Paul Esprante is a self-proclaimed ‘researcher’ from California; indeed, Esprante seems to consistently refer to himself as “Professor Paul Esprante”, though he gives little indication of what his putative field of expertise might be or what sort of institution has hired him in that position. In any case, Esprante has ostensibly, and like many before him, found Noah’s Ark, or at least found wooden structures that clearly stem from said vessel on Mount Ararat. And he has enthusiastically presented his findings e.g. at the International Symposium of Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark, which was ostensibly attended by “over 100 scientists” and where Esprante said that“The result of my findings will be published in books, publications and journals, but at this point it is too early to know what we are going to find. Once the scientific community knows about the existence of Noah’s Ark in Mount Ararat, we can make it available to the general public.” This was in 2017, so there has evidently been some delays in the peer review processes at distinguished journals since then.
Diagnosis: We have, admittedly, not managed to find any information about Paul Esprante from any resource not directly related to the 2017 story, and those sources are hardly reliable. We can, in other words, not quite dismiss the suspicion that Paul Esprante is a fictional character produced by some fake news factory – hence the question mark in the headline. But that there are plenty of people sharing his delusions is undeniable.