IncidentThe Raelian Movement (1973-)

Vorilhon said he encountered a saucer-shaped craft over a volcanic crater near Clermont-Ferrand on 13 December 1973; a small humanoid emerged and over six days dictated humanity’s true origins, published in ‘The Book Which Tells the Truth’ (1974). The theology: an extraterrestrial species, the Elohim (Hebrew, mistranslated as ‘God’), created all life on Earth via DNA manipulation ~25,000 years ago, the ~40 historical prophets were Elohim messengers, and adherents must build an embassy with a landing pad to welcome the Elohim’s return. Explicitly atheistic and scientistic (‘Science is our religion’), it grew into a hierarchical global movement claiming tens of thousands of members (a self-reported figure). Its cloning arm Clonaid, directed by chemist Brigitte Boisselier, announced ‘Eve,’ ‘the world’s first human clone,’ at a 27 December 2002 press conference - never substantiated by independent DNA test and widely judged a publicity hoax. The largest and most enduring UFO religion - the institutional culmination of the contactee lineage, complementing Adamski/Meier (contactees) and Heaven’s Gate (the cult endpoint) - and a clean study in an unverifiable founding contact scaled into a global organization plus a discrete, falsifiable secondary claim (the clone) that failed verification in real time.