So, instead of studying it with “top men”, they lock the Ark of the Covenant up in a crate and put it in a big warehouse.
I was discussing this with my wife last night and we both kind of agreed that…well, it was probably not a bad decision. Since we know that the object actually will kill anyone that looks at what is inside, isn’t it a good idea to get rid of it? I mean, destroying it would be even better, but if they can’t do that, isn’t locking it up a good thing?
Are they right?
Probably not a bad plan all in all. But I was always under the impression that it was government bungling where somebody somewhere along the paper trail dropped the ball and it became lost due to ineptitude, not some well thought out plan.
Probably a wise move from a plotting and storytelling perspective. Any attempt at an explanation will certainly fall short of just leaving the truth to the viewer’s imagination.
Do we know that “top men” didn’t study it before storing it away?
If avoiding the melting is just down to not looking at it while it’s open, there’s definitely potential. The problems are whether trying to get around that will just prompt God to say “Nice try, apes” and melt you anyway, and whether anyone will try to screw up your study, either because they want it for themselves or because they’re religious zealots.
I thought the fact that Indiana Jones presses them for details and all they say is, “Top. Men.” kind of implied that…uh, there probably are no top men and they just want to get him out of the room.
At least one did.
They should have given it to the Zionists. 
Ok, but how about not stuffing it in some big ass warehouse like it was a paperclip in a junkdrawer.
Maybe they could have incorporated it into the Fort Knox security system, that would have foiled Auric Goldfinger’s plan.
In the Indy-verse, locking it up was probably a better option than trying to employ it during WW2. As we later saw with the Holy Grail, divine artifacts seem to have failsafes against abuse. Dropping it in the Pacific would be a better option than storage.
Yes, This is the main reason why I think its a snafu it ends up there. Even IF they can’t do a damn thing with it, its obvious the thing is scary powerful and full of some damn good secrets they might get out of it someday.
So, either all those other tens of thousands of crates are ALSO filled with scary powerful stuff beyond imagination or it got there by mistake. The later explanation makes more sense to me.
Now the mistake could be it was never looked at by any top guys by some paperwork acccident and ended up there. Or it was looked at but accidently got sent to the wrong place for storage. Either way its sorta a double joke. The government looses something thats nearly proof of God (or at least one of the most impressive things on Earth). And the damn thing for all practical purposes gets lost again.
That my interpretion anyways.
Honestly I don’t really think that the government had anything to do with the Ark being put into the warehouse. I think that the Ark was always supposed to be lost and not used. Remember that God sent a sand storm and that’s what lost the Ark in the first place.
To me, at least in movie cannon, the government may have wanted to research the Ark, but God had other plans. Since God can’t exactly come down to earth very easily God did the next best thing and put it in a huge government warehouse and got it ‘lost’ again. I mean really, what better place then a government warehouse can you put something and never find it again? 
I realize that most of us have blocked out the fourth Indy movie, but we see the warehouse again, and see that it contains at least one other crazy item, the body of an alien. So apparently in the Indy-verse, the gov’t does just stash every crazy powerful occult item it finds in that warehouse.
The government clearly did not have “top men” to study it, because if they had, Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. would have been one of them.
And yes, it’s clearly extremely dangerous. But then, so are plenty of other things that people study. If you can find scholars willing to “tickle the dragon’s tail” experimenting with fission criticality with a screwdriver, then you can also find some willing to poke around with the Ark. I mean, obviously, you’d inform them of as much as you know about the dangers first, and do as much as you can to mitigate them, but let them study it if they choose to.
Heck, even if you can’t figure out any safe way at all to open it, at least let folks look at it from the outside. There’s probably reams of archaeological data to be had just from the art style of the carvings on the outside, or the like. And even if it were known to have no mystical power whatsoever, I’d still be quite interested in seeing the real, original Ark of the Covenant in a museum or shrine.
Not every one. Just the important ones (by accident) 
Come to think of it, that alien body might have been an “inside” joke about people bitching what happened to the ark the first time around. They should have had a giant crate of mismatched socks IMO.
Sounds a lot like the kind of jokes the old Lucasarts adventure games would have.
I don’t think we can assume that the government locked it up for the express purpose of keeping the world safe from the Power of the Ark. They locked it up because they’re an incompetent, impotent beaurocracy. (At least that’s my interpretation.)
So, at best, it wasn’t a good or bad decision; it was a non-decision. The fact that it probably saved some lives was just a fortunate un-premeditated consequence.
I’m torn between locking the sucker up, locking it up and killing everyone who knows where exactly it was, and simply losing the paperwork on purpose. But assuming I believe Dr. Jones’s story, there’s no way I’m opening it or letting anyone else try.
Do NOT fuck with the relics of sky-kings.
Everyone knows its @ Warehouse 13 - c’mon people, get with it already.
They seem to have had some trouble there recently.