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.
What the Photographs Actually Show
Three images accompany the post, and they are worth describing precisely, because both sides of the argument are reading them.
The first is not a raw photograph. It carries a caption bar reading "NOAH'S ARK SCANS" and "FOUNDER'S APARTMENT RANSACKED, BURGLARIZED" across the top and the address "NOAHSARKSCANS.COM" along the bottom. Beneath the branding it shows a disordered room, shelves partly emptied, papers scattered, cables and office supplies loose among them.
The second shows a shelving unit with items strewn across it, a tripod, papers, cables, and a microphone on a stand with its pop filter still attached. A cushion and clothing sit on the floor. There is no visible structural damage in the frame.
The third is the least informative: a short section of shelf holding an indistinct grey object, with no readable text and nothing that identifies the room.
The microphone is the detail that matters to both arguments. Its presence supports the specific claim Witzke makes, that whoever went in ignored resaleable equipment and took only what might hold data. It is also the entire basis of the counter-argument in the replies, which is that a room in disarray with no forced entry, no damage and no missing valuables is a picture of a mess rather than a picture of a burglary.
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
I said it on X last night and I will say it here, because it is what I actually believe is happening: Satan is working overtime at the moment. He knows his time is short.
Look at the shape of this. A team gets a permit to run the most consequential archaeological study in modern history. Within days the founder is being woken between one and three in the morning by men banging on his door, screaming through it, threatening to kill him. He leaves. They come in. They take the laptops, the computers, the memory cards, and they leave the microphone and the printer sitting right there. Then the building's cameras turn out to have been down for precisely that window.
You can call that a coincidence if you want to. I do not have to.
There is a reason this particular site draws this particular kind of pressure, and it is not archaeological. If Durupinar holds what these men believe it holds, then the Flood is not a myth, the account is not allegory, and a century of institutions built on the opposite assumption have a very bad morning. That is a spiritual problem before it is a scientific one, and spiritual problems attract spiritual opposition. Every believer reading this already knows what that looks like, because they have watched it operate in their own life on a smaller scale.
Here is why the enemy is this frightened of a hillside in eastern Turkey.
For a century the people who deny God have made the same demand. Show me. Give me something I can measure. Produce the evidence and I will believe. It has always been the argument, and it has always been offered as though no answer could ever come.
An answer is coming. Soon there will be irrefutable evidence of Noah's mission, and confirmation of the Biblical account will be indisputable. Not a matter of interpretation, not a matter of faith against science, but a thing in the ground that can be scanned, measured, dated and photographed. The demand for proof is about to be met on its own terms.
Thomas required proof. He got it. He stood in front of the risen Christ and was told to put his hand in the wound, and the doubt did not survive contact with the evidence. That is the pattern. God does not fear the question. He answers it. And the men currently trying to take memory cards out of an apartment in the middle of the night understand that better than the skeptics do, which is exactly why they are doing it.
Andrew Jones copied those cards before he walked out the door. The research is safe. The study goes on.
God is real. Satan is real. And Christ is King. Everything else is detail.
