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It's an unusually convivial and touchy-feely crowd, even for Quebec, a province renowned for its bonhomie: There are lots of shouts of recognition, lingering hugs and an affectionate rubbing of shoulders and biceps. Most of them are beautiful, too -- buff, tanned men in ribbed white T-shirts who'd look at home in Chippendale's bow ties and striking women, apparently from every continent, staring newcomers like me directly in the eye.

This is a gathering of the Raëlians, an organization whose members believe that the fact that the human race was created by extraterrestrials shouldn't interfere with our hedonistic enjoyment of sex. The skinny guy in front of me in the ticket line, who looks like a bit of a "Star Trek" fan, does magic tricks for the ticket seller, pulling coins from her ears. She smiles sweetly: "Peux-tu me sortir un bisou aussi?" -- how 'bout pulling out a kiss for me, too? -- and he obligingly pecks her on the cheeks.

In the lobby, women dressed in white are passing out pamphlets for UFOland, a kind of alien amusement park in the countryside outside Montreal ("Exact replica of a UFO! World's biggest building made of bales of straw! World's tallest replica of DNA!"). The Raëlian movement isn't, I've been assured, a millennial death cult. Which is a good thing because, judging from all the beatific smiles and unconditional love around me, I get the feeling I'm one of the few non-Raëlians in the building tonight.

I enter the auditorium and sit down next to a tall blond woman, who is outfitted with a white halter top, a furry white purse and tight white pants. She turns to me, fixes me with baby blue eyes as round as saucers and asks, in heavily accented French, where I first heard the message. "Boulevard Saint-Laurent," I deadpan, the Montreal street where I was handed a pamphlet for tonight's conference on human cloning by a Raëlian on roller blades a few weeks ago. Ivana, as she's called, tells me she heard the message from her brother, and that she left her native Warsaw, Poland, to be near other Raëlians in northern France. I ask her if she lives in a community, but she shakes her head: "We're free to come and go as we please, you know."

Ivana tells me she moved to Quebec about five months ago to be near Raël himself and is making her living as a dancer. This being Montreal, one of the world's leading dance capitals, I reflexively ask her what troupe she's with. "No," she says, looking at me as though I was a bit of a dunce. "I dance in the clubs." Riiight: I'd heard that a disproportionate number of Raëlians come from the exotic-dance community. Every few minutes, Ivana interrupts our conversation to hiss ineffectually at a toddler in a print dress running rampant in the aisles: "Isis!"

The Raëlians claim about 35,000 members worldwide, and though only 4,000 are French Canadian, the fact that Raël himself now lives here has made Quebec the organization's de facto headquarters. He has found fertile material for recruiting in this predominantly French-speaking province. Though 85 percent of Quebecois still identify themselves as Roman Catholic, church attendance here is the lowest on the continent, with only 15 percent of the provincial population actually showing up for services with any kind of frequency (vs. 21 percent of Canadians overall and 40 percent of Americans). That doesn't mean spirituality has vanished from Quebec, however. It has just veered toward the flaky and esoteric, so that there are now 800 sects and religions to choose from in the Montreal area alone.

Quebec's more notorious New Age religions include the cult of Roch "Moses" Thériault, a Seventh-Day Adventist who one day saw the light, declared himself "Oint the Eternal" and took his brood to the remote Gaspé Peninsula, where he oversaw amputations, castrations, disinterments of rotting corpses and brawls among the survivors. (Thériault comes up for parole this year.) Then there's the infamous Order of the Solar Temple, a cult founded by a Belgian homeopath whose local branch boasted the former mayor of the town of Richelieu, several journalists and a vice president of the local hydropower utility -- before they committed mass suicide, embarking on that long voyage to Sirius.

Next page | On the planet Elohim, Raël met Jesus and friends