Raël / Claude Vorilhon encounter

On the morning of December 13, 1973, twenty-seven-year-old Claude Vorilhon drove into the volcanic country west of Clermont-Ferrand, France. In the account he later published as The Book Which Tells the Truth, he said he often walked there to think. That morning he climbed into the Puy-de-Lassolas crater through cool gray mist. The ground was rough with dark volcanic slag, and the weather had left the normally expansive view closed in by cloud. Vorilhon wrote that a red flashing light first caught his attention. A silent object then descended through the mist and stopped roughly two metres above the ground. He described a flattened bell or shallow cone about seven metres in diameter and two and a half metres high, with a level underside, an intense intermittent red light below and a brilliant white light on top. A hatch opened in the underside and a stairway unfolded. From it emerged a small humanlike man about 1.2 metres tall. The visitor, according to Vorilhon, had almond-shaped eyes, long black hair, a small black beard and pale skin with a greenish cast. He wore a green one-piece suit. A subtle shimmering barrier seemed to surround his face. Vorilhon said the being spoke French and asked him to return the following day with a Bible and writing materials. What followed was not one long encounter but six consecutive morning meetings in the crater. Vorilhon sat with the visitor and recorded a message that reinterpreted the biblical creation story as an account of advanced beings using science to engineer life on Earth. The visitors called themselves the Elohim and, he said, wanted humanity eventually to build an embassy where they could return publicly. Vorilhon published the message in 1974 and adopted the name Raël. He began organizing followers around the claim, giving lectures and developing what became the Raëlian Movement. A later account described a separate encounter in 1975 in which he said he was taken aboard a craft and met figures identified with major religious traditions. Those later claims belong to the movement's developing history and should not be folded backward into the visual record of the December 1973 crater meetings. The Atlas treats the Puy-de-Lassolas series as Vorilhon's first-person contact claim. His book supplies a detailed chronology, measurements and physical descriptions, but no independent witness observed the alleged conversations or confirmed the identity or origin of the visitor. The movement and its surviving publications demonstrate the cultural consequences of the story; they do not independently verify that a spacecraft or extraterrestrial being was present in the crater.