When the aliens landed, they told a young musician and wannabe race car driver that he was the chosen one, and they were the real gods. He should build them an embassy with a UFO landing pad in order to prepare humanity for their arrival. They taught him the secrets of sex meditation and cloning DNA as a way to keep switching bodies and never die.
Not much in his story was original, but this was the 1970s, so free love hippies flocked to his French commune—then it all turned to shit. Somehow Claude kept landing on his feet. He took his schtick to Quebec, then Japan, and even found thousands of followers in Africa. Still no embassy, no divine alien arrival, no cloned human babies—but he kept raising funds from the gullible and living like a king with a ballerina bride 40 years his junior.
For the latest installment in Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian muses on the epic tale of the Raelians.
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And so now we have three scientists working almost full-time in a lab to produce a human embryo by human colony.
Why do you want to do it?
Four years ago when I heard all the...
The establishment saying this is so bad and all these things.
I said, I have to do it and show that this is only a baby.
A little baby, the belated twin of an individual.
And that's it.
It's not a monster.
It's not all, you know, what we have been hearing so many bad things about this baby.
That was the voice of a scientist named Brigitte Boiselier.
Forgive my French pronunciation.
She was appearing on C-SPAN to discuss human cloning.
A year later, on December 27th of 2002, she announced at a press conference in Florida that she and her company, CloneAid, had, in an undisclosed country, successfully cloned the first human being.
If this was true, at the time, it would have been a historic scientific accomplishment, it still would be, albeit a politically and ethically controversial one.
Media coverage and discussion was extensive.
A baby named Eve, she said, was a live-born clone produced for an infertile couple and was an exact genetic copy of her mother.
But Brigitte provided no photo of the baby or any other evidence for what she was saying.
And then two days later, she announced that Eve would be flying into the U.S. with her family the following day.
By the end of the week, she said, She agreed to have a former science editor from ABC select experts who would draw and evaluate the samples from mother and child.
Boisselier, who holds two chemistry doctorates, also said that several more cloned babies were expected to be born in the coming weeks.
I said this was controversial.
In short order, a Florida lawyer named Bernie Siegel filed suit against Brigitte and Clonade on behalf of the child.
He said the child may not be receiving proper medical care and could be at risk for exploitation.
The scientist's defense?
Eve was not born in the U.S. She and her family were, apparently, in Israel, and they had broken off all contact with her.
She said they would never speak to the press.
Now, no evidence for the existence of Eve was ever forthcoming, but Boisillier stayed in the news.
She claimed over the next two years to have been involved in the birth of 13 more clones, never providing any evidence to back up these claims.
Most scientific and journalistic observers at that time came to believe that the whole affair was a hoax designed to generate publicity and money.
But who is this controversial scientist?
What does she have to do with our human destiny to become gods in the image of our alien creators?
Funny you should ask.
I'm Julian Walker.
Welcome to Conspirituality.
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This is the latest installment in my series called The Roots of Conspirituality.
Which has so far traced a lineage from the Great Awakening of the 1840s in America's Northeast, during which true believers in the prophecy of William Miller climbed onto rooftops to await the second coming of Jesus, to Seventh-day Adventist founder Ellen G. White,
whose visionary trances inspired her to forbid masturbation, caffeine, and meat to her followers, to the spiritualists in New York City who performed communication with the dead before packed theaters.
To Russian aristocrat Madame Helena Blavatsky's synthesis of world religions as channeled to her by the ascended masters to the founders of UFO religions of the 1950s who, inspired by Blavatsky, believed that human prophets and sages were actually aliens all along after this was revealed to them during rides on their spaceships.
But who was...
Brigitte Boisillier.
While she's still alive, she was then and remains still a senior figure in a new religious movement started by a Frenchman named Claude Vérion in 1973.
And that movement, called the Raelians, is the subject of our episode today.
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