Our commentary
Nephilim and UFOs
Our own look at a common question, by David Dell. The background on this page is ours, not a summary of the book.
The Nephilim get only a few verses in the Bible, yet they've become a fixture of UFO talk. Here's what the text actually says, and why people make the connection.
The text
“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” Genesis 6:4 (KJV)
The word translated “giants” in the King James Version is the Hebrew nephilim. The earliest Greek translation, the Septuagint, rendered it gigantes, and many English Bibles followed. Some scholars derive the word from a Hebrew root meaning “to fall,” which gives readings like “fallen ones”; others propose different meanings. The texts themselves say very little. The Nephilim appear once more, in the report of the spies Moses sent into Canaan:
“And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” Numbers 13:33 (KJV)
Giants in the Book of Enoch
The ancient Jewish book 1 Enoch tells the Genesis 6 story at length. In it the Watchers take human wives, “and they bare great giants” (1 Enoch 7:2, tr. R.H. Charles). As we explain on our page Who were the Watchers?, 1 Enoch is useful background to how Genesis 6 was read, but it isn't Scripture for most Christians.
Where UFOs come in
The “ancient astronaut” writer Zecharia Sitchin claimed that the Nephilim of Genesis were the Anunnaki, a technologically advanced race from a planet he called Nibiru. That's the “aliens in the Bible” reading, and it's popular. (We look at what Scripture does and doesn't say about life elsewhere in What does the Bible say about aliens?)
A Christian reading turns that idea around. If the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 were angels, as many early Jewish and Christian readers held, then the story isn't about visitors from another planet. It's about beings from the unseen realm crossing a line they were never meant to cross, and the New Testament speaks of angels who sinned and were judged:
“For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;” 2 Peter 2:4 (KJV)
Jesus also pointed back to the days before the Flood:
“But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” Matthew 24:37 (KJV)
Some Christians read that as a hint that the strangeness of Noah's day could return. Others take it more simply, as a warning that people will be unprepared, as they were before the Flood. Either way, the verse is about the coming of the Son of man, not about UFOs, and any link between the two is an interpretation to be weighed with care. For the end-times passages people most often cite, see The Book of Revelation and UFOs.
Sources: Genesis 6:4; Numbers 13:33; 2 Peter 2:4; Matthew 24:37 (KJV) · Nephilim · Zecharia Sitchin · 1 Enoch, tr. R.H. Charles (1917)