A religious sect that contends space travelers created the human race by cloning themselves said that it would announce today that the first cloned human baby has been born.

A representative of the group, known as the Raelians, said the announcement would be made at a news conference by Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, who directs a Bahamian company formed to clone humans and is scientific director of the sect. Boisselier's spokeswoman, Nadine Gary, would give out little information but said the baby had been born by Caesarean section and was a clone of the woman who gave birth to her. Neither mother nor child will be at the news conference "for medical reasons," Gary said.

This year, three groups - a fertility clinic in Italy, an embryology laboratory business in Kentucky and the Raelians - announced separately that they were on the verge of overseeing the births of cloned humans.

Animal-cloning experts said it was theoretically possible for a human to be cloned but any such effort would probably have had dozens of failures before a successful birth.

They said it should be relatively easy, using the same type of DNA tests that are used in court, to prove that a child was a duplicate of his or her mother. An independent test would be crucial to proving that the announcement was not a hoax, they said.

Gary said Boisselier "would verify the DNA fingerprint of the baby" and "has been speaking to an independent inspector who would make the proof."

Raelians are followers of Rael, a French-born former race car driver who has said he met a 4-foot space alien atop a volcano in southern France in 1973 and went aboard his ship, where he was entertained by voluptuous female robots and learned that the first humans were created 25,000 years ago by space travelers called Elohim, who cloned themselves.

Raelians consider cloning an opportunity to meld religion and science and say they have 55,000 members.