It's 4:15 p.m. in North Miami Beach. The only clue about the unusual inhabitant of this stucco bungalow is the white Mazda van in the driveway. Its vanity plate says: RAELIAN.
Marie-Helene Parent, the owner of the house, answers the door. Three other Raelians, all wearing the medallion, are waiting in the living room, which is decorated with the familiar bare-chested photograph of Rael. They don't shake hands. They don't introduce themselves. They don't smile. One woman adjusts a video camera on a tripod. "We always tape," she says. "For the archives."
As if from nowhere, Rael makes his entrance. With his moustache and goatee, he could be mistaken for a magician in a lounge act in Rimouski, Que. At 54, his thinning grey hair is swept up into a tiny bun the size of an apricot. Not counting the topknot, he's a surprisingly scrawny 5-foot-7, and 136 pounds. As usual, he's wearing an all-white outfit straight out of a Star Trek rerun: white turtleneck, white polyester pants and matching top, with a samurai collar and padded sloping shoulders.
First things first: Where does Rael get these outfits? Answer: A Montreal tailor makes them from his own sketches. "It's all machine washable," he says. "Do you like it?" Searching for a diplomatic adjective, I say it looks, um, hot.
And what's up with the topknot? "It's the remaining hair," says Rael. "Soon it will be just a little . . ." He makes a circle with his fingers, the size of an olive, and laughs. The other Raelians laugh along with him, but decorously.
Third question: Why are his appointments always at 4:15 p.m.? "I'm busy before." Doing what? "Arranging the movement in the world." Rael says he spends about 10 hours a day on his computer, e-mailing supporters and playing computer games, especially virtual-reality car-racing, complete with a steering wheel.
Behind him is a painting by Lear, portraying one of the Elohim as a pale, almond-eyed E.T. They don't look like that, Rael says. So what do they look like? "Like Asian people who have a liver problem," he says. I burst out laughing. No one else does.
Like Cocolios, Rael gives space-cadet answers to the simplest questions. His mother was Catholic, his father, Jewish -- he thought, until he found out he was half E.T. Forgetting his relationship to Jesus, I ask if he has any siblings. "Not to my knowledge, on Earth," he says gravely.
Rael has never tested his DNA against his Earthling father's. "There is nothing to find," he says. "The genetic code of the Elohim mixed with human people created the Jewish people. It will show you I am Jewish and nothing more."
What does his 82-year-old mom make of her extremely close encounter of the third kind? Rael says that the aliens "erased the memory" of her impregnation. But she does tell him, "I understand now why you were so different from other children."
Rael dropped out of school at 15, busked on Paris street corners and dreamed of racing cars. One day it dawned on him that if he started his own sports-car magazine, he could gain entry to racetracks, and maybe get to test-drive new models. So he founded Autopop magazine. He also married and had two children. Three years later, he met the space alien and formed the Raelian movement. Soon thereafter, his wife filed for divorce.
But the alien didn't tell him to stop racing. UFOland displays the trophy from his best race, a third-place finish in the 1997 Dodge Dealers of Connecticut Grand Prix. Asked how he has done lately, Rael says, "Okay." An embarrassed silence ensues. "This will be my last year of racing," he says, adding that he doesn't drive much in Miami because he finds it too slow. Instead, his hostess usually chauffeurs him around.
A curvaceous young woman enters the room and sprawls on a divan. It's Sophie de Niverville, Rael's current wife, whose bare-breasted photos he displays in abundance at his UFOland condo. She's 25, a second-generation Raelian from Quebec, whom he married nearly 10 years ago, right after her 16th birthday. (Her Raelian mother consented to the match.)
Sophie doesn't work. She doesn't want children. Her only job is to be his wife. Alas, she couldn't even cook at first. So Rael, who loves to eat, taught her the basics. "For three weeks we ate only eggs," he says. Sophie smiles placidly. Then she excuses herself to prepare Rael's dinner of grilled Chilean sea bass.
Warming to the subject of food, Rael tells me how much he loves Peking duck. Of France's top restaurants, he particularly recommends Laguiole, which he says has three Michelin stars. "It's five hours from Paris, and half the price," he enthuses. Isn't that a bit far to go for a meal? He chuckles at my naiveté. "They have a heliport."
Like Lear, Rael draws no salary. But he lives well off book royalties and his supporters. All his expenses are covered by Raelian foundations. "People who want to help me buy good food -- Peking duck -- [give me] 1 per cent" of their net income.
We're getting sidetracked. Having read three of his books, I understand why the proposed embassy design calls for a spaceship landing pad. But why the swimming pool and a dining room that seats 21? "I don't know," he says with a shrug. "I just transmit."
The Raelians want to establish their embassy in Jerusalem, for sentimental reasons, because that's where the Elohim ran their first cloning lab. They've asked Israel seven times. Seven times, they've been refused, perhaps because they request demilitarized air space for flying saucers.
I ask Rael how, as a high-school dropout, he managed to become such an expert in biotechnology. He smiles modestly and says that all his knowledge was transmitted to him directly by the Elohim.
By now, the hour is running out. I finally confess that I don't believe they are cloning anything. "People are afraid it's a joke, that there's no lab," Rael cheerfully concedes.
He recently met the cloning couple in Miami. Of course, he is absolutely not at liberty to disclose anything about them at this time. He will say only that they are filthy rich and that the husband is the main investor in Clonaid. For a $1-million investment in the company, the man got a 40-per-cent stake -- with the first cloned baby thrown in for free.
The price tag for the second baby was supposed to be $200,000. But now, Rael says, there are 2,000 people on the waiting list. "That's $400-million," he says happily. "When we have a baby, maybe the list will jump from 2,000 to 20,000. I don't think the lab will be able to make so many clones. So my advice to Brigitte is to make an auction." In other words, the second baby will go to the highest bidder.
Rael is unperturbed by my skepticism. "I can give you two scoops," he says graciously. One company is about to organize an initial public offering of Clonaid. And two venture-capital companies have each offered $5-million for 5 per cent. "That means Clonaid is worth $100-million." Of course, he is absolutely not at liberty to disclose anything about the companies at this time. "Ask Brigitte," he says, referring to Boisselier.
And the second scoop? "Brigitte is invited to testify in front of the U.S. Congress."
This one turns out to be true. Among her revelations there is that Clonaid's rich client is "a successful attorney, a former state legislator, a current elected official." In his countertestimony, Thomas Murray, president of the bioethics think tank the Hastings Centre, warned of cloning promoters who "engender false hopes," and "the likelihood of exploiting parents who are desperate in their grief." And even the pro-cloning Human Cloning Foundation's Randolphe Wicker called the Raelians "space-cadet wackos" who are "defrauding the parents of dying children" and merely "seeking money for their prophet."
Next, Rael offers me yet another scoop. "Your third one today," he says. "It's your lucky day." Rael says that he is offering to share Clonaid's lab with Dr. Severino Antinori, a fertility specialist who has declared his own ambition to clone the world's first human embryo. (The Raelians are not really expecting a response, but they figure the offer will make headlines, since Antinori is rather publicity-mad.)
And then Rael is gone.
Suddenly, Sophie pops back into the living room with scoop No. 4. "Rael just got an e-mail from Brigitte," she says breathlessly. "He's invited to speak before Congress as a religious leader in favour of cloning."
"Do we look alike? You're looking back and forth at us," says Brigitte Boisselier, 45, watching me compare her to her daughter. Now that she mentions it, they could be clones. They are both on the short side, with long raven hair, pillowy lips and a taste for high-heeled platform boots.
We're having high tea at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal. Cocolios has tagged along, as has the watchful Chabot, plus a glamourous and silent Raelian from Japan who seems to go by only one name, Shizue. Female pulchritude is so plentiful at our table that when the waiter whisks away the vase of flowers to make room for finger sandwiches and scones, he gushes, "You don't need these flowers because you are the flowers."
Because caffeine is verboten, three of the women order orange juice. Boisselier, who has two doctoral degrees in chemistry, produces her own tea bag. She's apparently unaware that the Yunnan Tuocha she's drinking is a fermented black Chinese tea buzzing with caffeine.
Boisselier is fresh from an interview with CNN. She's dressed in a tight white suit with a large section cut out of the chest, exposing a fair amount of cleavage. Modesty is given a nod by a black stretch bandeau that she wears underneath.
Until 1997, she worked for Air Liquide Group in France. The company fired her, she says, after she advocated human cloning. After several years of unemployment, she taught for a year at Plattsburg State University in upstate New York. Since last fall, she's been a visiting assistant professor at tiny Hamilton College, also in upstate New York, teaching third-year biochemistry. (This week she resigned -- voluntarily, she says -- to devote herself full-time to the cloning project.)
Boisselier says she owns the majority of Clonaid, but won't say exactly how much. When I mention that Rael said to ask her the names of the venture-capital companies, she snaps, "What he forgot is that this is confidential."
By now, her black bandeau has slipped dangerously low. Cocolios whispers something to her mother, who glances down and yanks it up. "It's good to be with my daughter," she says with a smile. (Boisselier's ex-husband, a non-Raelian, has custody in France of their youngest daughter, 12. Their son, 17, a non-Raelian and studies science at university.
Boisselier contradicts Rael over how much the cloning couple has invested in Clonaid. It's $500,000, she says, not $1-million. Of course, she also is absolutely not at liberty to disclose anything about them at this time. She won't even say where Clonaid is headquartered. Ditto for the lab. Ditto for the scientists, except to say there are three, and one works "part-time" at Harvard. When I press her on her genetics credentials, she says her real talent is for organizing research teams.
Like Rael, she readily admits that four years ago, when the Raelians announced they were cloning a human, they had nothing. "We had no lab in the Bahamas. We started a company there. It was so easy. People thought we had something there. We never did."
This is the last stop on my 2001 space odyssey. I tell Boisselier that I don't believe her lab exists. Like Rael, she doesn't get mad. She dangles an exclusive. One journalist -- and only one -- will have a chance to visit her lab and follow the cloning process from beginning to end. I'm duty-bound to go through the motions. How about me? I ask. Boisselier says she doesn't know me. Ask me anything, I offer. Would I agree to embargo the story for 18 months from now? Sure, I say. "But we have a lot of candidates," she says, ending the discussion.
Before Congress last week, University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan said, "No reputable scientist[s], other than cults, cranks, kooks and capitalists, believe that science is ready for human cloning." He said the best you can expect is "to make an obese, demented cancerous version of yourself." But other experts testified that human cloning is within reach. And as far as the Raelians are concerned, a cloned baby is always just around the corner -- in time for each journalist's deadline.
Last fall, Boisselier told The New York Times that Clonaid would clone a baby this winter. In January, she told Time magazine that they would start in February. In February she told Saturday Night magazine that they would clone in March. (The magazine ran a luscious photo of Cocolios with this caption: "If all goes according to plan, by the time you read this she'll be pregnant with a clone.")
So what is she going to tell me?
"We hope to have an embryo by mid-April."