An ancient religious text that was removed from most Western Christian traditions describes a world that lost its protection and was left desolate. Some modern readers see surprising parallels between those descriptions and what scientists have discovered about Mars. The Book of Enoch, a text that survives in full today largely because Ethiopian Christians preserved it for centuries, contains stories of heavenly beings, forbidden knowledge, judgment, and a world left in ruin. Its descriptions of the heavens and of places marked by destruction have led some to ask whether the ancient book preserved a memory of something that happened on the red planet.
Long before the first spacecraft, Enoch’s writers described a highly ordered universe, with the sun, moon, and stars moving through assigned paths. The book spends considerable time detailing a calendar and the movements of heavenly bodies, presenting the cosmos as a carefully arranged system. Central to the text is the story of beings called Watchers, who were assigned places in that order but chose to cross their boundaries, descending to Earth and taking human wives. According to Enoch, they also taught humans forbidden knowledge, including metalwork and weaponry, leading to increased violence and corruption.
Their offspring, described as giants, became destructive, and the earth descended into chaos. In response, Enoch says, heaven dispatched angels including Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel to intervene. The giants were marked for destruction, while the Watchers were bound and condemned. Notably, the text describes them as being removed from their original place and sent to a desolate, exposed region, separated from the order they had once belonged to.
For early church leaders in the 4th century, these stories of angels taking physical form proved deeply uncomfortable, and the Book of Enoch eventually fell out of use in most of Western Christianity. Its full text was long assumed lost, surviving only in quotations, until Scottish explorer James Bruce brought three complete copies back from Ethiopia in 1773. Later, fragments of Enoch discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 confirmed that the text was genuinely ancient, having circulated long before the medieval Ethiopian manuscripts were produced. The comparison to Mars emerges from scientific findings about the planet’s history.
Billions of years ago, Mars appears to have been a much wetter world, with rivers, lakes, and a thicker atmosphere. It also likely had a global magnetic field, which acted as a protective shield against the solar wind. As the planet’s interior cooled, that field disappeared, leaving the atmosphere exposed. Over vast timescales, solar wind stripped much of the atmosphere away, temperatures dropped, and liquid water vanished from the surface, reshaping the planet into the cold, dry, heavily scarred world seen today.
The text’s image of a place that loses its protection and is left barren aligns, in the eyes of some modern commentators, with what science describes happening to Mars. This interpretation has been fueled by certain features of the planet itself. Valles Marineris, a colossal system of canyons stretching over 4,000 kilometers across the Martian surface, far longer and deeper than Earth’s Grand Canyon, suggests a world violently reshaped. Additionally, in 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft photographed a region called Cydonia, where a mesa, cast in shadow by low sunlight, appeared in the image to resemble a giant human face, alongside nearby formations that some thought looked like pyramids.
Although later, higher-resolution images showed the formation to be a natural geological feature, the initial images sparked decades of speculation about ancient civilizations on Mars. Adding to the mystery are the planet’s two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos. Discovered by American astronomer Asaph Hall in 1877, these dark, irregularly shaped objects are considered strange in their own right. Phobos, which orbits extremely close to Mars, completes a trip around the planet in just over seven and a half hours, faster than the planet rotates.
This causes Phobos to rise in the west and set in the east from the Martian surface, the opposite of Earth’s moon. Its surface is covered with deep craters and grooves, and scientists debate whether it is a captured asteroid or debris from a giant impact on Mars. Some fringe writers have even suggested Phobos could be artificial, though that claim has never been supported by evidence. Notably, the moons bear names from Greek mythology: Phobos, meaning fear, and Deimos, meaning dread, who were companions of Ares, the god of war, later known to the Romans as Mars.
The core question remains unresolved: was Enoch describing the destruction of a real world long before science could observe it, or are modern readers simply finding a connection that was never intended? The text’s authors lived in a world without telescopes, attempting to explain the mysteries of the sky with the knowledge available to them. Today, spacecraft map the planet’s surface and study its atmosphere, yet scientists are still piecing together the full story of how Mars changed.
Meanwhile, the Book of Enoch – once lost to most of the West, preserved by the Ethiopian church, and confirmed ancient by the Dead Sea Scrolls – continues to fascinate readers, offering a rare glimpse into how ancient peoples explained a universe they could not fully see.
