below in 2007), which is about 18 miles from Mount Ararat. A 1996 paper (archived here) co-authored by Lorence Gene Collins, a geologist with California State University, Northridge, details the investigation of this boat-shaped land form, concluding it is "a completely natural rock formation."
(Image source: Mfikretyilmaz via Wikimedia Commons.)
Lead Stories uploaded the 10-second video from @JohnmichealC1 to Hive Moderation (archived here). The AI-Generated Content Detection tool determined the video was 99.9% likely to be AI-generated (pictured below).
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
As a second check, Lead Stories also uploaded a thumbnail image from the video to the Verify tool from OpenAI (archived here). This tool was able to detect the SynthID watermark that is invisible to the human eye. This means the video was made using OpenAI tools (pictured below).
(Image source: OpenAI.)
Other fact checks
A claim about the Durupınar site and Noah's Ark was investigated by Snopes in 2013.
