The team behind the 2026 Noah's Ark study at Durupinar says its founder's apartment was broken into and stripped of every device capable of holding the expedition's research, in what it describes as a targeted theft rather than an ordinary burglary.
The account comes from Lauren Witzke, who posted it late Friday alongside photographs of an apartment turned over. According to her account, Andrew Jones began being woken between one and three in the morning after the permitted study was announced, with people banging on his door, yelling profanities and trying to get in. She wrote that he was threatened with death more than once, and that the team persuaded him to stay with a friend until the study was finished.
Witzke says that while he was away the apartment was broken into and turned upside down. "They stole his laptops, his computers, his memory cards, basically anything they thought he might have stored the Noah's Ark evidence on," she wrote, adding that a microphone and printer were left untouched. "They specifically knew what they were there for."
Two further details drive her conclusion. She says that when police asked the apartment complex for security footage, they were told the cameras were down during the robbery. And she says the man screaming threats through the door was speaking English, which she takes as evidence the pressure did not come from the Turkish village near the site. "The villagers around the site have been good to us," she wrote. "They benefit from the tourism Noah's Ark brings."
She says nothing was lost regardless, because Jones had already copied the data to memory cards he carried with him. "Andrew is safe, the research is safe, we are not backing down," she wrote. Her post ends with a link asking for donations to finish the study and a request for prayer.
The Reaction Split Immediately
Next News Network founder Gary Franchi responded by framing the episode in spiritual terms. "Satan is working overtime at the moment," he wrote. "He knows his time is short." He argued that confirmation of the Biblical account is close, invoking the apostle who demanded proof: "Thomas required proof. He got it."
The thread beneath the original post did not move in one direction. Many replies offered prayer and support for Jones. A substantial number did the opposite, and the most engaged replies were the skeptical ones. Several demanded documentation, one asking simply whether there is "a police report that we can see." Others pointed to the same details Witzke offers as proof and read them the other way, one writing that there was "conveniently no security footage, conveniently nothing was actually lost, and conveniently no one was hurt." At least one reply called the account "a grift and a lie."
Next News Network could not independently verify the burglary, the earlier threats, or the condition of the building's cameras. No police report has been made public, and the only images released so far show the aftermath rather than the act.
Our Take
Two things are true at once here, and the people shouting at each other under that post are each holding one of them.
The first is that hostility toward this kind of work is not imaginary. A find at Durupinar that stood up to scrutiny would be among the most consequential archaeological events in modern history, and plenty of institutions have staked reputations on it never happening. Researchers working against that current have been squeezed before, and dismissing the possibility out of hand is not skepticism. It is just a different kind of faith.
The second is that the demand for a police report is fair, and answering it costs nothing. An incident number, a filed report, a statement from the building about its cameras. If the account is accurate, that paperwork exists and producing it ends the argument. A story that arrives attached to a fundraising link invites exactly this scrutiny, and the people asking are not enemies of the project. They are the audience it needs.
We would rather report it this way than pick a side before the evidence is in. If the documentation comes, we will publish it. If it does not, that will tell its own story.
