It sounds like a plot rejected from “The X-Files” for being too on the nose: A UFO cult asks Israel for land in Jerusalem so it can build an embassy for aliens.
But the Raëlians were serious. For decades, the French-born movement has insisted that humanity was created by extraterrestrial scientists called the Elohim, that those aliens were mistaken for gods and that they will return to Earth only after humans build them a proper diplomatic compound — preferably in Jerusalem, complete with a landing pad for their spacecraft. The movement still presents the embassy as one of its central missions.
The Raëlian Movement was founded in the 1970s by Claude Vorilhon, a former French auto racing journalist who renamed himself Raël after claiming he had encountered an extraterrestrial being near a volcano in France. In the Raëlian version of history, the Bible is not a sacred text about God but a badly misunderstood user manual from space. “Elohim,” the Hebrew word traditionally translated as God, is recast by the group as a reference to beings who “came from the sky.”
That is why Jerusalem mattered so much. The Raëlians did not want to build their alien embassy in Nevada, Geneva or some empty patch of desert with good UFO aesthetics. They wanted the Holy City. In their telling, the embassy would function as a futuristic “Third Temple” — not for Jewish worship, but for the return of the extraterrestrial creators who, they say, engineered life on Earth.
The proposed compound was wonderfully absurd in the way only a bureaucratic UFO religion can be. It was to include meeting rooms, protected guest quarters, a landscaped park, special diplomatic-style status and a landing pad large enough for a spaceship. Less “Close Encounters,” more extraterrestrial consulate with zoning issues.
Israeli officials, unsurprisingly, did not go for it.
Kobi Drori, an Israeli Raëlian guide, said in 2005 that the movement had approached Israeli governments more than seven times. According to him, Yitzhak Rabin’s government said no, Ehud Barak’s office said it had no time to deal with the request and Ariel Sharon’s office said the matter had been passed along. The embassy was never approved.
The Raëlians also claimed Lebanon had discussed hosting the project, but only if the group agreed not to display its symbol. They refused.
That symbol explains a great deal about why the relationship between the Raëlians, Israel and Judaism was always radioactive. The movement’s emblem historically combined a Star of David with a swastika. Raëlians claim the swastika is an ancient symbol of infinity, not a Nazi reference, and for a period they modified the logo in some countries, saying they wanted to show respect for Holocaust victims and ease negotiations with Israel. But the original symbol later returned as the movement’s official worldwide emblem.
The problem was not only aesthetic. The Raëlian relationship with Judaism is built on appropriation, inversion and hostility. The group borrows Jewish language, Jewish symbols and Jewish messianic concepts, then uses them to argue that mainstream Judaism and Israeli Jews have misunderstood their own tradition. Over time, the movement’s rhetoric toward Israel hardened into open anti-Zionism and antisemitic language.
In 2015, the International Raëlian Movement announced that it was ending its support for Zionism after Raël claimed to have received a new message from Yahweh, whom the group describes not as the God of Israel but as the leader of the Elohim. In that message, the movement urged Jews to leave Israel, called anti-Zionists the “only true Jews,” described Raëlians as the real Jews and portrayed Palestinians as the descendants of ancient Jews.
The movement’s own wording went further, referring to some Jews as “false Jews” from Europe and telling Jews to leave Israel, convert to Raëlianism and support the Palestinians. This was not a stray comment from an obscure member. It was published through official Raëlian channels.
Then came ElohimLeaks, a Raëlian site presenting supposed messages from the aliens about secret government plots. Its Israel-related claims read like a greatest-hits album of conspiracy thinking: Israeli plans for false-flag attacks, biological warfare, plots involving Gaza, Syria, Iran, Turkey and the United States, and claims that Israel would kill its own citizens to manipulate world opinion. One post claimed elements in the Israeli government were considering a false-flag bombing in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem that would kill thousands of Israelis and be blamed on Palestinians.
This is where the kooky becomes darker. The Raëlians’ Jerusalem fantasy was wrapped in flying saucers, cloned prophets and cosmic diplomacy. But their later Israel material leaned heavily into antisemitic conspiracies: Jews as impostors, Israel as uniquely evil and Israeli intelligence as secretly staging mass murder. Holocaust denial, which the ADL describes as an antisemitic conspiracy theory, also appeared in Raël’s orbit, according to the material you provided.
So the story has a built-in contradiction. The Raëlians wanted Israel to give them a foothold in Jerusalem because they viewed the Jewish people and the Hebrew Bible as central to their cosmic origin story. At the same time, they promoted a worldview that recast Israeli Jews as illegitimate, demanded that Jews leave the country and replaced Judaism with what amounted to Raëlian Judaism — a UFO theology in which the “true Jews” are the people waiting for aliens to land.
The embassy never happened. The Elohim did not arrive. Jerusalem did not become the galaxy’s most contested arrivals terminal.
But the campaign remains one of the strangest footnotes in Israel’s long history with prophets, pilgrims and messianic real estate schemes: the time an alien cult tried to convince the Jewish state to build a Third Temple for extraterrestrials, then turned around and told the Jews they were doing Judaism wrong.