Science Friction

The clone ranger

by Chris Wright

In December 1973, at a remote spot in central France, a 26-year-old sportswriter named Claude Vorilhon received a strange visitation. "I had an encounter exactly like the movie Close Encounters," he says from his home in Montreal. "I was a little bit worried when I saw a flying object, and I was looking for a weapon, but the being who came out had a warm smile."

The being turned out to be an alien, an Elohim. "I have many things to tell you," the Elohim said, "and I have chosen you for a difficult mission." The alien renamed Vorilhon "Rael" ("In their language it means `The Messenger' ") and told him some home truths about the human race -- namely, that we are all Elohim clones, the result of an intergalactic genetic experiment.

Rael -- who says he still receives a telepathic message every August 6 from Elohim authorities -- now heads the Raelian Religion, a worldwide organization with 50,000 members. "My mission," he says, "is to be an ambassador." So far, Rael's efforts to build an embassy in Jerusalem -- from which he hopes to welcome the Elohim back to earth -- have been hampered by the Israeli government.

His drive to reproduce the Elohim's cloning experiment, meanwhile, is going very nicely.

Last month, having found a couple willing to foot the considerable bill, the Raelians' Clonaid program announced it was close to cloning the first human baby. "These people had a baby that died at 10 months because of a medical mistake," says Rael. "They wanted to have this baby back. It's a perfect case."

Rael expects the experiment, which is being conducted at a laboratory in the Bahamas, to be completed by the end of 2001. "People laughed at me when I said cloning will come," he says. "Now they know it is happening."

Not everyone, however, is so gung-ho about the prospect. "Cloning is a horrific idea," says Richard Hayes, coordinator of the Exploratory Initiative on the New Human Genetic Technologies, a San Francisco-based think tank. "The idea that the Raelians would even consider doing this is a sign that we need global prohibition."

A genetics skeptic at the best of times, Hayes shudders at the idea of the Raelians' producing the first cloned human. "They're a group of fanatics," he says. "They're obsessed with this idea of manufacturing human beings." Their success, he adds, "will open us up to a world where people are thought of as objects -- a potentially horrific human future."

Rael dismisses these objections as "silly."

"People are afraid of science and they always have been on earth," he says. "They should be controlling biological weapons and nuclear weapons, not pro-life technology." And he scoffs at such notions as a "post-human" society. "People cry, `Oh, you create a monster,' " he says, "but every day human beings are making love and creating monsters. Adolf Hitler was not created by cloning."

And to those who think the Raelian Religion is just plain daft, Rael says this: "I am a rational person. Believing in God is totally unrational. Believing in evolution is totally unrational. You cannot reproduce God in a laboratory. You cannot make a man from a monkey in a laboratory. But we can create life in a laboratory. That's possible."