GENETICS
A UFO Cult That Offers Alleged Human Cloning Services
Is this fraud or something else?
It certainly sounds crazy and is easy to dismiss. A genuine UFO cult from the 1970’s known as Raëlism created a media frenzy in 2002 when it claimed to have cloned the first ever human being. Their claim was initially taken seriously at the time. The first ever clone, Dolly the sheep was publicly unveiled in 1997. There were credible researchers that had demonstrated successful technology for human cloning by 2001, but terminated the experiments for legal purposes and never attempted a full human clone. The ethics and legality was controversial and the Raëlism sects’ claims lead to calls to ban such practices. A senator sued for legal custody of the alleged child and before the cult could ever provide any evidence of it’s claims, there was a legal battle for custody of the child. The whole thing was eventually deemed a hoax as scientific evidence was never provided.
However, if the claims were true the challenges over custody clearly would’ve deterred the group from providing evidence. Whether the claims were true or not, the cult appears very serious about the subject of pushing human cloning and gene editing forward and the subsequent banning of the research/practice inevitably drove such efforts underground where they likely evade the prying eyes of the public. With designer babies now being somewhat a mainstream subject and Raëlism supporting that practice as well, perhaps we should ask ourselves just how much of this kind of research is currently happening underground? Groups such as this UFO cult are driven by ideology and likely operate with a different set of ethics and with contempt for legal regulations. After over 20 years, is it possible this group continued their efforts underground outside of the public scientific community?
This whole movement/cult is a wild ride to investigate, but the main focus of this article is their belief in immortality through cloning and claims of cloning as well as apparent active services offered in genetic engineering and cloning. Basically, exploring if we should be concerned that they did, are and/or will be the first to clone human beings.
In order to explore this idea deeper we need to explore where the technology currently is as well as the intent and capability of the cult in question. When we explore where the technology was back then it’s understandable why the initial claims of cloning were taken seriously. It was considered unlikely, but possibly true. It was certainly more likely if serious ethical shortcuts were taken. Eventually it was deemed a hoax because there was no evidence, but the technology over 20 years later only makes it more believable that such a cult could pull this off. It’s important to understand that the only thing today keeping human clones from being made is not technology, but laws and ethical concerns. When we explore this cult, there is certainly reason to believe they have the intent. If we assume the intent never went away, regardless if the initial claims were a hoax or not, the capability certainly could be there by now.
The discovery of the principles behind CRISPR (revolutionary gene editing technology) actually happened in 1993.
Many people regard CRISPR to have been pioneered by Jennifer Doudna & Emmanuelle Charpentier, however, the discovery of the principle of CRISPR (Clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats) was discovered by Francisco Mojica during his work with bacteria in the marshes of Santa Pola, when he noticed that parts of the DNA in the bacteria repeated many times, with regular spaces in between.
Over the next 10 years, Mojica continued to look deeper into these repeats until his critical discovery in 2003 that the repeating DNA matched alongside pieces of DNA that matched the viruses attacking the bacteria. This principle led to many other advancements in DNA study over the next decade that brought the tool of CRISPR gene editing to the forefront of today’s study of genetics.
https://www.synthego.com/learn/genome-engineering-history
Brigitte Boisselier holds two PhD’s in chemistry and a masters degree in biochemistry. She converted to Raëlism in 1992 and became scientific director of Clonaid in 1997. This is the name given to the project tasked with creating the first human clone. In 2000, Mark Hunt, a politician from West Virginia gave Clonaid $500k to clone his late son. The revelation caused an uproar and the FDA shut down the lab and made Hunt promise not to clone his son in the US. Clonaid was being run by a well educated true believer and the science of the time was arguably close to being possible. Additionally, the cult had women volunteering to act as surrogates for the research, which gave them a huge advantage. Does this mean they actually pulled it off? No. However, it appears to be a legitimate group of true believers with a fairly large following and access to some of the necessary resources. If they didn’t pull it off in 2001, could they bull if off in 2022? If they are serious, isn’t this a matter of when and not if?
CBS reported in 2003 that Clonaid was seeking venture capital and raised $1M. “Boisselier said she’s setting up a new lab on a Brazilian island to produce the next generation of baby clones — away from U.S. investigators who suspect Clonaid has gotten a cloning scam down to a science.”
It’s not clear why she would chose Brazil for her next cloning lab, but it’s an awfully interesting choice. Perhaps figuring that out requires some more digging. This does seem like a good time to point out that I’ve covered the subject of potentially clandestine illegal human genetic engineering being connected to a bizarre alien abduction story from the late 90’s.
This article explains how science has undisputedly known since 2007 that human cloning is possible and questions why nobody has ever done it. It ironically recounts the Clonaid story and points odd how bizarre it is that multiple people immediately announced intent to clone humans after Dolly the sheep, but now all is quiet. Is it really absurd to speculate that groups like Clonaid learned to keep such intent to themselves because of the popular backlash?
Let’s take a moment to compare this to another cult. It’s worth pointing out that Scientology is arguably a dangerous cult that infamously gained legal protection as a religion. It also believes it’s based on science and that humans have an alien origin story. It’s not classically categorized as a UFO cult, but that’s arguably an issue of semantics. UFO’s technically are not alien or ET in nature by definition, but over the years that assumed connotation has been associated with it. Scientology focuses not on the craft, but the alien origin mythos (which also isn’t revealed unless your deep into it.) Raëlism in a way does focus on the actual craft as part of it’s origin mythos because its official symbol is what their prophet claims he saw on the craft. Interestingly, that symbol is a swastika inside the Star of David. This is the same image Kanye recently tweeted, however, there is no reason to believe he was referencing Raëlism.
Considering Raëlism’s beliefs in genetics and how society should be structured does bare some similarities to Nazism, it is a red flag of concern. Raëlists deny any association and they certainly are far more liberal in worldview, but fundamentally embrace a society where one group deemed intellectually superior clones itself to achieve immortality and governance over society. It’s fundamentally and even admittedly an anti-democratic belief system. It also has the same ethical pitfalls of eugenics although it’s not specifically race based. Considering the rise of Scientology it seems imperative not to simply laugh off this Raëlism. Even if you think that they are not actually engaged in any genetic research the mere fact that they are advertising their services to this day is concerning. Such a grift, if it is that, could conceivably take the form of human trafficking with true believers simply believing they have carried a clone and willingly giving away their children to customers that can’t verify anything. There is no evidence that this is what’s happening and it sounds absurd, but cults have been known to do worse. True believers are capable of just about anything.
There’s a lot of things controversial about Raëlism as well as topics such as genetic engineering and cloning. Society at large isn’t having the general ethical questions around the technological advances in genetic engineering that it should. The technology is here. The moment we cloned a sheep in 1996 it was obvious the only thing stopping us from cloning humans was desire and willpower. Over 25 years later we are not having this discussion. Meanwhile true believers such as the apparently growing movement of Raëlists have made it clear they have every intention to embrace this technology. As one religious group ensures it’s legally banned or shunned, we have another that can either use legal loopholes and/or illegal/unethical practices to operate under the radar. Somewhere in between there is a necessary and legitimate discussion the rest of us should be having publicly. What are the ethics of designer babies and cloning?
If you want to learn more about Raëlism there are three published books that explore it. 1 2 3
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