Mystical and futile sentences
I have chosen you for a very difficult mission, and I have many things to tell you
He arrived alone on a Thursday morning, three weeks before Christmas, to go for a jog in the cold, gray air. The Puy-de-Lassolas is the slightly taller of pair of peaks situated among the greater Chaîne des Puys, a 35-million-year-old volcanic range, located in central France. It’s a fine place to get lost for a moment and escape the world.
Claude Vorilhon took a final look at the fog-covered mountain, before heading back to the car for the ride home. A red light began flashing, as an object silently descended. It was, on closer inspection, not a helicopter, but perhaps a large balloon of some kind? It only came into the sharp relief as it hovered 60 feet above the ground. A long-time believer in extraterrestrial life, the 27-year-old editor and hobbyist race car driver finally accepted what he was seeing.
The flying saucer touched down. The door opened and a figure walked off. Vorilhon mistook the four foot passenger for a child, before recognizing that it was, in fact, a small man with long, black hair, a small beard and “slightly almond-shaped eyes.” His skin had the faintest green hue, matching the green one-piece suit that covered most of his body.
The being smiled and returned the Earthling’s bow.
“Where do you come from?” Vorilhon asked, sensibly.
“From very far away,” the small man answered in a perfect, nasal French, his body radiating a faint halo Vorilhon believed to be some manner of force field. The small man confirmed that he was, in fact, an alien. He was a regular visitor to this planet, who had managed to learn all of its languages during his travels.
“Have you read the Bible?” the visitor asked. Vorilhon answered in the affirmative. He wasn’t religious, but the impulse to read the text had overtaken him a few days prior. “I used telepathy to make you decide to buy it,” the little greenish man explained. “I have chosen you for a very difficult mission, and I have many things to tell you.”
Vorilhon describes the remainder of the encounter in 1974’s The Book Which Tells the Truth, which he quickly followed up with Extraterrestrials Took Me to their Planet the following year. The visitor was an Eloha, a member of an ancient Elohim race who had come to Earth for the explicit purpose of spreading his word through Vorilhon.
“Yes, to you, Claude Vorilhon, editor of a small motor sport magazine, married and father of two children,” he said. He illuminated the mission over the course of several return visits, finally revealing that the writer was destined to found his own religion.
“You will call your movement Madech, - ‘movement forwelcoming the Elohim, creators of humanity,’ which carries in its initials a message, Moise a devancé Elie et le Christ,” he explained, “which means: Moses preceded Elijah and the Christ.”
Over the course of their visits, the Eloha explained that his race were the origin of all life on Earth. Roughly 25,000 years ago, an extraterrestrial scientist name Yahweh programmed a pair of biological robots name “Adam and Eve.”
On a return visit, the little visitor explained,
Only the parts of the Bible that I will translate are important. Other parts are merely poetic babblings of which I will say nothing. I am sure you can appreciate that, thanks to the law, which said that the Bible had always to be re-copied without changing even the smallest detail, the deepest meaning has remained intact throughout the ages, even if the text has been larded with mystical and futile sentences.
Vorilhon’s career as a test driver ended in late-1973, when several countries introduced new speed restrictions, in a bid to save fuel amid an oil crunch. In 1974, he ceased publication of Auto Pop, the racing magazine he’d founded only a year prior. But work as a prophet would keep him in print for decades to come.
“I have written four other books, one entitled Geniocracy (1978), which describes an advanced form of democracy advocated by the Elohim,” he later wrote, “Sensual Meditation (1980), a teaching book of vital meditative practices designed by the Elohim to awaken our senses fully and help us achieve true inner harmony, Yes to Human Cloning (2000), which outlines the scientific advances soon to be part of our lives in the areas of cloning and nanotechnology, and The Maitreya, an anthology selected by leading Raelians of my more recent contemporary lectures and talks.”
His work celebrated Elohim-inspired concepts of free love, lowering the voting age, ending nuclear testing, promoting women’s LGBTQ rights and installing condom machines in Catholic high schools. Protests drew public attention, sometimes in alien costumes and otherwise partially nude, in conjunction with their annual Go Topless Day founded in 2007.
It was, however, a 2002 event that brought the group its highest profile press coverage to date.
On December 27th, at 11:55AM, a 31-year-old American woman gave birth to a healthy seven-pound baby girl via Caesarean section. Born somewhere outside of the U.S., Eve was, allegedly, a human clone. Clonaid, a Bahamanian-registed company funded by Vorilhon, claimed responsibility for the project. As the Raelian founder noted in Yes to Human Cloning, the technology was the first step toward unlocking eternal human life.
“[Vorilhon is] my spiritual leader,” Cloanid spokesperson and Raelian leader, Brigitte Boisselier, said at a press conference announcing the birth. “He's the founder of the Raelian movement. When all of these establishment [people were] saying, ‘this is not acceptable, we shouldn't have a human baby cloned any time,’ we couldn't accept that. To us, as Raelians to stop science is not possible. It shouldn't be allowed. Science can go be the worst and the best for humanity, but I choose to think that this is for the best.”
By March 2004, the organization announced the birth of its 13th clone. The organization noted in a press release,
Dr Boisselier who has already successfully helped 5 couples to have a baby through human cloning technology is now in Australia where she will visit the cloned baby expected to be born in the next couple of days. She is also meeting with other parents to be and is helping them to build the Australian Human Clone Rights Foundation.
Sources:
Intelligent Design: Messages From the Designers https://www.rael.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Intelligent_Design_ENGLISH.pdf
Eve: the first human clone? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eve-first-human-clone/
Clonaid claims it has cloned a baby girl https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/bn/date/2002-12-27/segment/06