Alien spokesman... \"When they arrive everybody will see them,\" says Real
Rael, a softly spoken Frenchman with a topknot, a medallion, and Flash Gordon shoulder pads, says that aliens told him to abandon his career as a racing-car driver, leave his wife and children and start a worldwide movement to glorify the potential of human cloning. So he did. Later in our meeting, he tells me a subtly different version. \"One day my wife said: 'you have to choose between the movement and me'\"
The world is full of people claiming to have experienced encounters with extraterrestrials - in Rael's case, a meeting in the south of france in 1973 with the pilot of a flying saucer, on top of a mountain. As a rule, the world offers them the same skeptical choice Rael's wife offered him: your fantasy or me, reality. Rael chose to turn his claimed encounter into a career. And whatever the truth of his late-night interstellar epiphanies, he has taken his self-proclaimed mission further than most, to the point of secret laboratories, clients, putting up hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce clones, and investigations by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Rael, in London to promote his new book, Yes to Human Cloning, is careful to keep cheers and whoops as he strides in - a diminutive beard man in what looks like a 23d-century astronaut's natty white leisure suit, complete with matching shoes. His thinning dark brown hair is tied into a knot on the top of his head, and round his neck he wears a big medallion, its motif of a kind of Walnut Whip swirl inside a Star of David - the Raëlian crucifix, if you like. His bearing and his dress sense are somehow redolent of the late Freddy Mercury, circa Live Aid, 1985.
You may think he is one of those dime-a-dozen evangelists who tell you to give your life to the Almighty, and who climax their act with the faithful jitterbugging out of their wheelchairs. Wrong - he doesn't even believe in God. But he does have a message for us all that, if it is true, amounts to the biggest news story in the history of humanity.
It's a gigantic \"if\". He could be the sanest and most trustworthy person on the planet. but the message is so earth-shattering that many think he is either a charlatan, a mischievous performance artist, or a few hit singles short of a jukebox. You're going to have to make up your mind about him. And you're going to have to do it fast, before the spaceships arrive.
Twenty-eight years ago, Raë was Claude Vorilhon, a 27-year-old French racing-car enthusiast with a wife, two children and his own motor sport magazine, Autopop. By his own account, on December 13, 1973, he was walking and jogging around Clermont Ferrand, and in the Auvergne region of France. He reached a volcano called Puy-de-Lassolas, and lingered for a while. Just as he was about to leave, he saw a saucer descending. It was about 7 meters in diameter and 21/2 meters high, and made no sound. A trap door opened, a stairway dropped to the ground, and a 4ft-high space alien with a beard and long black hair, dressed in a green one-piece was invited inside the craft, where the alien concluded the meeting with a request that the Frenchman return tomorrow with a Bible. He ended up returning daily for the next five days, listening with wonder as chunks of the good book were reinterpreted for him. The key revelation was that the Hebrew word 'Elohim' had been mistranslated as 'God' - it is really a plural, and means 'those who came from the sky'.
Humanity, and in fact all life on Earth, was made by alien scientists - people from the same distant planet as this 4ft visitor - using advanced genetic technology. The alien gave Vorilhon his new name Raë, and asked him to spread the news, gather followers, and arrange for an embassy to be built to welcome back the Elohim. It should be built in a pleasant country with mild climate, and should have a landing pad for a 12-meter diameter spacecraft.
