The Miami Herald, Dec. 29, 2002
http://www.miami.com/
BY KARL ROSS
The location of the lab where experiments were done leading to the birth of ”Eve,” allegedly the first human clone, is so secret that the founder of the firm carrying out the research claims he is clueless as to its whereabouts.
”The work is totally secret,” Clonaid founder Rael says in an interview published on a website catering to UFO hunters. “I don’t even know myself. If I have to answer to authorities I can swear that I don’t know. But there is a laboratory and four scientists working on it.”
Rael, formerly Claude Vorilhon, is the spiritual leader of the Raelian movement, which claims humans were sired 25,000 years ago by alien scientists and considers human cloning the key to eternal life.
Rael was in Miami-Dade County on Saturday, a day after Clonaid’s scientific director made the startling announcement in Broward County, but he did not immediately comment.
In a phone interview from his Las Vegas, Nev., home, the president of the U.S. Raelian movement, Ricky Lee Roehr, said he has no idea about the Clonaid lab either.
”I can’t tell you anything about the baby because we don’t have anything to do with Clonaid,” Roehr said. “We support Clonaid only philosophically — not with money and not with man hours.”
Roehr said the main link between the two entities is Rael himself. He said Rael started Clonaid in 1997 after British scientists successfully cloned a sheep they called Dolly.
‘After Dolly, the pope came out and said, `Cloning is terrible.’ And anything the pope is against, we’re for it. Almost always.”
In the interview published on the Far Shores News Index website, Rael says Clonaid was registered in the Bahamas five years ago but has since abandoned that base.
”It was just a post office box number in the Bahamas, based on a shell company in California,” Rael said. “After one year, due to pressure from French TV, the Bahamian government passed a law and canceled the company.”
One published account says Clonaid’s secret lab is in a remote Nevada desert. That account remains unconfirmed.