Raelians

The Raelians, a Quebec-based free-love cult, who also say the human race was created by super-aliens, called Elohim (rhymes with "annoying"), and that their leader is Christ's half-brother. To Raelians, evolution is bunk. The Elohim cloned their own DNA to create the human race in a laboratory 25,000 years ago, according to Rael, the one-named leader, a transplanted Frenchman who lives half the year in Florida and the other half at UFOland, the Raelians' theme park and condo complex about an hour northeast of Montreal. Rael founded his movement in France in 1973, but it is now based in Quebec. It claims 55,000 members in 84 countries, but the real number is probably half that. Now 54, Rael, formerly a wannabe race-car driver named Claude Vorilhon. He advocates sensual massage, nude meditation, free love, and eternal life through human cloning.

The Raelian website
An article from the Mail on Sunday I was married to clone cult leader ...

Rael's appearance on the Late Late Show

Clone artist

The Globe and Mail, April 7, 2001
JAN WONG

Dozens of major media outlets, from 60 Minutes to The New York Times, have reported recently that the Raelians, a Quebec-based free-love cult, are about to clone a millionaire's dead baby in their secret laboratory. JAN WONG investigates the Raelians - who also say the human race was created by super-aliens and that their leader is Christ's half-brother - and wonders, why on Earth does anybody believe them?

White candles flicker alongside a dish of fresh strawberries. Diane Brisebois clutches a microphone, torch-singer style. She's sexy in tight pants and red lipstick, curls cascading over her shoulders. "At 11, as we always do," she says, "we will make telepathic contact with our leaders." Brisebois is the chief priestess in Ontario for the Raelians (rhymes with "aliens"). It's only 10:35 a.m., because, an organizer explains, it takes 25 minutes to reach the extraterrestrials called Elohim (rhymes with "annoying").

To Raelians, evolution is bunk. The Elohim cloned their own DNA to create the human race in a laboratory 25,000 years ago, according to Rael, the one-named cult leader, a transplanted Frenchman who lives half the year in Florida and the other half at UFOland, the Raelians' theme park and condo complex about an hour northeast of Montreal. Rael founded his sect in France in 1973, but it is now based in Quebec. It claims 55,000 members in 84 countries, but the real number is probably half that. Now 54, Rael advocates sensual massage, nude meditation, free love, and eternal life through human cloning. He'd also like you to tithe your after-tax income. And until you can clone yourself, he requests that when you die, you leave the bulk of your worldly possessions to the sect. Its plans include an embassy, complete with spaceship landing pad, for the Elohim's scheduled return in 2035. So far, it has raised about $11-million. In the meantime, the cult hopes to reap an even bigger windfall. Targeting a growing market of bereaved parents, infertile or same-sex couples, and your average megalomaniac, the Raelians plan to clone the first human. Or so they have declared in dozens of interviews to pliant, panting media, and, last week, in testimony before the U.S. Congress. "A grieving family hopes to replace a lost child. A genetics-obsessed sect dreams of achieving immortality. Is this how human cloning will begin?" asked the display copy on Margaret Talbot's New York Times Magazine cover story in February. "Two groups announce human cloning plans," CNN reported in March, right along with "Lung cancer rising in women."

"Human cloning project may have begun," headlined USA Today. "Is this what Aldous Huxley warned us about?" fretted the National Post. Everyone including 60 Minutes to Good Morning America to Dan Rather has duly reported that the cult has a bereaved and very rich American couple bankrolling its effort. The unnamed couple wants to clone their 10-month-old son who died following an operation two years earlier. News groups have also repeated the Raelians' claim to have 50 wombs at their disposal. One belongs to Brisebois. Another belongs to the eldest daughter of Brigitte Boisselier, chairman, chief executive officer and "scientific director" of Clonaid, the cult's cloning company. Finally, the media swallow whole the Raelian story that they have a lab up and running in the United States -- even though no one has ever seen it -- and that they are cloning a human as you read this. The Raelians have a history of stunning announcements followed by zero results. In 1997, when Dolly the sheep was cloned, the Raelians said they had more than a million customers and were building a laboratory in the Bahamas. "It was just a P.O. box," admits Rael, formerly a wannabe race-car driver named Claude Vorilhon. "There was nothing. We wanted to see if there was interest from potential customers, potential investors, from scientists." In their current media blitz, the Raelians have not had to buy a single ad to let potential customers know they are selling human eggs for $5,000 (U.S.), storing DNA samples for $50,000 and cloning babies for $200,000. Make that $500,000. Or $1-million. As publicity builds, the price keeps going up. Cloning isn't explicitly outlawed in Canada or most of the United States, although U.S. President George W. Bush has signalled he'd like to pass legislation soon.

But scientists now say that cloned humans could be prone to a high risk of genetic abnormalities. Cow clones often have enlarged hearts. And, as The New York Times has reported, some mouse clones that looked normal at first have become obese in maturity, even though they eat the same amount of food as other mice. Though Boisselier is a chemist, not a geneticist, that doesn't stop Clonaid's scientific director from stating that the "success rate for cloning cattle is 15 to 30 per cent." It's actually 1 per cent. It took 277 tries before scientists succeeded in producing Dolly the sheep. And a three-year, $3.7-million effort in Texas to clone a mongrel dog named Missy for an anonymous West Coast billionaire has so far failed. But why let facts get in the way of a good story? No matter how strange they are.

There's Rael's claim that he's Christ's half-brother, for instance. Or Centre UFOland's pictures of little green men and its life-size plywood replica of the flying saucer Rael boarded in 1973. Or the Raelian claim of covering a distance of two light years in 25 minutes, sans spacecraft. That's what we're doing here on this frozen Sunday morning. Brisebois is leading the monthly meditation. She instructs us to breathe deeply. We're about to visit another planet. Only 22 devotees have shown up for the ride. They sit, eyes closed, on orange vinyl chairs. In deference to the weather, no one disrobes. The men look ordinary. The women are almost all attractive, or at least have made a major effort to that end. Everyon e seems to be wearing identical medallions, a swirl within the six-pointed Star of David. We're on the fourth floor of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education on Bloor Street in Toronto. A huge photograph of a bare-chested Rael is propped on a table. I don't feel any breeze when Brisebois, an ex-Quebecker, announces that we are flying through the sky. I do notice the Bloor Street subway line rumbling beneath the building every four minutes. "You can see Lake Ontario," she murmurs. "And the cars are getting smaller. The planet is now just a tiny blue dot. And you are among the stars. On your right side, you see a beautiful star. You start going toward it."

Suddenly a man bolts. Does he know a shortcut? No, he's merely having a coughing fit in the hall. Brisebois announces we've just landed on the planet of the Elohim, one light year from Earth (which is odd, because astronomers say the closest star is four light years away). After briefly hanging around a marvellous green forest I can't see, she leads us back to Toronto. She points out the North American continent, then the Great Lakes. "You can recognize the Bay," she adds, referring to the department store's Bloor Street branch. Ta-dah! We're back. Everyone claps. Two Raelians pass around envelopes, collecting $5 here, $20 there. Chatting later, Brisebois says that she joined the Raelians when she was 16. She subsequently had sex with Rael whenever he was in Montreal. "It was wonderful," she breathes. "I loved him in the past, and I still love him." Like many Raelians, Brisebois is childless by choice. But, she says, "I think it would be wonderful to be the surrogate mother of the first cloned child." She admits that she hasn't had a single one of the many drug injections required to prep a woman's body to accept a foreign embryo. So is she a bonafide volunteer?

"I'm 41," she concedes. "That would make me borderline." Marina Cocolios, however, is a picture of female fecundity. At 22, she has a peaches-and-cream complexion and shiny dark eyes. As Boisselier's daughter, she's also the surrogate-mom volunteer the Raelians always trot out for media interviews. This week, she's done CTV and a Dutch magazine. Later, she'll talk to Japanese TV reporters. She has the routine down pat. She meets reporters at this Second Cup on St. Denis Street in Montreal and orders herbal tea and chocolate cake. Then she parries questions. She's met the cloning couple, of course, but she is absolutely not at liberty to disclose anything about them. Cocolios turns heads with her shapely figure, swathed in a caramel leather skirt and snug black sweater with eyelet stitching just below the bra line. Lovely as she is, conversations with her tend to veer off into outer space. Take her plans for the future. After she graduates from Concordia University where she is in third-year fine arts, she plans to teach art. Then she'd like to open a school for abused children. Later, she wants to study science. And after that? "Then I want to go to another planet as an artist and scientist." Last year, her performance art consisted of donning an antique white nightgown and bathing with red wine. "It was extremely sensual," she recalls. This year she's working on a paper dress covered with quotations from Rousseau, Sartre and, yes, Rael.

Cocolios, a French citizen, has no plans for any children of her own. She's already had one abortion. But she'd be thrilled to carry the first cloned human embryo. "It's like having a pregnancy not just for yourself, but for the whole world. Isn't it beautiful?" As Boisselier's daughter, she should have the inside track. Yet she has never been to her mother's cloning lab. And, like Brisebois, she has not donated any eggs or undergone the heavy drug regimen required for implanting an embryo. Has she done anything at all to prepare herself for this momentous step? Cocolios smiles. Her ex-boyfriend, a Raelian who decided he'd be happier living in Europe, gave her cream for stretch marks. Raelians love publicity. They issue press releases. They stage stunts, like distributing condoms to Montreal high-school students in 1992 to protest against the Catholic Church's stand on birth control. They even have publicists, like Sylvie Chabot, a Montreal consultant whose business cards carry Rael's photo and identify her as "Rael's press attaché." Raelians also love hierarchy. They group themselves into six levels, ranging from novice to Rael himself, who alone occupies the 6th level. Cocolios is a 3rd-level Raelian and a "regional guide." Chabot, a 4th-level Raelian and a "national guide," sets up an interview with Lear, a 5th-level Raelian.

Lear (Rael spelled backwards) is a "bishop" and "continental head" for No rth America, and Rael's top aide. Like his mentor, Lear goes by only one name. His real surname is Potvin, but he says his real first name is too dorky to reveal. We meet for dinner at Jardin Sakura on Mountain Street in Montreal. It's Lear's favourite restaurant, and he orders without even glancing at the menu: miso soup, a giant sushi-sashimi platter, and a couple of orders of barbequed eel and raw sea urchin. Raelians may be casual about nude meditation, but they're quite formal about interviews. Chabot, a slim angular woman with hennaed hair and watchful eyes, insists on joining us. She joined the Raelians when she was 25. Now 46, thrice-divorced and childless by choice, she's weirdly secretive. Her brother, Daniel Chabot, heads the Canadian Raelian movement and teaches psychology at a Montreal CEGEP. Asked which one, she says, "I don't know. Somewhere in Montreal." Lear, who is an artist, designed the medallions every cult member wears. His own is the size of a Pringle's potato-chip canister lid. "I had a bigger one," he says, "but somebody stole it at the gym out of my bag." Lear also designed Centre UFOland. It consists of a museum devoted to DNA and extraterrestrials, the plywood flying saucer, a snack bar, souvenir shop, campsite, 500-seat dining hall and six condos for top Raelians, including Rael and Boisselier. (It is open to the public only in the summertime.) "I'll take a little sake, but don't tell Rael," says Lear, smoothing back his longish dark hair, which has bleached tips. Raelians, he explains, aren' t supposed to smoke, drink or take drugs, even caffeine. (Chabot also sneaks a cup of sake.) Lear is childless, too. He doesn't want a squalling baby, but he would like to be cloned, as an adult, and download his memories into the new body. Exactly how is unclear. "It's going to be possible soon. One will have eternal life." The promise of perpetual youth through cloning could be why so many attractive women are drawn to the Raelians -- and they, in turn, draw in the men. "I would keep my mind," Chabot says enthusiastically, "but in a new body, when I was 17 years old, when I was young and sexy."

As a lapsed Catholic, Lear isn't afraid of going to hell. "But if they tell me I'll never come back to sushi, I'll be sad." Clearly, he's no starving artist. He dines at Sakura several times a week. Soon, he'll fly to Florida to relax on the beach and play the ball game petanque with Rael. Lear also has a health-club membership, a black Volkswagen Jetta with heated seats, and two homes. He needs two, he explains, for the inevitable day when he and his Raelian girlfriend split up. Lear, who is 37, became a Raelian at 14. A neighbour in the Quebec village of Lac St.-Jerome gave him The Message Given by Extra-Terrestrials, the first of Rael's half-dozen books. (His latest, Yes to Human Cloning, is about to be published by the sect.) In the first book, the author describes how, at 27, as an auto-sports journalist and aspiring race driver, he boarded a hovering flying saucer in Auvergne, in southern France, in December, 1973. For six days straight, a little green man explained in fluent French the origin of Earthlings. He also unravelled all those mysteries in the Bible. The miracle of Jesus feeding the multitudes with just 20 loaves of bread, for example, was merely "synthetic dehydrated food -- which, when added to water, increased to five times its original volume." The space alien informed Claude that his true father was an extra-terrestrial who had impregnated Claude's mother. (The same E.T., by the way, who had earlier inseminated Mary, mother of Jesus.) The alien asked Claude to spread the word and to change his name to Rael, which means "messenger" in space-speak. Two years later, Rael was whisked to that same planet we visited during the Sunday meditation. There he met Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed. Moses was there, too. It turns out that, like Jesus and Rael, Moses is of mixed parentage (which may explain the confusion in the bulrushes). Like a New-Age Hugh Hefner, Rael enjoyed perfumed baths and, with the aid of six voluptuous robots, other favours.

It was, he writes, "the most extravagant night" of his life. Suddenly Chabot starts talking about green lists and pink lists and blacklists. "Every journalist has one chance," she says, pushing away her plate of sushi. "When we don't like what they write, they're on a blacklist." The pink list, she adds, means the journalist is "pure." She stares at me. "You're on the green list. It means green light, go ahead." Chabot is tired of Earthling ridicule and contempt. She can't wait until the first cloned baby is born. Then all those blacklisted media types will besiege her for interviews. "And I'll say, 'Sorry,' " she gloats. Lear gets into the spirit: "When the Elohim come to our embassy, we'll remember who has been disrespectful and we'll let them line up. And then we'll make them go back to the end of the line." He laughs uproariously. I may not be on the green list for long, so I quickly request an interview with Rael himself. Like many Quebeckers, cult leaders or no, he winters in Florida. For several years now, he's been the semi-permanent houseguest of a devout Raelian in North Miami Beach. Chabot says Rael gives only one interview a day, for one hour, always at 4:15 p.m. Why 4:15? "Because this is his schedule."

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. S he 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."