Raël (Claude Vorilhon)

Early life and career

Claude Maurice Marcel Vorilhon was born on 30 September 1946 in Vichy, France. Public accounts of his childhood are thin and largely self-reported: Raëlian biographical material describes an unsettled upbringing and an early pull toward performance and speed rather than religion or the occult. As a young man he recorded pop songs under the name Claude Celler before moving into motorsport journalism, eventually founding and editing a racing magazine, Autopop, and working as a test driver on the French circuit. Nothing in the public record ties him to esoteric movements, UFO research, or fringe spirituality before December 1973 — by his own telling and by that of journalists who later profiled him, he was a secular, unremarkable figure in provincial French media until the encounter that would define the rest of his life.

The first encounter, 13 December 1973

Raël's origin story begins on a specific date and in a specific place: the crater of an extinct volcano, Puy de Lassolas, near Clermont-Ferrand in central France. According to Vorilhon's account, a small, luminous, bell-shaped craft descended silently from the sky, and a diminutive humanoid being emerged — roughly four feet tall, olive-skinned, with long dark hair and a faint beard, dressed in a green one-piece suit. The being addressed him fluently in French and, over what Raël describes as several days of return visits, explained that it belonged to a species called the Elohim (a Hebrew word from Genesis usually translated as "God" but which Raël insists is a plural meaning "those who came from the sky"). The Elohim, the being said, were an advanced extraterrestrial civilization that had scientifically engineered all life on Earth, including human beings, in laboratories roughly 25,000 years ago — a literal, biotechnological reading of Genesis in which prophets, angels, and God himself were rebranded as alien scientists and their technology. Vorilhon was told he had been chosen — in part because of his ordinariness and lack of religious indoctrination — to serve as the Elohim's messenger to a humanity now technologically mature enough to receive the truth, and that he was to take the name Raël, said to mean "messenger of the Elohim" or "light of God." He also says he was told he was the product of an Elohim father and human mother, making him, in the movement's later theology, a half-brother to Jesus, Buddha, and other historical prophets it recasts as earlier Elohim envoys.

The second encounter and the completed message, 1975

Raël reports a follow-up experience on 7 October 1975, in which he was taken aboard an Elohim craft and transported to their home planet, where he says he met with a council of the Elohim's created prophets and — notably — was granted a private audience that included physical intimacy with female android-like escorts, an episode that would later feed into the movement's embrace of open sexuality. This second encounter forms the basis of his second book, Les Extra-terrestres M'ont Emmené sur Leur Planète (Extraterrestrials Took Me to Their Planet, 1975), which together with his first book, Le Livre Qui Dit la Vérité (The Book Which Tells the Truth, 1974), constitutes what Raëlians treat as their core scripture, later republished in English as Intelligent Design: Message from the Designers.

Founding the Raëlian movement

Vorilhon began touring France giving public lectures within months of the first encounter, and by 1974 had formalized a following into what became the Raëlian movement (officially the International Raëlian Movement, later rebranded in some materials simply as "Raëlism"). Structurally the group borrowed the trappings of a church — a hierarchy of "Guides" and "Bishops," formal baptism-like "transmission of the cellular plan" ceremonies, tithing, and an annual "Raëlian Happiness Academy" retreat — while explicitly rejecting the label of religion in favor of a self-described atheistic, materialist, scientific worldview: there is no God, only a technologically superior species that has been mistaken for one throughout human history. The movement expanded through the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s across French-speaking Europe, Quebec, Japan, and South Korea, and Raël relocated its operational center more than once, eventually establishing UFOland, a theme-park-like headquarters and welcome center in Quebec intended, in part, to prepare for the Elohim's eventual public return.

Doctrine and practices

Raëlian theology fuses several distinct strands. Its cosmology holds that the Elohim created life on Earth via genetic engineering and periodically sent messengers — Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha — to nudge humanity's moral and scientific development, with Raël himself cast as the final and "greatest" of these messengers, tasked specifically with building diplomatic relations before the Elohim's physical return. The movement is emphatically pro-science and transhumanist: it has campaigned enthusiastically for human cloning as a path toward a kind of technological immortality ("you can live forever through cloning," as Raël has put it), and it promotes "Geniocracy," a political system in which voting rights and governance would be restricted to those of demonstrably high intelligence. Socially, the movement is libertine relative to mainstream religion, promoting what it calls "sensual meditation," open relationships, and (controversially, discussed below) liberalized attitudes toward youth sexual education. Raëlian-affiliated initiatives have included Clitoraid, a charity aimed at reconstructive surgery for survivors of female genital mutilation, and the topless-rights campaign GoTopless.org. A recurring, unrealized project has been the construction of an "embassy for the Elohim" — funded by member donations — that Raël has requested be built in or near Jerusalem to formally welcome the aliens on their return; Israeli authorities have never granted the movement land or permission for it. Membership figures are supplied entirely by the movement itself and are unverifiable by outside researchers; the group claimed roughly 60,000–100,000 adherents through the 1990s and 2000s and cited a figure above 130,000 around its 50th anniversary in 2024, concentrated heavily in Japan, Quebec, and France.

Clonaid and the "Eve" controversy

The episode that brought Raël his widest — and most damaging — international notoriety began in 1997, when he founded Clonaid, a company explicitly built around the movement's belief that human cloning was both scientifically achievable and spiritually desirable. On 27 December 2002, Clonaid's CEO, French chemist and ordained Raëlian bishop Brigitte Boisselier, announced at a press conference that Clonaid had produced the world's first cloned human baby, a girl she named Eve, born to an American mother. Over the following weeks Clonaid claimed four additional cloned births in the Netherlands, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. The announcement triggered a global media storm and swift scientific skepticism: no peer-reviewed evidence, independent DNA verification, or even confirmed sighting of any of the children was ever produced, despite Boisselier's repeated promises to submit to testing. Coverage by Scientific American, the CBC, and NPR all documented the claim's collapse under the absence of proof, and later reporting quoted Boisselier acknowledging she had "amused [herself] playing with the journalists" during the saga — language widely read as an admission the entire affair was, at minimum, a publicity stunt for the movement, if not an outright hoax. No scientific body has ever validated a Clonaid birth, and the consensus among cloning researchers is that the technology required did not exist in usable form at the time the claims were made.

Legal battles and bans

The cloning controversy and the movement's sexual teachings repeatedly put Raël in conflict with governments. In August 2003, he was detained for roughly nine hours at Incheon International Airport and then deported from South Korea, a country with a substantial Raëlian following, after officials stated his presence "may hurt our national interests or cause social disorder" — reporting by Al Jazeera tied the ban directly to the Clonaid fallout. In Europe, French and Swiss authorities have long classified the Raëlian movement as a secte (cult) of concern, citing its teachings on "sensual meditation" for minors as, in the words of a 1998 Fribourg Cantonal Court ruling, "theoretically" capable of enabling child sexual abuse, even without evidence of actual abuse by the movement. That characterization underpinned Mouvement Raëlien Suisse v. Switzerland, in which Swiss authorities banned Raëlian promotional posters from public spaces; the movement sued for violation of its freedom of expression, and the European Court of Human Rights' Grand Chamber, in a narrow 2012 ruling (9 votes to 8), sided with Switzerland, finding the restriction proportionate — a case still cited in European debates over new-religious-movement regulation and public-order limits on speech.

Reception and criticism

Outside the movement, Raël is treated almost universally as a case study in new-religious-movement studies rather than as a credible witness to extraterrestrial contact. Scholars of religion (see the Religion Media Centre factsheet and entries in the Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements) generally classify Raëlism as a UFO-based new religious movement built around a single charismatic founder whose authority is unfalsifiable by design — the founding encounter, like most contactee narratives, occurred without independent witnesses or physical evidence. Cloning scientists and bioethicists uniformly reject the Clonaid claims as unsubstantiated, and mainstream ufology itself has largely kept Raël at arm's length, viewing the movement's theatrical publicity stunts (the cloning announcement chief among them) as damaging to the credibility of UFO research generally. His defenders, mostly within the movement, point to the group's five-decade institutional persistence, its humanitarian offshoots like Clitoraid, and Raël's consistency of message as evidence of sincerity rather than fraud. The balance of outside assessment, however, treats both the 1973 encounter and the Clonaid births as unverified claims resting entirely on the word of Raël and his inner circle.

Recent years and legacy

Raël has spent much of his later life based in Japan, historically one of the movement's strongest territories, and more recent reporting places him there with a companion the movement refers to as "Sky." The Raëlian movement marked its 50th anniversary in 2024 amid renewed public attention driven by Raël: The Alien Prophet (released internationally in some markets as Raël: The Last Prophet), a four-part Netflix docuseries directed by Antoine Baldassari and Manuel Guillon that combined interviews with Raël, current members, ex-members, and journalists, and which climbed into Netflix's global Top 10 shortly after its February 2024 release. The documentary reintroduced the Clonaid affair and the movement's more contested teachings to a mainstream audience largely unfamiliar with 1970s French contactee lore, cementing Raël's position less as a figure taken seriously within ufology than as an enduring, singular case study of how a single claimed UFO encounter can be built, deliberately and durably, into an international religious institution.