(left to right) Raelian Bishop Brigitte Boisselier, Rael, the founder of the Raelian religious movement and GayToday contributor Randolfe Wicker, founder of Clone Rights United Front, the world's first pro-human cloning organization

New York, New York-An announcement by Clonaid that it has cloned a female child, Eve, reportedly the world's first baby conceived through cloning, is a hoax, believes pro-human-cloning activist Randolfe Wicker. Wicker, the founder of the world's first pro-human cloning organization, Clone Rights United Front, is also a pre-Stonewall pioneer of the gay civil rights movement. As the early 1960s "media whiz kid" of the gay and lesbian movement, Wicker's biography appears in the new history textbook, Before Stonewall.

Clonaid, an incorporated spinoff of the Raelian religious movement, made its claim Friday in a Hollywood, Florida Holiday Inn through Brigitte Boisselier, a Raelian bishop who promises that genetic evidence of the breakthrough will be provided within about 10 days. Also, within a week, she promises, the birth of a second cloned child will take place "somewhere in Europe" and its parents will be a lesbian couple.

In the first pro-human cloning interview, hosted in GayToday in early 1997 immediately following the birth of the cloned sheep, Dolly, Randolfe Wicker proclaimed: "Heterosexuality's historic monopoly on reproduction is now obsolete." Mainstream gay movement organizations have studiously avoided commenting on the topic. Wicker appeared over the weekend on both MSNBC-TV and FOX News, openly expressing doubts that the Raelians have successfully cloned a child. He does believe, however, that 2003 will see the births of the world's first cloned children.

The Raelian theology of ''scientific creation,'' is an alternative to both Darwinian evolution and to the creationist theories of Christian religious fundamentalists. Raelianism was born in 1973. Its early adherents moved from Paris, where they encountered legal difficulties, to Montreal.

Rael, the movement's leader, and a former French race car driver, calls cloning '' the key to eternal life,'' and he looks forward to the universal downloading of personal memories into new bodies that will be exact replicas of their deceased predecessors. Randolfe Wicker himself has written in GayToday that human cloning will provide humans with what he calls "partial, temporary immortality." Wicker, who knows Rael personally and who was a guest of the Raelians during a 1999 visit to Canada, expresses serious doubts, however, about the veracity of their widely publicized cloning claims. An MSNBC-TV moderator described the claim as "either a fraud or something like The Invasion of the Body Snachers."

"Is it good news?" MSNBC-TV's Bill Boggs asked Wicker and the cloning advocate replied, "I think its such good news that its too good to believe…This is just a great big stunt," Wicker advised Boggs, "and you fellows are being played for every bit of media coverage they can get."

Wicker told GayToday that the current-day Raelian media hoax was comparable to that of actor Orsen Wells' War of the Worlds, when radio audiences were fooled into believing that an inter-planetary alien invasion was taking place on earth. On MSNBC-TV, during one of the few exchanges with anti-cloning bioethics experts in which he sided with an opponent, Wicker nodded in agreement as Glenn McGee, PhD, Director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, ridiculed the Raelian claims. "She appears at a Holiday Inn press conference with no scientists," said McGee, "no doctor, no Mom and no clone."

The claims of Dr. Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility doctor, that cloned babies will be born under his care as early as January, are far more credible, Wicker told MSNBC-TV. "Antinori enabled a 63-year old woman to have a child, a 59-year old woman to have twins, and the first post-menopausal woman to have a child," said Wicker. The current issue of U.S. News and World Report quotes Wicker's prediction, namely that "2003 will be the year of the clone."

SEE RANDOLFE WICKER'S TESTIMONY TO CONGRESS: IN 1998 AND 2001, TO READ HIS CRITICISMS OF THE RAELIANS.

ALSO SEE ARTICLE/INTERVIEW REGARDING THE REALIANS, UNDER OUR "EDITORIALS" PAGE.