UFOs in the Bible? Ezekiel's Wheel, the Pillar of Fire and the Nephilim

The ancient-astronaut reading of the Bible holds that its writers saw real flying machines and real visitors and described them in the only vocabulary they had: chariots, clouds, wheels, angels, gods. Erich von Däniken made the argument popular in "Chariots of the Gods?" in 1968, and a NASA engineer named Josef Blumrich gave it its most famous exhibit with "The Spaceships of Ezekiel" in 1974. Half a century later the same handful of passages carry the theory: Ezekiel's vision by the river Chebar, the pillar of cloud and fire in Exodus, Elijah's fiery chariot, the Nephilim of Genesis 6, Zechariah's flying scroll and the Star of Bethlehem.

This article takes each in turn: what the text says, what the ancient-astronaut reading makes of it, and what scholars of the ancient Near East say the writers meant. It ends with where the churches themselves stand on life elsewhere, which is more relaxed than most people expect.

In 593 BCE, among the Judean exiles in Babylon, the priest Ezekiel saw a storm cloud from the north with fire flashing inside it, and in it four living creatures, each with four faces (human, lion, ox, eagle) and four wings, moving in any direction without turning. Beside each was a wheel "as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel," gleaming like beryl, with rims full of eyes, that rose from the ground when the creatures rose. Above them was a crystal expanse, and above that a throne, and on it a figure like a man wrapped in fire and rainbow. Ezekiel fell on his face.

Blumrich, who designed structures for the Saturn V at NASA's Marshall center, set out to refute von Däniken and decided instead that the chapter was an accurate description of a landing craft: a central body with four helicopter-like rotor units, each on a landing leg ending in a wheel that could roll in any direction. He patented the omnidirectional wheel. Scholars point out that every element of the vision has an address in Babylonian art and Israelite religion: composite winged creatures like the lamassu that guarded Assyrian palaces, the wheeled throne-chariot of a god, the storm-god's cloud and fire, the sapphire pavement of Exodus 24. Ezekiel is describing the throne of God leaving the Temple to be with the exiles, in the imagery of a people who lived among Babylonian throne-rooms. The later Jewish mystical tradition of the merkabah, the divine chariot, grew directly out of this chapter.

Exodus says the Israelites were led through the wilderness by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, which moved ahead of them and stood between them and the Egyptian army at the sea. Ancient-astronaut writers read a hovering craft with a searchlight; some point out that Mount Sinai's smoke, fire, thunder and trumpet blast in Exodus 19 sound like a landing. Historians of religion read the standard theophany of the storm god, shared across the region: Baal rides the clouds in Ugaritic poems, and Yahweh is repeatedly "he who rides on the clouds" in the Psalms. The pillar is the visible sign of a presence, not a vehicle.

Elijah, in 2 Kings 2, is taken up "by a whirlwind into heaven" as "a chariot of fire and horses of fire" separate him from Elisha. The chariot is the war-vehicle of kings and gods, fire is the substance of the divine, and the whirlwind is the storm again. Enoch, who "walked with God and was not, for God took him" in Genesis 5, is the other biblical figure taken up alive, and the later Books of Enoch describe his tour of the heavens in detail. Those books are also where the theory's next exhibit lives.

Genesis 6:1–4 is four verses long and has generated more alien theology than the rest of the Bible put together. "The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and took wives for themselves," and their offspring were the Nephilim, "the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown." The Book of Enoch, a Jewish text of the third to first centuries BCE, expands it into the story of two hundred Watchers who descend on Mount Hermon, teach humanity metalwork, cosmetics and sorcery, and father giants, for which God sends the Flood.

For Zecharia Sitchin and his successors the sons of God are the Anunnaki, the Watchers are their crew, and the giants are hybrids; the story appears, almost unchanged, in modern claims about hybrid programs. Scholars read it as a fragment of an older myth of divine beings and human women, of the kind found across the ancient world, retained in Genesis to explain the giants of Canaanite legend and to set up the Flood. The word Nephilim probably means "fallen ones." Rabbinic and later Christian tradition mostly demoted the sons of God to the line of Seth or to fallen angels. Nobody in antiquity took them for visitors from another star, because nobody in antiquity had the concept. The Anunnaki article follows this thread into Sumer.

Zechariah 5 describes a flying scroll twenty cubits long and ten wide, about thirty by fifteen feet, which ancient-astronaut writers have measured as a craft. In context it is a curse on thieves and perjurers, written out at the dimensions of the Temple porch, one of a series of visions in which the prophet sees measuring lines, lampstands and a woman in a basket; it is symbolic architecture, not aviation.

The Star of Bethlehem, which "went before" the Magi and "stood over where the young child was," is the passage most often called a UFO on the grounds that stars do not do that. Astronomers have proposed a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BCE, a nova, a comet, or Jupiter's stationary point in 6 BCE; some scholars think Matthew is composing a fulfillment of Balaam's prophecy that "a star shall come out of Jacob" rather than reporting an observation at all. Either way, the guiding star is a familiar device in ancient birth stories of kings.

The general objection to the UFO reading is not that the passages are unspectacular but that they are legible. Ancient Near Eastern texts and images supply the vocabulary: winged hybrids, wheeled thrones, storm clouds, fire, the chariot of the sun. The biblical writers used those forms deliberately, and their first readers understood them as descriptions of divine presence. Reading a rocket into Ezekiel requires assuming the writer saw a machine, could not recognize it, and described it with perfect accuracy anyway, while ignoring that every strange detail has a documented meaning in the culture he came from.

The reading also depends on translation choices. "Wheel in the middle of a wheel" is one rendering of a difficult Hebrew phrase; the eyes on the rims may be "gleams" or jewels; the "living creatures" are the cherubim that Ezekiel names outright in chapter 10. Von Däniken and Blumrich worked from modern translations, not the Hebrew. That is not a small point when the whole argument rests on the literal shape of the words.

The irony of the topic is that mainstream religion is more comfortable with extraterrestrial life than the UFO reading assumes. The Vatican Observatory has hosted astrobiology conferences since 2009; its director, Brother Guy Consolmagno, has written that he would baptize an alien "if she asked." Pope Francis said in a 2014 homily that if Martians came asking for baptism he could not refuse. The Church of England, the Orthodox churches and most Protestant denominations have no doctrine against life elsewhere, and Jewish tradition has debated inhabited worlds since the Middle Ages. Islam's Quran refers to God as Lord of "the worlds" and to creatures "in the heavens and the earth."

What theologians resist is not aliens but the specific claim that the biblical God was one. The ancient-astronaut reading demotes every theophany to a misunderstood engineering event, which is why it lands as an attack on the text rather than an interpretation of it. The passages remain what they have always been: some of the strangest and most visual writing in the Bible, which is exactly why they attract the theory. Ancient astronaut theory covers the wider argument, and how aliens changed religion looks at the reverse influence.