Eve Redux: The Public Confusion over Cloning. (Essay) (Clonaid and Media Coverage‪)‬

As any well-informed newspaper reader knows by now, the white-robed prophet Rael (nee Claude Vorilhon) is a soft-spoken, French-born, Canadian-based apostle of cloning technology who claims to have been conceived by a human mother and a space alien. The former race car driver also claims to have had two encounters with aliens in the 1970s and to have boarded their spaceship. He believes that humans were created by cloning techniques developed by alien civilizations, and he has established a sect called the Raelians to promote human reproductive cloning, to the point of forming a private company called Clonaid. Rael considers himself a half-brother to Jesus Christ and requests that visitors address him as "Your Holiness." In the calculus of most working journalists, the combination of UFO-ology, prophetic megalomania, and alien conception would ordinarily land Rael and his followers on the gentle, lowland slopes of any credibility curve. And yet a steady stream of writers--sometimes from prominent publications--have made the pilgrimage to "U.F.O.-land" in Valcourt, Quebec, to interview Rael (apparently some even agreed to submit questions in advance and call him "Your Holiness"). For its loony entertainment value, Rael and his be-robed colleagues make for an irresistible human interest story, but that also helps explain why Raelian claims to have created a cloned human child named "Eve" received such widespread and frenzied attention in the press in December 2002. Although the sect did not provide a shred of scientific evidence to back up its claim, the news prompted a familiar, even reflexive cultural reaction: social conservatives fulminated, the president reiterated his absolute opposition to all forms of cloning, and respectable scientists were left shaking their heads.