In December 2002 a company founded by the movement, Clonaid, announced that the first cloned human being had been born, a girl it called Eve. The announcement was made at a press conference in Florida and reported worldwide within hours.
Nothing was ever produced. The arrangement announced alongside the claim was that an independent journalist, Michael Guillen, would organise genetic testing to confirm that the child was a clone of her mother. Guillen withdrew within a fortnight, saying that he had not been given access and that the affair might well be a hoax. No child was presented, no sample was tested, and no verification followed for that birth or for any of the further births the company subsequently announced.
A Florida court was asked to appoint a guardian for the child, on the reasoning that if she existed she required protection. The company responded that the parents were not in the United States and that the court had no jurisdiction, and the proceeding ended without the child being located. Twenty years on there is no evidence that any of the claimed clones exists.
The episode is instructive about the movement rather than about cloning. Its cosmology holds that humanity was created in a laboratory by an extraterrestrial civilisation and that cloning is the route to indefinite life, so a successful human clone would have been a demonstration of doctrine. What the announcement produced instead was worldwide attention at no evidential cost, and that outcome has shaped how later claims from the same source are received.