Raelism
Raelism (also Raëlism; formally the Raelian Movement) is a UFO religion built on a single claimed contactee experience: on December 13, 1973, at the Puy de Lassolas volcanic crater near Clermont-Ferrand, France, the French motorsport journalist Claude Vorilhon says a small humanoid being descended from a saucer-shaped craft, named itself Yahweh, one of the Elohim, and told him to publish what it taught — that the Elohim are an extraterrestrial civilization that genetically engineered all life on Earth about 25,000 years ago. Vorilhon took the name Rael, founded the movement in 1974, and the movement runs Clonaid, the company that announced the first human clone in 2002.
The religion-studies scholar Andreas Grünschloß calls Raelism "the missing link between hardcore versions of Contactee UFO-religions and the quasi-historical Paleo-SETI discourse," and notes that Vorilhon had read the ancient-astronaut writers Charroux and von Däniken before 1973, so that his encounter was, in Grünschloß's words, the "living proof" of what they had argued; if the encounter was real, Vorilhon observed what the Elohim reading of Genesis then explains; if it was not, he either elaborated a reading he already held into an experience or invented one, and the scholars do not say which. Jacques Vallée counts Vorilhon a "notorious sect leader" and records that some speculate the movement drew the attention of "social engineers" interested in managing belief systems, a reading that makes the followers its subjects rather than its dupes. Scholars of religion class Raelism among the UFO religions alongside the Aetherius Society, Heaven's Gate and Unarius, and it interprets the Hebrew Elohim as the name of the alien creators, a position shared with Zecharia Sitchin's framework. The anthropologist Debbora Battaglia, who did fieldwork among Raelians, calls it "the largest ET religion in the world today."
Foundation and initial contact
Vorilhon reports that on December 13, 1973, he felt compelled to leave his route to work and drive to the crater, where after exploring it he saw a red light drop from the sky and a saucer-shaped craft come to rest above him. The being was about 1.2 m tall with almond-shaped eyes and black hair, and green or greenish skin in Grünschloß's and Reece's tellings, though another reference work describes olive skin. It told him he had been chosen for a mission: to tell people the truth about what they are and what the Elohim are, and to write it down and publish it as a book. Over six days of further contact Vorilhon received the message: that the Genesis creation account is a literal record of the Elohim's genetic engineering; that Jesus, Muhammad, Moses and Buddha were Elohim-sent teachers; and that the Elohim will make open contact once humanity proves peaceful and scientifically advanced enough to receive them.
A second contact in 1975, which Vorilhon describes as a journey to the Elohim's home planet, added a world governed by its top scientists, without violence, where death has been conquered through cloning and memory transfer. The Elohim offered humanity the same immortality, conditional on an embassy in Jerusalem, which Raelism has campaigned for since 1976.
The Elohim message
Raelian doctrine holds that all life on Earth was created from scratch about 25,000 years ago by Elohim scientists using DNA technology; that the Elohim are physical beings who achieved immortality through cloning and consciousness transfer; that the Bible, Quran and other scriptures record Elohim contact, decoded by replacing "God" with "the Elohim"; and that the prophets were Elohim incarnated as humans (Jesus's case) or human messengers. In Rael's telling the Elohim scientists' creations began as small animals and ended with an artificial human; their home world, alarmed at the "test tube children," forced them to keep the new humans primitive and to mystify their work, which is why humans received no science. The present age is the age of apocalypse, in which humans are advanced enough to accept the truth; Rael was asked to build an embassy to receive the Elohim upon their return, expected before 2035 with thirty-nine immortal prophets including Jesus and Buddha.
Raelian metaphysics is materialist. Reece reports that souls do not outlive the body; immortality is achieved by revitalizing human bodies through cloning, with memory and personality transferred to a rapidly matured clone, and the DNA and memories of those who died in roughly the last ten centuries are held on file by the Elohim for a "scientific resurrection." The movement's swastika and Star of David symbol is held to be an ancient Elohim emblem; the claim caused controversy and the symbol was replaced in 1992 with a spiral galaxy. Raelians and conservative Christians stand on the same side against evolution as the explanation of human origins, though the Raelian creation story is entirely different.
The Raelian reading of Elohim as a plural noun for extraterrestrial beings parallels Zecharia Sitchin's Anunnaki hypothesis: both take the Hebrew plural to show the Genesis account records physical beings rather than a single deity, and Reece likewise observes that, as with Sitchin, Rael "translates the stories found in the Hebrew Bible into accounts of the intrigues and dramas of the Elohim and their creations." They diverge on motive: Sitchin identifies the Elohim with the Anunnaki of a hypothetical twelfth planet who engineered humanity as a labor species, while Raelism makes them benevolent scientists whose motive was creative and educational. The Elohim article carries the comparison.
Organization and practice
Vorilhon founded the movement as MADECH in 1974 and reorganized it as the Raelian Movement in 1976; it reached North America through French-speaking Canada the same year and publishes in about twenty-five languages, with offices in North Miami Beach, Montreal and Geneva. Leadership runs through six tiers from Rael as "Guide of Guides" to probationers, and the Order of Rael's Angels is women trained for diplomatic roles on the Elohim's arrival. The movement calls itself an atheistic, scientific religion and endorses contraception, abortion, homosexual relationships and sexual pleasure as spiritually beneficial; members undergo a DNA baptism and practice sensual meditation, and the movement has faced cult designations in France and Belgium. It claims over fifty thousand members in over eighty nations, while another reference work gives 80,000 to 100,000, with particular strength in Japan and South Korea. The religious-studies scholar Susan J. Palmer observed the movement for more than fifteen years and published her study as Aliens Adored: Rael's UFO Religion in 2004.
Vorilhon among the contactees
Reece holds that the Raelian movement "is more directly connected to ancient astronaut theories and to the work of von Däniken than is Scientology," while sharing "many elements with the contactee movements," and judges Rael's faith in science "terribly naive," with "no recognition that technology can be used for evil rather than good." Vallée reports that the swastika-in-Star-of-David logo was, allegedly, given to Vorilhon by space aliens, and writes that Vorilhon "has repeatedly met and traveled with them, and was once given a delightful bath by a group of attractive female robots." Vallée also reports an episode of 1988–89: a newspaper advertisement, placed for the trustees of the estate of one A. P. Teesdale of Durham, invited "serious organizations" in contact with extraterrestrials to apply; at a Paris dinner for fifteen the "attorneys" chose Vorilhon over a chemist and a French investigator as recipient of the bequest and handed him a frosted cryogenic container presumed to hold an extraterrestrial talisman. The specimen was never delivered for analysis, the money never came, and the London law firm's address, 31 Sussex Mansions, had no matching number; Vallée asks whether Teesdale existed at all, and why the other candidates, better placed to analyze the talisman, were invited "purely as fillers." Vallée does not say who staged the dinner, or whether Vorilhon knew. Robert Todd Carroll of The Skeptic's Dictionary holds instead that Rael "appropriated" Zecharia Sitchin's ideas; Sitchin's The 12th Planet appeared in 1976, two years after Vorilhon's first book, and Grünschloß names Charroux and von Däniken as the sources Vorilhon had read. Palmer, who observed the movement for more than fifteen years, writes of it as a religion with its own theology and organization.
Battaglia reads the Raelian message as a "second origin" myth, in which benevolent alien scientists made humans in their own image through cloning, and records its Hiroshima dating: Year 1 of the Raelian calendar, and Rael's birthday, is the day Hiroshima was bombed, the point from which humans can grasp that science both creates and destroys life and so prepare to welcome the Elohim back. Her Raelian acquaintances included a neurobiology postdoctoral researcher, a nanotechnologist and a biology graduate student, none of whom would refute evolution from the moment of creation but who shared Rael's objection to kinship with primates. She sets against this a critique she attributes to the anthropologist Carly Machado: that Raelian cosmology "re-invents the colonial model" in a world legitimated by the biotechnological creation of serfs by their masters.
Clonaid and human cloning claims
In 1997 Rael founded Clonaid, a company offering human cloning at a reported $200,000 and directed by the chemist Brigitte Boisselier. On December 27, 2002, at a news conference in Florida, Boisselier announced the birth of the first human clone, a girl named "Eve," and offered no proof beyond a promise of DNA tests within about a week. The former ABC science editor Michael Guillen, who had been asked to arrange independent testing, reported on January 13, 2003 that his team "has had no access to the alleged family" and could not verify the claim, adding that it was "still entirely possible Clonaid's announcement is part of an elaborate hoax." The scientific community expressed skepticism, and the claim was widely dismissed as a hoax. Reece records that the Raelians "were never able to provide any proof of their success." Raelism frames Clonaid as the first step toward the Elohim-promised immortality, which requires perfected cloning as the substrate for consciousness transfer.
Raelism in exopolitics discourse
Jason Jorjani, philosopher and author of Prometheus and Atlas, identifies the Raelian framework as one of the more intellectually coherent attempts to systematize the ancient astronaut hypothesis into a complete theology. On American Alchemy, Jorjani located the Raelian Elohim-as-creator position within a broader lineage: the idea of "using technological science to unlock the secrets of the heavens and achieve parity with the gods" — which he identifies as the defining tension between the creator-Elohim who want humanity servile and a Promethean/Watcher faction who gave humanity elevated knowledge. Raelism sides entirely with the beneficent creators rather than acknowledging this internal conflict within the NHI population.
The Anunnaki-as-Elohim interpretation advanced by Michael Tellinger converges with Raelism in treating the biblical creator beings as physical extraterrestrials who conducted deliberate genetic engineering, but diverges sharply on motivation. Tellinger described the Anunnaki program as exploitative: "To have to experience pain... and be smart enough to follow instructions and repeat manual labor and be able to do complex things while you don't question why you are doing it."
Open questions
References
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