Five years after Panayiotis Zavos shocked the world by claiming to implant a cloned human embryo, the rogue fertility doctor says he's done it again—and this time, with no fewer than 11 clones.

It's hard to know what to make of Zavos' boasts, which emerged yesterday in the wake of a Discovery Channel press release promoting its upcoming documentary, Human Cloning.

Zavos' original claims were roundly dismissed after he failed to produce any proof. The same went for a 2006 announcement that he'd put cloned embryos in five British women.

This time, he was filmed conducting research on allegedly clonal embryos before implanting them.

"My babies are doing well," he says on camera while peering through a microscope at a secret laboratory somewhere in the Middle East, where he moved so as to conduct research illegal in most of the world.

"I think we have three very good embryos that could be in utero today. If the implantation is successful as well, and the pregnancy is maintained, then as we say in the U.S., we have a home run," he said.

As evidence, the film is meaningless. Maybe he did implant the first reproductively cloned embryo. Maybe he's found a way to consistently avoid the potentially fatal genetic errors introduced during the cloning process. There's no way of knowing.

History, of course, suggests an answer. And if Zavos' assorted claims haven't stood the test of time, an assessment of him by bioethicist Art Caplan has.

"I think he is the most dangerous of the current fringe proponents of cloning, because he knows more, stretches the facts, and seems to be wallowing in a mix of publicity and fundraising that rests on a foundation of hype," Caplan told the Los Angeles Times in 2001.

Nothing has changed.