Clonaid And Baby Eve: A Story Of Aliens, Cults, Hoaxes, And The First Ever Human Clone
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PUBLISHEDYesterday - 14 February 2026Clonaid And Baby Eve: A Story Of Aliens, Cults, Hoaxes, And The First Ever Human Clone
When this religion talks about being "born again", they really mean it.
Dr. Katie Spalding
Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals.View full profile
Buckle up, this is going to be a wild ride...
Image credit: YuriyZhuravov/Shutterstock.com
At 11.55 am, on December 26, 2002, a baby was born like no other before her. Known as Eve – no official first or surname was ever given – she was, according to the internationally-publicized press conference the next day, the first ever cloned human being.
“I'm very, very pleased to note that the first baby clone is born,” announced Brigitte Boisselier, Scientific Director of Clonaid, the company that undertook the project. “We have been celebrating with the scientists this week, and it was a very special Christmas […] I know that they are looking at me, and I want to thank them, especially right now, because I believe that they deserved the recognition – and they will get it, once they are ready to go public.”
Just five years post-Dolly the Sheep, the process to create Eve was, Boisselier said, “very close” to that used for her ovine predecessor – just “adapted to human cells.” Specifically, she was the result of her mother’s skin cells, forced to divide via what Boisselier described as “an electrical impulse”.
“Some people will say it's luck” that was to thank for the success, she said. “But I would say it's hard work.”
And the good news didn’t end there. Eve may have been the first, but she wasn’t alone: four other babies, all genetic clones of their mothers, were gestating in various countries – “the next one is from Europe,” Boisselier said; “two are from Asia. And the [last] one is from North America.”
The technique could bring hope to infertile couples, like Eve’s parents, or lesbian couples, like the European baby. It could even be used to cheat death itself when it came too soon: there were, Boisselier said, “two cases […] with dead children” where the parents had “preserve[d] the cell before the death of the child.”
So, here’s a question: why, nearly a quarter century later, do we hear basically nothing about human reproductive cloning? Where even are these babies?
The bizarre origins of Clonaid
There is nowhere in the world where human cloning for explicitly reproductive purposes is permitted – and if that situation was different in 2002, it was only because the technology was so far from realistic that legislation was unnecessary. So how was it that Clonaid, an organization with no street address and no incorporated status, which nevertheless promised loudly to do exactly that, was able to secure funding for this highest of high-tech projects?
Well, luckily, Boisselier was pretty forthcoming about that. “Clonaid was funded in 1997, thanks to Raël,” she noted in the press conference announcing the birth of Eve. “You may have heard of him. He's my spiritual leader.”
Who was this mysterious Raël? A priest, perhaps? A guru? A mystic, a la Rasputin?
No: he was – and still is, in fact – the founder and leader of an apocalyptic cult, an ex-pop star turned racing driver turned journalist, and, if you take his word for it, the half-alien half-brother of Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha.
“The International Raëlian Movement (IRM), founded in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon (who later became known as Raël), is arguably the largest ‘flying saucer cult’ in the world, claiming over 60,000 members in 52 countries,” wrote sociologists Susan J. Palmer and Bryan Sentes back in 2012 – although they cautioned that “this figure is probably inflated.”
Born out of wedlock in Vichy, France, in 1946, Claude was raised staunchly atheist – even if he did briefly attend a Catholic boarding school, allegedly causing a minor outcry among the clergy when he took communion despite not being baptized.
So far, so mid-century Europe – but the story really starts when he decided, aged 15, to run away from home. Almost immediately, things become fantastical: he “hitch-hik[ed] to Paris with a race car driver who introduced him to the pleasures of prostitutes and the race track,” Palmer and Sentes report; he “sang […] in Paris cafés to support himself” until “he was discovered by an agent who set him up as a teen pop star named Claude Cellier, and he enjoyed a brief success on France's hit parade.”
But just as soon as he had zigged, life zagged. “Suddenly the agent committed suicide, and Claude's singing career ended abruptly,” Palmer and Sentes write, so Claude “founded a race car magazine called Auto Pop in 1973 and […] established a career as a test driver. This career was abruptly curtailed in November 1973 by a new French law that banned speeding on the highway and suspended car races.”
“His career as a prophet or UFO contactee commenced soon thereafter,” they add. Because of course.
In fact, “soon” is almost underselling it. Vorilhon first claimed to have met aliens on December 13, 1973: they spoke French, he said, which was lucky, since they immediately brought him on board the ship and started explaining the true meaning of the stories in the Bible.
Now, not everything Vorilhon claimed to have been taught was all that kooky. Raëlism, right from the start, was a sex-positive, feminist, LGBTQ-friendly, anti-war, and pro-science movement – which, considering it began in the 70s, is fairly impressive. But once you get into the actual details, things get stranger.
Case in point: the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, the aliens apparently said, was a misinterpretation of the truth – that Earth was once barren, and life was seeded by this race of “Elohim” aliens. The first humans, of course, were clones of the Elohim’s own DNA.
There is so, so much more to talk about with Raëlism – like the fact that the apocalypse is apparently scheduled for 2035, or the “Raël’s Angels” band of extra-sexy women specially trained to “please the Elohim” since “male Elohim are extremely gentle, delicate, and sensitive, and therefore have special requirements,” per Palmer and Sentes.
But it’s really this emphasis on the holiness, for want of a better word in an atheist UFO-based belief system, of cloning that’s most important right now. According to Raëlism and the Elohim, cloning is how we achieve eternal life; it can bring people back from the dead; it’s quite literally why we exist at all. It’s no wonder they funded it – international outcry be damned. Its success was nothing less than the first step towards a new era of enlightenment.
Except… was it a success?
The twist: Did Eve even exist?
To hear Boisselier and the Raëlists tell it, the births of Eve and her four cloned comrades were a success story like no other. For many politicians and religious leaders, it was the opposite: a morally questionable example of science going too far, too fast. But for many scientists, the truth was likely much simpler: Boisselier was bluffing.
“[Clonaid’s claims are] totally ridiculous,” MIT biologist and pioneer of transgenic science Rudolf Jaenisch told New Scientist back in 2003. “In the absence of any scientific evidence, I have to believe that it's not true […] They are extreme nuts.”
Why? Well, a bunch of reasons, to be honest. Some said Clonaid couldn’t possibly have the necessary expertise to clone humans; others pointed out how much more successful the company claimed to be with cloning than current technology was doing with bog-standard IVF. “I believe Ms Boisselier has claimed five miscarriages, which [with five successful implantations] gives a 100 per cent implantation rate,” pointed out Harry Griffin, head of the UK Roslin Institute and part of the team who cloned Dolly the sheep in 1997, at the time to New Scientist.
“This is biologically possible,” he said, “but IVF clinics only manage an implantation rate of about 20 per cent and that's with healthy embryos and implanting two embryos per woman.”
But most damning of all was Clonaid’s reluctance to provide… well, literally any evidence at all for their claims. “Clonaid have no track record but claim to have cloned hundreds of embryos,” Griffin said. “It just doesn't ring true.”
“Nearly everything they have said in the past has never been confirmed by scientific investigation,” agreed Alan Trounson, an embryologist and stem cell scientist from Monash University, speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, per New Scientist. And Eve and her fellow clones were no exception: despite big claims about having the babies’ genetic identity independently confirmed, Clonaid never gave Michael Guillen, the science journalist they chose to oversee the testing, any evidence to be examined.
“I'm tearing my hair out in frustration. I stuck my neck out and they knew it,” Guillen later told USA Today. “All I want are some samples [from the baby] so we can find the truth.”
It’s now been more than two decades since Clonaid’s bombastic announcement, and since then neither genetic evidence nor cloned baby has ever been presented – although a website offering clone babies for six-figure sums was launched without delay. The whole thing was, Guillen believed, “an elaborate hoax.”
In that, he is apparently joined even by some Raëlists. “Internal Raëlian opinions range from agreeing it was a hoax to claiming there are clandestine cloned babies who will step forth some day,” Palmer and Sentes wrote. “Another theory is that the purpose of the ‘Baby Eve announcement’ was to ‘raise the public's awareness so they will be ready for human cloning when it happens in the future.’”
But if that’s the case, the stunt might have been misjudged. In the wake of their announcement, anti-human cloning advocates were spurred into action: the prospect of Baby Eve “gave [cloning] more of a sense of a clear and present danger,” Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, who in 2003 introduced a bill to Congress aiming to outlaw all human cloning, told Time that year.
For proponents of human cloning, therefore – those who believed in the technique’s potential for medical innovation and therapeutic breakthroughs, rather than eternal life through carbon copying and accelerated growth – the supposed birth of Baby Eve was not good news. It was, Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told Time, simply a “preposterous announcement by kooks” – and one that he “knew […] would have a very damaging impact on the cloning debate.”
It “would just plain scare people,” he said. “The Raelians are not the picture you want in people's minds when they write their Congressman about cloning.”
