Ken Ham's Ark Encounter: 10 Years of Broken Promises

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:00]It has been a long time since I talked about Ark Encounter, the giant Noah's Ark replica that is in Kentucky. It's supposed to be like a theme park, so you can walk through Noah's Ark as if it were a museum and explore it. Um, but it's it's about to be the 10-year anniversary this July, so they're expecting big things. And I felt like this was a good time to remind people of how much of a disaster Ark Encounter has been. Not just for science, we knew that, but for the city it's based in because Ark Encounter made a lot of promises when they were going to open and none of them have panned out. And this is worth going over. Okay, let's start with this. When creationist Ken Ham and his team at Answers in Genesis were looking for a place to build this ark, this fake boat, they pitched it to cities as a way to create jobs. They actually said at the time, Ark Encounter is expected to annually generate a minimum of 3,000 new full-time equivalent jobs, which is a lot.

[00:01:20]And now what they didn't tell you is that even after they opened, those jobs were only available for conservative fundamentalist Christians who believe in young earth creationism and that samesex marriage is a sin. So like they have a no Jews allowed policy. No atheists can work for them. They have thousands of jobs supposedly, but unless you're one of us, you can't get it. They did not say that when they were pitching this place, but that is what they ended up doing. Here's another thing.

[00:01:54]The city of Williamstown, Kentucky, which is not that far from Cincinnati, Ohio, they really wanted to be the home of this attraction. And they said to Answers in Genesis or or whichever company technically was overseeing all this, they said, "We will give you 62 million in junk bonds if you build your facility in our backyard." And the county, Grant County, which Williamstown is in, they actually gave Kenham's team 98 acres of land on which to build the ark for a grand total of $1.

[00:02:34]So they got the land for free, more or less.

[00:02:39]They also, here is another incentive the county offered to Ark Encounter. They said that over the next 30 years, 75% of the real estate taxes you were supposed to pay to the city, you can use it to pay back the interestfree loan. So instead of that money going to the city and the schools and the citizens, it's being used to repay the bonds.

[00:03:06]Also, the county said, "We're going to garnish the wages of your staff." So 2% of the paychecks of your employees is going to go back to Ark Encounter to help them pay off the loans. So the neither the government nor the employees were getting everything they deserved.

[00:03:27]Now why the hell would a city and a county throw this many incentives at Ark Encounter?

[00:03:36]because they hoped that this attraction would be so popular. It would increase tourism. It would liven up what was basically a dying town. It would create well-paying jobs for the people in their community. And it would be good for all the businesses and restaurants around it. I mean, that's kind of why cities and counties and states throw money at Amazon or any big company like come to us, we'll give you a sweetheart deal, you will give us jobs, it'll benefit the community. And almost always, those things do not always pan out. But that's why they were making all of these pitches to Ark Encounter, which they took. And then the state of Kentucky actually did something even be better.

[00:04:26]They said, "We will give you a tourism tax incentive worth over $18 million over the next decade. You can get back that money that you would have paid to the state in taxes. You can get back over $18 million over the next 10 years based on attendance and sales." So, the state of Kentucky gave them a sweetheart deal.

[00:04:54]Now, here's why I'm telling you all this.

[00:04:57]Everything I'm telling you was based on the promises that Ark Encounter made to all of these people. And all of these promises were contingent on the idea that they were going to draw in a lot of people every single year. And you knew this was going to be a problem because if there's one thing creationists are very bad at, it's dealing with big numbers.

[00:05:28]I want to show you something. In 2013, they actually put out a feasibility study. Here's how we know Ark Encounter is going to succeed.

[00:05:38]And look at what they said in it.

[00:05:41]Arc feasibility study visitation projections. How much how many people are going to come through our doors? And look at this first paragraph.

[00:05:51]The Ark Encounter is expected to attract between 1.2 and 2.0 visitors, an average of 1.6 million visitors during the first year of operation.

[00:06:05]Remember that. On average, 1.6 million people a year for year one.

[00:06:14]Okay?

[00:06:16]Ken Ham bragged about this on Ark Encounter's website at the time. This is the original website for Ark Encounter.

[00:06:26]And if you scroll down here, there's a section, how many visitors do you expect?

[00:06:33]Based on an extensive independent feasibility study conducted by America's research group, we expect over 1.6 million guests. our first year creation museum attendance. The Creation Museum is his creationist theme park which is a short drive away. It's also likely to increase by over 200,000 guests. So, you know, we're bringing in a lot of new people every year.

[00:07:04]That same report, I want to show you one more thing that was in the feasibility study. They had this chart in it and this is a 10-year operating income projections.

[00:07:17]And it's okay if you don't like to deal with numbers, but I want to show you a couple things here. What's the attendance? They're going with the lowend estimate, 1.2 million people in year 1. They're starting with that because again, that is the worstcase scenario.

[00:07:38]Let's say we start with 1.2 uh million people visiting. Do you see this number right above my finger here? That says by year two, our attendance is going to be 104% of that. Or to put it another way, we will have a 4% increase in attendance by year two.

[00:08:02]And in year three, it'll increase by another 4%.

[00:08:06]year four 10%. Because now we're expanding the ark. We have more money coming in. We're going to make it bigger and better. And then they go back and forth for the other years. 4% 10% 4%.

[00:08:21]Like they just go back and forth to kind of balance it out. But you could see what they say there. Annual attendance growth 4% in a normal year, 10% after they expand.

[00:08:36]This is what they promised people would be their 10-year projection, and they were going to make a hell of a lot of money. Money that would then flow back to the city and the county and the state.

[00:08:50]The these are Ark Encounters own numbers that they showed people uh to to to convince them to give them these sweetheart deals. And by the way, if you do the math, if they started year one with 1.2 2 million visitors. By the end of year nine, when they have the 10-y year anniversary, they expected to have about 2.5 million visitors by year 10. If you do the 4%, 10%, four, whatever, 2.5 million visitors by that 10th year.

[00:09:27]So, what happened? They got the sweetheart deals. They got the loans.

[00:09:33]They got the land. They got the tax incentive rebate.

[00:09:38]Ark encounter finally opened in July of 2016. And here's the thing, it's a private business, which means we have no way of knowing how much how many people are visiting the park. It's like saying how many how much money is a church taking in. They don't have to tell you and they won't.

[00:10:00]Ark Encounter did not have to say what their attendance numbers were or how much money was coming in. Now, maybe they had to offer attendance numbers to get the tax rebates and maybe you could figure it out that way, but on a monthly basis, they did not have to tell the public what their attendance was, right?

[00:10:23]And then something wonderful happened.

[00:10:28]And I'm not talking about the lawsuit several years ago where there was a big rainstorm and Ark Encounter said, "Our attraction has been destroyed by the flood and we're filing a lawsuit against our builders."

[00:10:41]Which is a very real thing that happened and it was the funniest goddamn thing ever.

[00:10:49]But here's the wonderful thing that happened. the city of Williamstown knowing, think about this for a second.

[00:10:58]You have an attraction that is bringing people to the community. We don't know how many, but it is drawing in numbers.

[00:11:08]But when you have tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people visiting your community for something, just like a parade in your town or a concert in Chicago or something like that, you got to pay for increased police presence. You got to pay for the fire department in case of emergencies.

[00:11:32]I mean, think about it. It's aren't counter. You're drawing in a lot of old white Christians. They're gonna It's Kentucky in the middle of the summer.

[00:11:41]They might have heat strokes. They're going to need medical attention. Who's covering the cost of that? It's the city. They got to pay for all this stuff, right? So, even if you have a big attraction, why should the city be on the hook for all this extra stuff you're going to need? So, they did something amazing. The city of Williamstown, they said, "We're going to impose a 50 cent per ticket safety fee on all the attractions in our city that draw in X number of people.

[00:12:20]5050 cent per ticket fee." Basically, this was their way of saying, "We're going to take in a dollar for every two people who come through your door to help us cover the costs of ambulances, police presence, etc." Now, think about what that means. That means every month Ark Encounter would have to tell the city what their attendance was so that they knew how much money to pay the city. And because they had to tell the city this, the city was open to foyer requests. You could ask the city, "Hey, I would like to see that paperwork."

[00:13:02]And that meant the public could know what the attendance numbers were like.

[00:13:08]This is a good time for me to jump in and say, "My voice sounds like this cuz I'm losing my voice today, but I had to talk about this. It'll be fine by next week. It's all good."

[00:13:17]Um, so here's that all happened about a year after Ark Encounter began.

[00:13:25]And there's a local paleontologist in Kentucky. His name is Dan Phelps. For the past decade, every month, he has been asking the city of Williamstown.

[00:13:36]He's been filing the foyer requests, "Send me what the attendance numbers are." And every month when he gets them, he sends them to a small group of people. myself included.

[00:13:48]Have we kept records of these numbers in a spreadsheet for everyone to see? Oh, you better believe we have. In fact, I will put that link in uh you could see it in the comments right now. Let me show you this.

[00:14:12]Here is the spreadsheet and you could see for example in the year 2017 when they finally started getting these attendance figures like July of 2017 they had 142,000 people walking through the door which meant they had to pay out $71,313 to the city of Williamstown.

[00:14:40]You could do this every month ever since.

[00:14:45]Have I been keeping track of it as recently as like last month, two months ago? Uh-huh.

[00:14:52]It's a fun hobby. I don't have friends.

[00:14:58]So, why do I tell you all this? because I can tell you a little something about their attendance figures, which is what you see in this row right over here.

[00:15:10]In 2018, in calendar year 2018, the first year when we had a full accounting of all the attendance numbers Ark Encounter was giving us, look at their attendance right over there.

[00:15:27]827,000.

[00:15:30]In 2019, it was just about 900,000.

[00:15:35]COVID started, it went down. Okay, that makes sense. And I know it takes a while to recover. Let's jump to 2022, they're under 750,000.

[00:15:47]2023, it's still under 800,000. 2024, it goes down.

[00:15:54]2025 it goes down a lot.

[00:16:01]So what have we learned from all of this?

[00:16:06]If this is year nine over here in 2025, they should have been getting over 2 million visitors by the feasibility study they used over 10 years ago to convince people to give them all these tax breaks.

[00:16:22]They are at 652,000 and it doesn't look like this year is going to be any better.

[00:16:31]That is what we get from the data.

[00:16:35]Ark and you know Noah's ark is supposed to be this indestructible ship that stays afloat during a global flood allowing Noah's family and two of every animal to rebuild humanity.

[00:16:51]Ark encounter. The creationist attraction can't even keep itself afloat. The ark is sinking.

[00:16:59]And at this point, this is no longer postcoid.

[00:17:04]Like you're not, you can't blame this number on CO anymore. People are pretty much back to normal. They're just losing people. They're not bringing in people.

[00:17:15]Now, there is a website called Writing America. RI GHT and they did the they used the same numbers I used but they calculated using fiscal years. So from uh right over here this is from July of 2016 to June of 2017. And they did the same thing I just showed you in the spreadsheet. But you could see using the attendance numbers and the projected attendance. I think the 1.6 6 million that Ark Encounter said all this that they were going to get. They've had 50% attendance, 52%, 51%. What are they doing now? They are at 26% projected attendance in the last fiscal year that we have available.

[00:18:07]It's not good. It's not good for Arc and Counter. The takeaway here is that attendance keeps falling. Ark Encounter has never even once come close to the worst case scenario of 1.2 million visitors a year.

[00:18:27]And because they're not hitting their projected attendance numbers, what does that mean for the city and the county and the state? the city. It means they're not attracting tourists in the volume they had hoped, which is bad for local restaurants and stores and hotels.

[00:18:46]And it's even bad for the schools that rely on property taxes.

[00:18:52]Williamstown has paid for this dearly.

[00:18:55]They took a misguided gamble by giving Ark Encounter all this these sweetheart deals. I feel bad for them. I think they genuinely did not care about the religion or science of it all. They cared about just bringing a business to their town. And I get that. If you're a city official, you'll do anything to bring a big business to your town, draw in people, and they fell for a creationist's scam.

[00:19:24]Here's another thing you should keep in mind. I mentioned that the state of Kentucky gave them an $18 million tax break over the next decade as a tourism benefit. Well, that's going to expire now, which means Arnounter is going to make even less money than it had coming in.

[00:19:45]That's bad news for Answers in Genesis.

[00:19:48]And then when you factor in a faltering economy because of the Republicans that creationists like Ken Ham actively root for because of high gas prices, which can also be blamed on Republicans, and the simple fact that Ark Encounter is one of those places that you see once and then you never have to see it again because unlike a real museum, this one never changes because the Bible says it cannot. Not. What do you think they have? You think they have updated exhibits every year? No. It's not an art museum. It's not a museum of science.

[00:20:28]It's a biblical animatronic storage shed.

[00:20:32]Once you've seen it once, even if you're a hater, you don't need to go back again. By the way, a bunch of atheists I know have seen it once. They made fun of it. They made their videos. You could see a lot of walkthroughs on YouTube.

[00:20:47]But once you've done it once, you don't need to go back again.

[00:20:51]I have not been inside Ark Encounter. I have been inside the Creation Museum. I was there on opening day. I protested and then I went inside. It was funny.

[00:21:02]Um, but I don't have any reason to go back. I mean, come on. I'm your biggest client here, man. No one's thought about Ark Encounter as much as atheists have.

[00:21:12]You're doing nothing to attract us.

[00:21:15]Anyway, thoughts and prayers, Ken Ham.

[00:21:21]All right, I will stop there. What questions we got here?

[00:21:26]I should tell you there's going to be another protest. Um, I think it's on the Fourth of July weekend. Maybe it's sooner. I'm sorry I don't have it in front of me, but if you look up Ark Encounter protest, there are a group of atheists who do protest outside Ark Encounter um at a distance, but they protest it not because of uh what they're protesting is the fact that they pretend this is science. It's not. It's just biblical mythology. So, they protest to show people this is not science. This is not real. It's well worth it if you are around there.

[00:22:07]This is true. I have been waiting all day to say this.

[00:22:14]I do appreciate how many of you also love spreadsheets as much as I do.

[00:22:21]So, let me talk about this.

[00:22:24]I protested then bought a ticket. This was a this was a source of debate among many of us. Is it worth it to buy a ticket to Ark Encounter or the Creation Museum? And the way we justified it in our heads is we are going there so that we could show other people what is inside of it so that they do not go in there. We felt it was a small price to pay for a bigger reward in the long run.

[00:22:54]And as you could see from the attendance numbers, if you want to give us credit for that, which I'm not saying you should, maybe that paid off. But we we understand the potential hypocrisy here.