Clonaid, Ra�l, and the media seem to have got things backwards, says Paul Kurtz, chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). It should have been science first, publicity second. Without a shred of corroborative evidence, the French UFO cult visionary Ra�l (formerly known as Claude Vorilhon) and his strange brand of extraterrestrial futurism were catapulted into the world spotlight by the suspect announcement that Clonaid, the human cloning company founded by Ra�l, had achieved its first success.
Now that it has become clear that the first alleged human clone will not be verified through DNA testing after all, several media watchers are sifting through the smoking wreckage of this crashed media cycle. Kurtz is one of them. In 1997, he debated Ra�l on MSNBC. CSICOP's official journal, Skeptical Inquirer, has covered and criticized many the previous claims and exploits of the Ra�lians.