RaelPress.org scrubs CLONAID

The official site for press releases by the International Raelian Movement (IRM), RaelPress, has scrubbed all news between January 2001 to May 2004 in an apparent attempt to disassociate itself from claims of human clones made by CLONAID during that time. That's the period when the CLONAID hoax was in the limelight.

A search for "clonaid" produces only 6 results from the entire press site. None of the entries make direct references to CLONAID's claim of being the first company to have successfully cloned a human being:

CISION PR Newswire has archived IRM press releases since July 2002.

It's been 20 years since Rael founded CLONAID (initially called Valiant Venture) as a publicity stunt. While it's claimed that the supposed cloning company is completely independent from Rael and the IRM, all of the people involved with the former were indeed all dedicated IRM members.

This pic of Damien still appears
on CLONAID's website

One such person is Damien M., who had devoted 33 years of his life to Rael. With a background in biotechnology, he was used as a poster boy for CLONAID as part of its scientific team.

However, more than a decade later, in early 2016, he was excommunicated by Rael for finally denouncing Raelian Bishop Brigitte Boisselier, who runs CLONAID, for lying to the media about producing human clones (to date, 13 clones have been claimed) to effectively publicize Raelism to the world. In fact, in 2003, Rael gloated about running a successful media campaign that allowed him to reach one of his 2 main goals: to spread the Raelian Messages worldwide (Susan Palmer, Aliens Adored, p. 191). Rael instead accused Damien of lying and making everything up before expelling him from his cult.

[RaelTV FAIL] Doggone it, SIRIUS-ly!

As part of a series of short clips on RaelTV, the Raelian Movement refers to the Dogon tribe of sub-Saharan Africa, as possessing secret knowledge about our galaxy passed down by their ET ancestors/creators thousands of years ago. The clip argues that the Dogons are one of many examples of indigenous peoples from around the world testifying about their origins to be from ETs as fact instead of mythology. This comes from the notion in Rael's writings that humanity's scientific creators, the Elohim of the Bible, left traces of their existence among ancient civilizations across the globe [Intelligent Design, p. 60].

The claim that the Dogons are an exemplary case rests on the subclaim of how it is possible for them to know about a star system 8.6 light-years from here and unseen to the naked eye, that of Sirius A and B, unless the mythological serpent-like amphibious beings known to them traditionally as the Nommos are actually technologically advanced ETs?... and in terms of Raelian confluence, must be the Elohim.

The popularization of these claims in New Age and ancient astronaut literature originates from Robert Temple's book The Sirius Mystery (1976) based on his interpretation of the work of ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. A substantial bulk of The Sirius Mystery consists of comparative linguistic and mythological scholarship, pointing out resemblances among Dogon, Egyptian and Sumerian beliefs and symbols. Greek and Arab myths and words are considered to a lesser extent.

Skeptics question Temple on several grounds: (1) his drawing supposedly by the Dogon depicting the orbit of Sirius B around Sirius A was doctored, (2) the Nommos couldn't have come from the Sirius system, and (3) astronomical knowledge was limited to the time the Dogons first interacted with Europeans in the early 1900s.

[RaelTV FAIL] Piri Reis Map

Years ago, when Rael started his You Tube channel RaelTV, the Raelian Movement produced a series of short clips presenting some interesting information that supposedly challenges conventional knowledge and thus would support their tagline:

"Isn't it time we rewrote our history books?"

 ... implying the Raelian version of history as being true.

The clip showcases a 16th-century map produced by Turkish admiral Piri Reis. It is claimed that the map depicts an outline of Antarctica without its ice caps and that it was drawn 300 years before the modern discovery of that continent.

Bad Archaeology's Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews points out:

Maps of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries are a favourite source of information for fringe writers, who use them to make a wide variety of claims. To Erich von Däniken, for instance, they are evidence for a survey of the Earth from space, carried out by extraterrestrials, while for Graham Hancock, they are evidence for an ancient sea-faring civilisation, lost beneath the sea after the melting of glacial ice at the end of the Pleistocene. These writers focus on a relatively small number of such maps, those of Piri Re‘is and Orontius Finaeus being the most used, whilst ignoring others of the same age. All these maps are alleged to show anomalous knowledge for the dates at which they were drawn: the west coast of South America, Antarctica (with or, more frequently, without its ice sheet), the Strait of Magellan and other “impossible” details. This appears to be solid evidence, so why do mainstream historians and archaeologists ignore it?

Fitzparick-Matthews' article traces the origins of this claim, originating not from scholarly studies of the map, but from a geography college teacher by the name of Charles Hapgood (1904-1982). He shows where and how Hapgood got it wrong and that the map in fact did not show Antarctica at all, but the coastline of South America only instead.