Daniel Phelps, who tracks attendance at Ken Ham’s cheesy roadside attractions in Kentucky, tells me that they’re in decline.
According to my monthly Kentucky Open Records Act (KORA) request, December Ark ticket sales were the lowest ever (with the exception of 2020 – during the Covid pandemic). In December 2025, the Ark sold 35,223 tickets, about 4,000 less than December of 2024. Of course, these ticket sales numbers don’t include lifetime pass members or children under 10. My summary of all available ticket sales numbers can be found below.
The December ticket sales number means that the Ark sold 652,342 tickets in 2025. These numbers indicate that the Ark will never come close to the 1.4 to 2.2 million attendees per year projected when the Ark was begging/shaking down Grant County, Williamstown, and Kentucky Tourism for perks including 100 acres of land for $2, $200K cash, reduced taxes, a $62 million bond, and $1.825 million dollars/year in sales tax rebates.
Because of massive donations, AiG and its shell companies are not in danger of collapse. They, however, aren’t doing as good as in previous years.
Yeah, no likelihood of imminent demise, unfortunately — I’m sure the leadership is living comfortably for the duration, and has no major concerns for the future, but they’re in a cult that demands the conversion of everyone in the country (the world!) to their weird apocalyptic doomsday religion. They must be hoping for some magical miracle, and it isn’t happening right now.
Perhaps of greater concern is that their cult of personality is led by a personality that isn’t propagating.
If you look at AiG’s website https://answersingenesis.org, more and more of the content is exclusively coming from Ken Ham himself. Most notably, no one appears to be a replacement for Mr. Ham if he ever retires. His onetime appointed successor, Martyn Iles somehow ended his employment with AiG and returned to Australia to form his own conservative ministry. There have been no official reasons given for this departure by either AiG or Martyn Iles himself (if you know, let us hear about it).
That’s a problem with authoritarian cults. They are ruled for life by unpleasant, weird people who alienate everyone around them, and maybe instill in them the ambition to be in charge on their own. I hope I outlive Ken Ham, because I’d really like to see the chaos that will follow on his death.
Oh no, that’s terrible!
I don’t have any popcorn.
All those years I dove into the toxic world of AiG only because I was forced into this claptrap by my late mother who was a Christian fundie, asking for their materials to look at only to receive some materials from a damaged package, listening to Ham spewing out toxic drivels on his and other christian radio programs, creating articles that refuted their false claims and made up lies, briefly partaking in their CD Rom versions of one of their children’s books, dimwittingly offer to send to them a dinosaur carousel drawing I made years ago for their literature only to see an actual carousel inside the unrealistic ark park not at all very attractive, downloading unrealistic dinosaur imagery from their site and using a image editing software to correct them, seeing photos of his crackhouse “museum” on Flickr, being moody and mentally ill, harboring stress, anger, and tension headaches, ranting and raging about it on my way home from the library after spending a few hours surfing the net for dinosaurs only to come across links to Dumb Idiot Ham sites and other similar sites on the web, get a lot of headaches every time I read their drivels. And on and on and on until I came across a wonderful website “The Righting America” blog that really helps me to make sense of it all as well as comparing how Dumb Idiot Ham runs his cult religion match that of Trump’s cult and found a whole lot of similarities between the two to the point where I’m now on the road to recovery from being stuck in that Satan-filled, Toxic, Christian cult religion for 30 years.
And all those times I resisted them, knowing just how unfounded, false, and stupid their so-called Bible teachings really are.