National Post columnist Mark Steyn gleefully cited a recent Daily Telegraph article as confirmation Canada has become the global refuge of choice for flakes and nutbars of every stripe. The article's key sentence read: "Rael found that his baggy white suits, his medallions and his topknot of hair - which he claimed was an antenna for receiving extraterrestrial messages - made him a laughingstock in France. So he moved to Canada."

The Telegraph's Paris correspondent had been writing about Claude Vorilhon - the French born sports writer and failed race car driver who re-dubbed himself "Rael" and opened up shop as an anti-religious, pro-cloning, pro-group sex guru after being (he says) abducted by aliens in 1973. Reportedly, the green-skinned, almond-eyed aliens told Vorilhon that there was no God, that they - the aliens - were the origin of all human life through a batch of cloning they'd undertaken in extraterrestrial laboratories some 25,000 years ago.

On a more personal note, the aliens told Vorilhon that he was a clone (they'd somehow impregnated Vorilhon's mother in 1946 without her knowing) and they were counting on Vorilhon to spread the word that the only way to achieve human immortality is to clone people just before they die, grow those clones to adulthood in a matter of hours and then "download" the dying person's memory into the brain of their newly created copy. They make it all sound so wonderfully - if mysteriously - simple.

G. K. Chesterton once famously opined that the real danger in renouncing traditional religions is not that people end up believing in nothing, but rather they'll believe in anything; that such people become sitting ducks for whatever wacky, faddist mumbo jumbo comes along.

Thirty years after his extraterrestrial visitation, Vorilhon's Montreal-based UFO cult is 55,000 members strong. Over the Christmas holidays, Raelians made international headlines with their claims to have cooked, incubated and brought forth the world's first two cloned human babies. Further, Vorilhon insists, there are three more cloned Raelians in the natal works even as we speak, all of whom should come in for their earthly landings ("Beam me down, mommy") over the next six weeks.

I wonder if part of the phenomenal media play this story received wasn't perhaps due to its seasonal coincidence - that it came across as such a creepy parody of the story of Christ's nativity, then being celebrated around the world.

"Everything that the Pope is against, I support," Vorilhon has said. "The Catholic Church is the worst enemy of human nature." Yet the man decks himself out in flowing priestly robes whenever he can and for her interview with Vorilhon on CNN, Connie Chung had to agree to his pompous demands to be addressed as "your holiness" - a title usually reserved for the Pope.

Originally, the Raelians said they were going to submit their cloned offspring to objective, scientific testing that would supposedly confirm that each baby's DNA was 100-per-cent identical to a single biological forbear and wasn't a blending of the DNA of two parents. When they ultimately reneged on their promise to allow DNA testing, claiming security and privacy concerns, once pliable and credulous media sources turned against the cult. A number of this week's editorials in the mainstream media (that doesn't include those tabloids in the grocery checkout lines which customarily include tall tales that are right up the Raelians' alley) have been searching their journalistic souls and asking "How did we fall for that one?"

I, on the other hand, find myself thinking a lot this week about the late Agnes Shaw Cowan Mehlik, a perpetual candidate in London elections who used to wonderfully enliven some pretty stodgy debates with her otherworldly concerns. Eschewing such mundane projects as convention centres, refurbished markets or hockey arenas, Agnes' big political dream was to raise the funding to build a landing platform for UFOs in downtown London. In her last run for mayor - just before she was charged with running a common bawdy house - Agnes was heavily promoting something called "civic sex.."

All of which raises the intriguing question (cue Twilight Zone music): Was Agnes a proto-Raelian?