Michael Jackson was so terrified of dying he was desperate to clone himself in a bizarre bid to extend his superstar legacy.
Jackson – who was obsessed with the idea of immortality – attended a Las Vegas conference on human cloning with his friend, the spoon bender Uri Geller.
And the King of Pop was so blown away by the teachings of a sect called the Raelians he asked if they would clone him.
Jacko’s chauffeur Al Bowman, who drove the singer and Geller to the event in 2002, said: “Jackson was very excited.
“He bounced out of that conference like a small child. He was smiling and on a high. I heard him and Uri talking in the back of the limo.
“He was talking about the prospect of being cloned. He grabbed Uri by both arms and told him, ‘I really want to do it Uri, and I don’t care how much it costs’.”
The Raelian movement is a strange religious sect that believes the human soul dies when the body dies so the key to eternal life is cloning – recreating individuals from their own genetic make-up.
The sect also has a scientific arm called Clonaid which holds regular fund-raising events to share its latest research with the great and good of Hollywood.
“I always remember Jackson talking about the cloning of Dolly the sheep in Britain in 1996 – he was totally fascinated by it,” said Al, 50, Jacko’s chauffeur for over a decade.
“Then when he heard about the Raelians he became utterly convinced this weird religious group could clone humans.
“It was really oddball stuff, but it interested Michael. One day in the limo he said, ‘They did it with Dolly’. I said, ‘Dali… you mean Salvador Dali’. We both laughed.
“Michael said he wanted a mini-version of himself cloned to carry on his legacy. He was hoping that Michael Jackson could live for ever.”
In the 90s Jackson inquired about being cryogenically frozen before he died and it was also rumoured that he took GH3, a drug designed to prolong life expectancy.
But he was particularly fascinated by the Raelians, which were founded by French journalist Claude Vorilhon.
In December 1973, Vorilhon – or Rael as he is now known – claimed he was contacted by an extra-terrestrial being who emerged from a flying saucer and told him – in fluent French – that humans were created in laboratories 25,000 years ago by people from another planet .
It’s believed Jacko made contact with the Raelians after the conference in Las Vegas and spoke with Dr Brigette Boisselier about the idea of a Jacko clone.
Dr Boisselier, a trained scientist with a master’s degree in biochemistry and a doctorate in physical chemistry, is also a Raelian bishop and the managing director of Clonaid, which was set up in the Bahamas in 1997. In December 2002 she told the world that the Raelians had created the first cloned child – a baby girl named Eve.
She popped up on American, French, British and Belgian TV promising that a second cloned baby would soon be born to a lesbian couple in an undisclosed northern European location.
There has been no evidence of any such baby but the following year, in 2003, Al said he got a call from one of Jacko’s publicists. “I wasn’t chauffeuring for Michael anymore, but then this woman calls me out of the blue saying she was his publicist,” said Al.
“She wanted contact details for the Raelian people. She said Michael was furious with them and she needed to get hold of them. She wouldn’t say why.
“I thought that surely Michael or one of his people had a contact number, but the woman said he’d lost it. I gave them a number and then didn’t hear anything back.”
It remains unclear whether Jacko ever pursued his cloning ambition any further.
According to Britain’s Daily Star, Michael underwent several three dimensional scans in 1996 so a virtual reality ‘robotic’ twin could be produced.
It is thought the scans could now be used to bring the singer back in pop videos, computer games or even films.
The anonymous US businessman who owned the images and has reportedly been trying to sell them for $1 million told Britain’s Daily Star newspaper: “The data has been in our archives since he had the scans. The thing about this data is it immortalised him at the age of 37, before his nose was disfigured and when he was in the prime of his life.”
