A cult which believes that humans were first created by aliens claimed yesterday that it had won the clandestine and increasingly bizarre race to produce a human clone.
It said a baby girl was born on Thursday from an egg fertilised by a skin cell from her mother.
Ms Brigitte Boisselier, who calls herself a bishop of the Raelian sect, offered no proof to back her claim at a press conference in Florida, but said an independent panel of scientists would be allowed to verify it with DNA tests in the next eight or nine days.
The announcement provoked an outcry among scientists concerned it might open the floodgates to many other human clones when both the safety and ethics of the process are still very much in question.
Ms Boisselier, a former research chemist from France, said a company associated with the cult, Clonaid, expected four more cloned babies to be born in the next two months, the first next week to a lesbian couple at a secret location in Europe.
At a press conference yesterday made all the more surreal by her dramatic orange and white hair, Ms Boisselier, the head of Clonaid, beamed and declared: "I'm very, very pleased to announce that the first baby clone is born."
She called the baby "Eve", and said she was born by Caesarean section on December 26th, weighing 7lb and was "doing fine".
However, Ms Boisselier would not reveal where she was born, saying only that the parents were American and would return to the US in three days. She said the couple had sought help from Clonaid because the husband was sterile. Human cloning is permitted in the US under limited conditions and only for the cultivation of cells for therapeutic purposes such as transplants.
Using cloned human cells to induce a pregnancy is banned.
Prof Randall Prather, a reproductive bio-technology expert at the University of Missouri said he had no way of telling if Clonaid's claims were true, but, if confirmed, they had "devalued human dignity".
Scientists in the US yesterday were sceptical about Clonaid's claims, particularly of Ms Boisselier's claim that of 10 women implanted with cloned embryos, five had sustained successful pregnancies, a success rate far in excess of experiments in cloning animals.
Clonaid was founded five years ago by a self-styled prophet known as Rael, formerly a French sports journalist called Claude Vorihon, who established a sect on the belief that human beings were first cloned 25,000 years ago by extra-terrestrials.