The International Raëlian Movement (IRM), founded in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon (who later became known as Raël), is arguably the largest “flying saucer cult” in the world, claiming over 60,000 members in 52 countries. Vorilhon was born in Ambert (near Vichy, France) on September 30, 1946, and a brief narrative of his early life, mixing emic and etic perspectives, runs as follows.

Claude was the illegitimate child of a 15-year-old village girl and a married man, a Sephardic Jew named “Marcel” who was in temporary hiding from the Nazis. Marcel returned to his family and his lumber factory in Alsace at the end of the war, but he continued his relationship with his young mistress, Claude's mother. Claude himself was never baptized, and was raised by his aunt and grandmother to be a staunch atheist. At the age of 9, he was briefly placed in a Catholic boarding school, where he naïvely opted to participate in the Mass, along with the other boys, not realizing that he was committing blasphemy (due to his not being baptized). This allegedly caused an uproar among the priests. At 15 Claude was taken out of high school to work to help support his mother, but he ran away, hitch-hiking to Paris with a race car driver who introduced him to the pleasures of prostitutes and the race track.