Clonaid's Burden of Proof

This December, it will be the 15th anniversary of the Human Cloning hoax perpetrated by Brigitte Boisselier of Clonaid infamy who claimed the birth of Eve, the first human clone on December 27, 2002. The whole hoax was conceived 20 years ago by her spiritual leader Rael in February of 1997 when he registered a hollow company in the Bahamas, as Clonaid's website relates.

Rael has maintained in news media interviews that he and his cult, the Raelian Movement, had no involvement in the claim and that it all rested on Brigitte Boisselier, as the scientific director of Clonaid.

But the truth of the matter is, by April of 2001, Clonaid had created a scientific dreamteam, all composed of high level members of Rael's cult. Moreover, in November 2002, Brigitte Boisselier, without the knowledge of Rael, confessed of the hoax to the top echelon of the cult in a meeting at a fellow Guide Réal Thériault’s home, and asked everyone present to keep it under wraps. These revelations came out only in the past year, more than a decade after the hoax, when Damien M., a Raelian Priest (level 4 Raelian Guide and biotech researcher privy to Clonaid's operations) resigned first and then got excommunicated and Daniel Chabot, a Raelian Bishop (level 5 Raelian Guide, planetary responsible of Raelian Teachings and a professor of psychology) resigned. There had been many more resignations and excommunications in the past year, most notably that of Roy Tyrrell, the National Guide of the Australian Raelian Movement and Sophie de Niverville, who Rael had married when she was only 16 and who had remained faithful to him while Rael satisfied himself with his Angels.

Now, to get to the heart of this blog post. From the recent revelations, Rael seems to maintain that as long as no one can prove Brigitte Boisselier did not produce any human clones, her claim is not a hoax and that her innocence must be assumed. Moreover, even if the hoax ever gets busted, Rael would ironically still forgive her since the whole fiasco brought him and his cult media attention.

While this is true in a criminal court case, where the burden of proof falls on the prosecutor to convict the defendant, in the peer-reviewed scientific method, the burden of proof falls on the claimant and not their scientific peers. The latter is a more rigorous method to establish any truths.

So far, Brigitte Boisselier has not been able to prove her claims by publishing any scientific papers nor has she been able to prove the existence of the 13 in total of the human clones (between December 2002 to March 2004) she claims Clonaid has produced.

The difference in the burden of proof in law and science can be found here and here.

Daniel Chabot explains this point in his resignation letter titled “Balance Sheet – 40 Years of Raelism.” Below are the relevant excerpts in relation to the Clonaid hoax that includes Damien M.'s and another anonymous Raelian Guide's [referred as X] interaction with Rael: