Jack F. Grimm, a flamboyant West Texas wildcatter who found his share of oil in Texas and Oklahoma but had less luck searching for Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest, the Abominable Snowman in Nepal, the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland, Noah's Ark in Turkey and the Titanic in the North Atlantic, died on Tuesday at a hospital near his home in Abilene, Tex. He was 72 and had insisted to the end that he really had discovered the ark and had been the first to find the Titanic.
His family said the cause of death was cancer.
To suggest that Mr. Grimm was a perpetual seeker would hardly do justice to a man who was so inspired by his grandfather's tales of buried treasure that at the age of 11 he blew up a creek bed near his home in Wagoner, Okla.
Never mind that the blast, using dynamite the youngster had bought at the local hardware store, turned up nothing but a few arrowheads, some lead bullets and an old frying pan.
'That was it,'' he said years later. ''That was all it took to hook my imagination.''
His imagination was fired even further a few years later when Mr. Grimm, who served as a demolition expert in the Marines in the Pacific in World War II, hitchhiked to Houston to visit a Navy buddy and discovered that the friend he knew as Bunker was the son of the billionaire oil wildcatter H. L. Hunt.
Mr. Grimm, who was studying oil geology at Oklahoma University, was so impressed by the Hunt wealth that after graduation he turned down offers to work for major oil companies and struck out on his own, but only after he had married a fellow geology student and spent his honeymoon panning for gold in California.
Getting rich seemed easy at first. The first well he drilled struck oil in Oklahoma, but when he moved to West Texas, his luck changed. After 25 straight dry holes, he was so poor that his telephone service was turned off, a major blow to a man who spent so much time on the phone that he once said he planned to have one installed in his coffin.
With two young children to support, Mr. Grimm was on the verge of taking a job, but with his wife's blessing, he tried one more deal. The well came in, and he had phone service from then on.
Mr. Grimm's more quixotic searches began in 1970, when he read about a planned expedition to find the remains of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat and signed on for what turned out to be the first of three expeditions to Turkey. Although by most accounts the efforts failed to turn up fragments of the biblical ark, Mr. Grimm, who returned with a hand-carved oaken timber dug out of the frozen peak and always carried a hunk of it in his briefcase, maintained otherwise.
As he put it a few years ago, ''This is the ark; that's my story, and I'm going to stick to it.''
The ark expedition brought Mr. Grimm to the attention of other seekers, and during the 1970's he helped finance other quests, always, he proudly maintained, as business deals, never as a hobby.
Although he put up some of his own money, Mr. Grimm, a master salesman, raised most of the money from other investors, including his old buddy, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who proved such an easy touch that when Mr. Grimm was presented with a proposal that even he found outlandish he would placate the promoter by giving him Mr. Hunt's private phone number.
