Whenever the family moved, Peggy would take the kids to visit grandparents. Then Brown would report to the next assignment, sign in, begin work, and wait for quarters. It would have been too difficult and expensive to live in motels with the children.
So in 1970, he put Peggy and the kids on a plane and drove from Albany, New York, to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. Driving across Kansas, he was getting sleepy and bored. The roads were flat and straight, and there was nothing to grab his interest in the passing scenery. He turned on the radio and flipped through the stations. He stopped the dial when he found a Christian station talking about Noah’s Ark. The program featured interviews with people who claimed that Noah’s Ark had been sighted on Mount Ararat, which rises almost 17,000 feet above sea level. As he listened, he thought, How in the world could Noah’s Ark reach that elevation?
The Rocky Mountains were just beginning to come into view as he drove along. He tried to imagine an object large enough to fill a football stadium sitting up there on one of the summits because it had floated there. Impossible! When the program ended, he pulled off the road and jotted down the name and address of the radio station.
The very first night he was at the Air Force Academy, he wrote a letter to the radio station asking who their sources were and how he could reach them. Within a few weeks, they wrote back and gave him names and addresses. He called one of the contacts on the list, Jim Lee, a man who traveled across the country giving lectures about the effort to find Noah’s Ark.5 Brown invited him to stay at his home whenever he was passing through.
Jim Lee visited the Browns several times. He and Brown would stay up late into the night talking about the possibility that the Ark could be there. The logistics of it all stumped Brown’s engineering mind. “Where did all that water come from?” Brown asked Jim. “You’ve got to be lame in the head to think that all the mountains were really covered with water.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jim said. “Maybe the water came from outer space.” “Maybe so.” Brown said. “But then where did all the water go afterwards?”
Brown saw other problems. How could so many animals fit in the Ark? How could the freshwater fish survive if the flood waters were salt water? And how did the plants survive?6
Why, that part of the Bible had to be wrong, he thought. The Old Testament troubled him because there were parts of it that didn’t seem scientifically sound. The New Testament made a lot of sense to him, and he heartily accepted Christ’s teaching. (It never dawned on him, though, that Christ himself had talked about Noah as a literal historical figure.)
For the next two years, he read everything he could find about the Ark and talked to many “Ark hunters.” The possibility that Noah’s Ark was actually buried on Mount Ararat and that the global flood had occurred was growing in his mind.
He had always thought the fossil record was the strongest evidence for evolution—which he had passively accepted. But now he began to wonder whether perhaps the flood laid down the fossils. If water sloshed all over the earth for a year, that would explain why fossils of sea life are at the tops of all the major mountain ranges—something geologists had known for more than two hundred years. If fossils had been laid down rapidly in Noah’s flood, then fossils were no longer evidence for evolution. (In fact, fossils must be buried rapidly or else the animal or plant’s shape won’t be preserved.)
What then was the evidence for evolution? he wondered. The more he struggled with this question and studied it, the more amazed he became at the lack of evidence supporting evolution. To his surprise he found that the scientific evidence actually supported creation. By 1972, Brown was convinced that creation and a global flood were the only logical positions.