Under the glaring fluorescent lights of a conference room on the second floor of USF's Marshall Center, Marie-Helene Parent takes the floor. She eschews the small P.A. already set up for her use, instead inviting the attendees to move closer to the front of the room.Like her four companions, the trim, attractive, middle-aged French-Canadian woman gives off a stylish casualness that most Americans relate to affluence. And she is given to the sort of attentive, lingering direct eye contact that most Americans find unnerving. Around her neck hangs a large, odd charm — a vortex inside a Star of David. It's the symbol of the Raelian Movement.
Following a time-filling nature video that, incidentally, includes far more humping-animals footage than one usually sees in such things, Parent begins to speak about her religious convictions. She has been a Raelian for 25 years. In an effort at clarity, she verbally boils the movement's promise down to its essence.
"No disease, no work, but immortality and … pleasure," she says.
The Raelian Movement, she goes on, anticipates a peaceful, disease-free world in which a classless, money-less society no longer needs to bother with the labors of production or provision. We, the members of this society, will have staved off death through advanced cloning technology.
As it turns out, DNA manipulation and its anticipated near-future advances play a huge role in Raelian beliefs. (If you think you've heard the word before but aren't quite sure where, it was probably in a news story about Clonaid, the Raelian-run genetics company that a few years ago claimed it had successfully cloned a human baby.) Because of all this progress, Raelians believe we'll be unburdened by the day-to-day toils of keeping society running; we'll be free to spend our time pursuing artistic and/or scientific endeavors, and exploring our full potential through exponentially heightened senses.
(If you need any more titillation, simply Google up a few of the many cult-watch websites and news pieces that strive to discredit the movement — but often only make it scandalously alluring. More than a few investigative articles characterize the Raelians' expression of the aforementioned potential-exploring as substantially sexual in nature; the group's lengthy Sensual Meditation Seminar gatherings have occasionally been portrayed as little more than very large swingers' parties. Ironically enough, a large percentage of the uproar over this perceived sensual-slacker ideal comes from France, where the Movement originated.)
It all sounds pretty good, right? But what's the catch?
Aliens.
Raelians believe that all life on Earth is the result of genetic experimentation by aliens. These aliens are humanoid, and we, their greatest scientific success, were engineered in their image. And from their planet (located somewhere within our own galaxy), these beings have been watching over us. From on high, as it were.
According to Parent, there is no God. There are only the aliens, who've been consistently mistaken for God. You might be familiar with some of their more famous middlemen: Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses. All this time, it's been these aliens, or Elohim, who have been shepherding us toward the time when we're ready for them to reveal themselves to us.
Apparently, our discovery of and subsequent screwing around with DNA was a pivotal point in our technological development. Raelian theology holds that the Elohim believe we will soon be able to understand the scientific process that created us, and so they charged a new prophet, Rael, with preparing the way for their arrival.
In other words, it won't be long before God is revealed to the world as being a culture of really short people from outer space.
It might be a lot for some to swallow, even in exchange for several lifetimes' worth of vacation time and communal third-eye-opening sex.
Tonight at USF, Parent and her fellow acolytes aren't here to force-feed anybody that pill — they just want everybody to know that it's there in the theological medicine cabinet.
Speaking to a small but diverse audience at the Marshall Center, Parent calls the Bible "the greatest trickery in the history of mankind." She says it without malice, however; in fact, it seems more like a vocabulary error (a long residency in Miami hasn't dampened her liquid-silk accent). She claims that the Hebrew word "Elohim," found in the book of Genesis in traditional Bible editions, is a plural meaning "those who came from the sky," and explains that it had been mistranslated as a singular meaning "God" ages ago.
As the Elohim are some 25,000 years ahead of us, technologically speaking, it's easy to see how folks continued to mistake them for an ultimate spiritual being.
"They are so advanced. What they can do, it seems like miracles to us," Parent says, describing a future in which a dying human's consciousness will be downloaded into a new, young-adult clone of their original body.
She's an engaging public speaker — at ease, earnest and unflappable. (As the evening begins, a belligerent young Christian corners her at the back of the room. He's obviously entered the building and rode up the elevator solely to disrupt the meeting. His questions aren't really questions, and her placid rebuttals so frustrate him he finally retreats in a huff.)
But the dozen curious audience members don't seem to be buying it, despite Parent's cheerfully unwavering commitment. This is perfectly OK with the Raelians. Accordingly, the entire presentation is light on hard evidence, but then again, what religious explanation isn't? Parent doesn't offer much beyond an interesting story about the origin of humanity that she believes. Like the rest of those, and despite her assurances that the proof is in the science, it requires a conspicuous leap of faith.
The two short videos that are screened don't offer much more, either.
The first informs us that a French auto-sports journalist named Claude Vorilhon was in 1973 chosen by the Elohim to change his name to Rael (meaning, obviously, "messenger of the Elohim") and spread the word about mankind's true nature. He's since remained in sporadic contact with the Elohim, and he's written about a gazillion books about it. Rael — whose resemblance to deadpan stand-up comedian Steven Wright is uncanny — has amassed an estimated 60,000 believers in 90 countries. The group is now based in Canada, where the nonprofit Raelian Movement enjoys tax-exempt status as the world's largest UFO-related organization and its only atheistic religion.
The second video reminds us that we still really don't know shit about the Missing Link, the Great Pyramids, Easter Island and most of that weird stuff we found down in South America; it then helpfully suggests the Elohim as the answer.
What follows isn't so much a Q&A period as a tacky and ultimately pointless round of Let's Try to Stump The Moonie. The skeptics — and that's pretty much everybody — want specifics regarding alien technology, and Parent doesn't have them. She's not a geneticist. She's just a friendly woman whose spiritual beliefs can sound to some ears like a science-fiction plot set in a utopia where the engines of progress run on flower power. When the subject of Sensual Meditation is broached, she remains consistent by withholding the mechanical details, instead describing how it makes one feel in terms rather like those the poets use to describe love — heightened senses, a feeling of oneness with the universe, etc.
It's very sexy. Couple it with the idea that one might get to spend several lifetimes just, you know, not working, and it might be intriguing enough to make one take another look at that whole alien-test-tube-kingdom deal. After all, it's not like it sounds any crazier than the one about how a lady got pregnant by magic, and her magic baby came back from the dead.
But by now, most of the dozen curious have already gone.
Contact Scott Harrell at 813-739-4800, ext. 4856, or by e-mail at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in May 6-12, 2004.