Did the CIA locate the Ark of the Covenant?
(No, it’s not in a nondescript crate and stored in a colossal warehouse filled with numerous other identical crates. Well, maybe not.)
Resurfaced declassified CIA documents suggest that US officials tracked down the biblical ark using psychic intelligence techniques.
Biblical texts describe the ark, a holy relic said to contain the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.
In the 10th century BC, King Solomon was said to have installed the ark in the temple he built in Jerusalem.
As to its final fate, the Bible does not say. Some believe it was looted by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, in 597 BC.
The CIA hoped to answer this. A ‘remote viewer’ told agents on December 5, 1988, that the ‘target is a container’ with ‘another container inside’.
‘This target is located somewhere in the Middle East as the language spoken by individuals present seemed to be Arabic,’ the paper, viewer *032, said.
‘Visuals of surrounding buildings indicated the presence of Mosque Domes… The target is hidden — underground, dark and wet were all aspects of the location of the target.’
This was part of a secret Cold War-era programme called ‘Project Sun Streak’, a name all too well known to conspiracy theorists and truth-seekers that saw intelligence agents employ ‘remote viewers’.
This was certainly not the first time that the fabled ark has been found.
Where could the Ark of the Covenant be?
It depends on who you ask.
Some scholars will say it’s very much in the ‘Holy Land’. Others have placed the Ark as far away as Zimbabwe.
Rosslyn Chapel in Edinburgh has widely been thought to be the final resting place of the ark, thanks to a conspiracy peddled by the Knights Templar, a powerful medieval order of Christians.
As is the Chartres Cathedral in France. Carvings on a pillar hint that the knights excavated Solomon’s temple and found the ark in 111.
The ark is being transported to the cathedral by wheelbarrow – under some interpretations, at least.
But showing that the ark may have clocked in some serious air miles in the centuries since it vanished, some experts suspect it’s hidden somewhere in Mount Tsurugi in Japan.
A ‘real-life Japanese Indy Jones’, Masanori Takane, believed ancient Israelis hid the ark on the Iya mountain – though Takane’s two decades of digging came out fruitless in the 1930s.
In what would be further bad news for an Indiana Jones-type’s lower back is hiking Mt Nebo in Jordan, said to be where Moses saw the Promised Land – and where he hid the ark in a cave.
Temple of Edfu, deep in the Egyptian city of the same name, is another top contender. Biblical scholars say that the Ark of Edfu, which honours the Egyptian god of healing Horus, might have ‘might have drawn on descriptions’ of the Ark of the Covenant.
Antakya, too. The city in Turkey, standing where the ancient city of Antioch once did, is where the Shi’a sect of Islam once said that a Messiah-like figure will appear in the end times and offer the ark. At least, according to some traditions.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient parchments considered the oldest copies of biblical books in the world, may also hold the keys to the ark.
A translation of one of the scrolls speaks of hidden riches, with one being the ark – but there’s a catch, given that its location ‘shall not be revealed until the day of the coming of the Messiah son of David’.
Ark hunters have also proposed that the relic is in Zimbabwe. The Lemba, a Black southern African tribe with Jewish roots, once owned a replica of the ark called the ‘ngoma lungundu’, or ‘the drum that thunders’.
Other spots where the glistening ark may be include Temple Mount, said to stand where Solomon’s temple once did, and Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion.
The church in Aksum, Ethiopia, has openly claimed the ark is in their possession – outsiders can’t see it. Though, fact-checkers dispute this, saying it’s only as replica.
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