A Clone of One's Own

Last February, when Brigitte Boisselier, a French chemist, heard that Scottish scientists had produced Dolly, a sheep cloned from an adult cell, she was one of the few researchers whom the news did not surprise. A member of a fringe religious organization called the Raelian Movement, Boisselier had expected such a development: the group’s leader, Rael, had predicted it 23 years before. It seems that Rael, a former French sports journalist, received the news of the impending discovery from extraterrestrials. They send him such announcements periodically, since he’s half E.T. himself. According to a Raelian fact sheet (which could also serve as a script for The X-Files), his mother was transported aboard a ufo, where she was inseminated by one of these otherworldly beings. In 1946, Rael was born from this union, and 27 years later he began receiving messages from the distant paternal side of his family. Most of ...