Raëlism

Raëlism is a new religious movement founded by Claude Vorilhon, known as Raël. It teaches that extraterrestrials called the Elohim created humanity through advanced science and will return when humanity is ready.

Raël: Raël is the religious name of Claude Vorilhon, founder and principal leader of Raëlism. His claimed encounters with the Elohim provide the movement’s founding revelation.
Claude Vorilhon: Claude Vorilhon is a French former automobile journalist who founded Raëlism and adopted the name Raël. His personal claims and leadership shaped the movement from its beginning.
Clonaid: A company founded by Raëlians that claimed to pursue human reproductive cloning. Its high-profile cloning claims brought the movement’s scientific aspirations into public controversy.
Young Earth creationism: The belief that Earth and life were created by God within roughly the past ten thousand years. Unlike Raëlism’s extraterrestrial account, it attributes creation to divine action on a short biblical timescale.
Cloning controversy: Public and ethical disputes over the safety, legality, and morality of human cloning. Clonaid’s announcements drew Raëlism into debates about whether reproductive cloning should be pursued.
Elohim: Elohim is a Hebrew term used in the Bible for God or gods and, in Raëlism, for extraterrestrial scientists. Raëlism reinterprets this biblical word as the name of humanity’s creators.
UFO religion: A religious movement or belief system that interprets extraterrestrial beings or spacecraft in spiritual terms. Raëlism belongs to this broader family of movements linking revelation with extraterrestrial life.
Human cloning: The production of a genetically near-identical copy of a human being. Raëlians have promoted cloning as a possible route to extending life, echoing their creation story.
Intelligent design: The claim that features of life are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than undirected processes. Both challenge purely natural accounts of life’s origins, but Raëlism identifies its designers as extraterrestrials.
Human cloning claims by Clonaid: Unverified announcements by Clonaid in 2002 that it had produced cloned human babies. The claims generated global media attention, but the organization provided no independent verification.

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