PARIS, Dec 28: Visibly embarrassed by the “French connection” to the birth of the first Raelian cloned baby, President Jacques Chirac has vigorously condemned the practice, saying that for France it was “contrary to the dignity of man,” and appeared in his eyes to be “patently criminal.”

The birth had been announced earlier in the day in Florida by a French citizen Brigitte Boisselier, a chemist by trade and president of Clonaid, a private company whose principal stock-in- trade is the cloning of human beings.

As for the “Raelian” sect, in whose name Brigitte Boisselier announced the birth on Thursday, it was founded in France in 1974 as the Mouvement pour l’accueil des Elohim,” credited with being the “creators of humanity,” and renamed the Mouvement raelien francais (MRF) a year later after the initial organization was dissolved.

Although the worldwide Raelian movement claims to have 55,000 members, only 2000 of them are thought to be French.

As for sect founder Claude Vorilhon, who has taken on the name of Rael, he was born in the Auvergne department of France in 1946, and at the age of 27, in 1973, says that during a stroll near a volcano crater near the city of Clermont-Ferrand, he came across a group of “elohim,” extraterrestrial creatures who descended from a flying saucer to “explain” to him, how they’d created humans in a laboratory before transporting them down to earth.