Watchers and UAPs: What the Book of Enoch Can (and Can’t) Tell Us

Editor’s note – Every generation asks whether the strange things Scripture describes might be walking – or flying – among us again. Will Blesch, a Messianic Jewish believer living in Israel, brings real linguistic and historical care to a question BCW readers keep raising: do the Watchers of 1 Enoch have anything to do with today’s UAP reports? He doesn’t hand us a tidy answer, and that restraint is itself worth learning from. What follows treats an old text honestly instead of forcing it to solve a headline.

Something strange has happened to the UFO.

The little green men and flying saucers that once belonged to supermarket tabloids now appear in congressional hearings, military reports, and government offices. The Pentagon calls them UAPs.

Witnesses who have testified before Congress have used an even more provocative phrase: “non-human intelligence.” Whatever one makes of the evidence, the subject can no longer be dismissed simply by making an X-Files joke.

And of course, Christians have noticed.

Almost immediately, the Book of Enoch, the Watchers, and the Nephilim entered the conversation. U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who has played a prominent role in congressional UAP investigations, even publicly urged people to read Enoch.

That makes sense in a way. But it also creates a problem.

I am a Messianic Jewish believer living in Israel, and much of my research involves the strange supernatural world inhabited by the Biblical writers and the Jewish literature surrounding them. One thing has become increasingly clear to me: modern readers have a habit of asking ancient texts to answer questions their authors were never asking.

Occasionally, the comparison sheds genuine light on current issues. But sometimes we put a flying saucer into the text and call it exegesis.

The Bible Never Needed Aliens to Populate the Cosmos

Genesis 6:1-4 is remarkably terse. Humanity multiplies and daughters are born. Then the bene ha’elohim, the “sons of God,” see the women, take wives, and children are born to them. The Nephilim appear in the same compressed passage.

A major stream of ancient Jewish interpretation didn’t understand these “sons of God” as ordinary men. The Watchers tradition, preserved most famously in 1 Enoch, identifies them as heavenly beings who descended, took human wives, produced monstrous offspring, and taught humanity knowledge it was never meant to receive.

BCWorldview has already dealt with that interpretation in detail. What matters for the UAP question is that ancient Jews didn’t need H.G. Wells, Roswell, or the Pentagon to imagine intelligent beings other than humans. For them, the cosmos was already crowded.

Genesis doesn’t wait long before introducing beings who are neither human nor God. Adam and Eve have barely left Eden when God stations the cherubim at the east of the garden “to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis 3:24). Genesis doesn’t explain what a cherub is. The beings simply appear in the story.

And they are hardly alone. Scripture describes a divine council, Heavenly beings associated with nations, angels who interact with human beings, demons, and rebellious angels awaiting judgment. The Biblical writers were perfectly comfortable with an inhabited supernatural realm.

Whether the beings and apparent craft reported by modern witnesses are connected to anything described in Scripture or Second Temple literature is a different question. An ancient writer would not have called something a UAP or described it with the vocabulary of aerospace engineering. He would have described what he encountered using the terminology he knew.

That doesn’t prove the Watchers and modern Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) are connected. But different terminology can’t settle the question either.

Editor’s note – This point deserves emphasis: the Biblical writers never treated the Heavens as empty space waiting to be filled by human imagination. Cherubim, a divine council, and rebellious angels are already there in Genesis, centuries before anyone had a word for extraterrestrial. Modern fascination with non-human intelligence isn’t discovering something Scripture lacked; it’s stumbling into a populated cosmos the Bible assumed all along.

There Are Parallels. Real Ones.

The temptation to connect the Watchers with modern reports of non-human intelligence isn’t strange. In the Enochic tradition, intelligent non-human beings enter the human realm, interact directly with people, and do so in rebellion against God.

Modern UFO encounter literature contains some curious echoes. People claim contact with “superior” or “higher” intelligences that deliver messages about humanity’s origins, our future, and sometimes what we ought to believe about ourselves.

From a theological perspective, that last detail bothers me more than whether somebody saw lights over an Air Force base, although I understand the national security concerns.

The resemblance is worth taking seriously, but it gives us a reason to investigate a possible connection, not assume the beings described then and now are the same.

What the Ancient Texts Actually Allow Us to Say

There is a popular move in some corners of UFO culture that takes an ancient reference to Heavenly beings, translates “Heavenly” into “outer space,” and declares the problem solved.

Genesis never tells us that the sons of God came from another planet, nor does Enoch present the Watchers as extraterrestrial biological engineers whom primitive humans mistook for gods.

Yet the same discipline must also work in the opposite direction.

An unidentified object doesn’t become demonic simply because we cannot explain it. “UAP equals extraterrestrial” is an inference, just as “UAP equals demon” is an inference. Calling the conclusion for the latter Biblical doesn’t make the evidence for it any stronger.

Scripture gives us abundant reason to believe that rebellious non-human intelligences exist. But it doesn’t identify every unexplained object in the sky, or every non-human intelligence we might encounter, as one of them.

And God, after all, is perfectly capable of surprising us.

Editor’s note – Blesch’s warning here cuts both directions, and it’s the most useful thing in this piece. Christians can be just as guilty of forcing a text to say more than it says when we’re eager to label something demonic as when skeptics dismiss it as myth. Good discernment starts by admitting what we don’t yet know.

The Stranger Question Enoch Forces Us to Ask

What interests me most about the Book of the Watchers within Enoch 1 isn’t how they arrived on Earth, but what happened once they interacted with humanity.

In the Enochic account, the Watchers violate boundaries established by God. They take human women and teach things they had no authority to reveal. Humanity isn’t an innocent bystander. People receive what the Watchers offer and participate in the corruption that follows.

There’s something here that should be familiar to anyone who has read Genesis 3. Namely, knowledge is offered, humanity is invited to receive it, and behind the offer lies a question about whose word should be trusted.

How would Christians respond if we made contact with physical beings that appeared to have come from another planet? Suppose they possessed knowledge centuries beyond ours, demonstrated technology we could barely understand, or cured diseases that have defeated us for generations.

What happens if those same beings then begin telling us what happens after death, who Jesus “really” was, or that our understanding of God is simply the primitive religion of an intellectually immature species? Would technological superiority make their message true?

Deuteronomy 13 gives us a remarkably useful answer. Moses warns Israel that a prophet may announce a sign or wonder and that the sign may actually happen. Yet, if that prophet uses it to lead Israel after other gods, Israel is commanded not to listen.

Scripture therefore allows for something extraordinary to be real without the message accompanying it being true.

John gives Christians a similar warning: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). John doesn’t assume every spirit is evil; he tells his readers to test what they’re dealing with.

Those warnings become especially relevant if we eventually move beyond radar returns, sensor data, photographs, and eyewitness testimony to direct communication with whatever intelligence may lie behind some of these encounters.

Editor’s note – Deuteronomy 13 is doing quiet, heavy lifting in this article, and it deserves a second look on its own. A miracle can be real and its message can still be a lie – that’s not a fringe idea, it’s what Moses told Israel to expect. Any conversation about non-human intelligence that skips this test is missing the one Scripture actually gives us.

Christians Can Afford to Investigate

I don’t know what lies behind every credible UAP report, and I don’t think anyone else does either. Some will have mundane explanations; others may involve classified technology, misidentification, exaggeration, or fraud.

But enough difficult cases involve trained witnesses, radar, and other sensor data to justify investigation without deciding beforehand what the answer has to be.

Living in Israel has made that principle unusually tangible for me. Places that appear in Scripture aren’t abstractions here. Mount Hermon is a mountain you can see. Bashan is actual geography, not fantasy world-building.

You quickly realize that the people who wrote these texts didn’t separate the spiritual realm from the physical one as neatly as we often do. Mountains, nations, cities, non-human heavenly beings, and humanity all inhabit the same Biblical story.

When Scripture gives us something strange or unexpected, I don’t think the answer is to leave it alone. Those are often the places where we should ask harder questions, compare the passage with the rest of Scripture, look at how ancient readers understood it, and follow whatever other evidence we can find.

What we shouldn’t do is begin with a later interpretation and then force the text to support it. If the evidence really does point in that direction without special pleading, fine. Follow it. But until it does, the text has to be allowed to say what it actually says in black and white.

The same applies to the UAP question. If we eventually discover that some previously unknown intelligence really is interacting with humanity, I don’t see why Christians should panic. The Biblical cosmos was never empty in the first place, and Scripture certainly never taught us that human beings are the only intelligent creatures in God’s creation.

Discovering that another intelligence exists would tell us nothing about whether that intelligence deserves our trust, much less our worship.

A being could be older than humanity, possess knowledge we don’t have, or demonstrate technology so far beyond ours that we struggle even to understand what we’re seeing. None of that would make the being divine or give it authority to redefine God for us.

Whatever we eventually learn about the UAP phenomenon, no creature gets to rewrite what God has revealed about Himself through Scripture and through Jesus Christ.

That is why I think the Watchers tradition, along with the Bible’s broader testimony about non-human intelligences, belongs in the UAP discussion.

These texts preserve much older accounts of intelligent non-human beings interacting with humanity, and there are enough similarities to ask whether a connection exists without pretending we’ve already established one.

Where that investigation eventually leads remains an open question. It is also one I examine at greater length in In the Shadow of Goliath: where does the ancient testimony end, and where does our modern interpretation of it begin?

A Word from the Editor
Whatever eventually turns out to be true about UAPs, the test Christians need was given to us long before radar or satellites. Deuteronomy told Israel that a sign could be genuine and its message could still be a lie, and John told the early church to test every spirit rather than trust one on the strength of what it could do. That is the discernment this piece is really asking for. No being, however old or advanced, gets to hand us a new god or a new gospel. Whoever or whatever shows up, Christ remains “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), and that is where our confidence stays.

Sources and References

1: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, “Read the book of Enoch,” X, April 19, 2026.
https://x.com/realannapaulina/status/2045667951022371155

2: Angela Kim Harkins, Kelley Coblentz Bautch, and John C. Endres, eds., The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions (Fortress Press, 2014).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22nmb25

Henryk Drawnel, “Knowledge Transmission in the Context of the Watchers’ Sexual Sin with the Women in 1 Enoch 6-11,” The Biblical Annals 2, no. 1 (2012): 123-151.
https://czasopisma.kul.pl/index.php/ba/article/view/836

3: Greg Eghigian, After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon (Oxford University Press, 2024), particularly the discussion of UFO contactees and claims concerning technologically, intellectually, and morally superior beings.
https://academic.oup.com/book/56340/chapter-abstract/445467230

4: All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, U.S. Department of Defense, UAP reports and official imagery documentation.
https://www.aaro.mil/Next-AARO-Home-redesign/Next-Parent/Next-UAP-Report-Documents/
https://www.aaro.mil/Next-AARO-Home-redesign/Next-Parent/Next-AARO-Congressional-Press-Products/

Editor Comment: Deuteronomy 13 teaches that a sign can be real and its message can still be false, and that distinction protects believers from being fooled by power alone. You end the piece with Christ's unchanging identity instead of a verdict on UAPs, and that keeps the reader's eyes on what won't move.