The Elohim

In the Raëlian reading, the Elohim are not gods but scientists: beings around four feet tall, olive-skinned, with long dark hair and dark almond eyes, from a distant advanced world, an atheist, materialist civilization that created all life on Earth, humanity included, as a genetic engineering project. Their request is recognition: an embassy where they can land and be officially welcomed.

The tradition begins with French motorsport journalist Claude Vorilhon, who said that on December 13, 1973, at the Puy de Lassolas volcanic crater near Clermont-Ferrand, he met a small being who renamed him Raël and dictated the message: the plural Hebrew word Elohim, conventionally translated "God," names this race, and scripture is the garbled record of their work. Raël's books followed, and the movement he founded in 1974 (the International Raëlian Movement) became among the largest UFO religions, claiming tens of thousands of members worldwide.

Raël's 1973 and claimed 1975 encounters (including a reported trip to the Elohim's planet) are the founding testimony; the movement's practice centers on his message rather than new contacts.

Raëlism achieved global notoriety in 2002 when its affiliated company Clonaid claimed the first cloned human, never substantiated. The movement's embassy campaign, sensual-meditation practice, and symbol controversies keep it in scholarship on new religions.

Scholars of religion document Raëlism as a well-organized new religious movement with a single founding witness and a theology engineered for the scientific age; Hebrew scholars note "Elohim" as a plural-form noun with singular grammar for Israel's God, not a hidden species name. The Clonaid affair is treated as publicity. No evidence beyond Raël's testimony supports the Elohim.