Michael Jackson's outlandish life is being overshadowed in his death by events so preposterous they seem to come from a fiction writer's overactive imagination.

They include a petition to award him a Nobel peace prize; a growing list of people who claim to be the real parents of Jackson's children; a lawsuit from an alleged ex-wife; and a sect that believes the "King of Pop" lives on, albeit on another planet.

Jackson died in Los Angeles on 25 June at age 50 from an apparent cardiac arrest. His son Prince Michael (12), his daughter Paris (11) and seven-year-old son Prince Michael II — known as "Blanket" — are the immediate heirs to the late singer's music empire. Their legal guardian is Katherine Jackson, the children's paternal grandmother.

According to a case filed recently in Los Angeles, a woman named Claire Elisabeth Fields Cruise claims to be the children's sole biological mother.

"Unofficial college sweetheart"

Documents filed by Fields Cruise, and posted on celebrity website TMZ.com, also claim Prince Michael I was fathered by a man who lives in France, while Paris Jackson's father was Fields Cruise's "unofficial college sweetheart".

Fields Cruise told a judge she gave birth to the children without being pregnant with them.

"There is technology that is in existence," she told reporters after she filed the case,"to remove the conceived children from her body and insert them into the bodies of the surrogates who gave birth to them."

Fields Cruise also claimed that Jackson "always knew" he was the biological father of Connor Cruise, the 14 year-old black child that actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman adopted in 1995, when they were still married.

Meet the parents

One day before Fields Cruise filed her case, British ex-child star Mark Lester said that he might be Paris Jackson's father.

"I gave Michael my sperm so that he could have kids — and I believe Paris is my daughter," Lester, who played Oliver Twist in the 1968 film musical 'Oliver!', told the British tabloid News of the World.

Jackson family spokespeople said the 51-year-old Briton was a friend of Jackson and is godfather to all three of his children, but denied Lester's parenthood claim.

Jackson had his first two children, Prince Michael and Paris, when he was married to Debbie Rowe, an assistant to his dermatologist, between 1996 and 1999.

Rowe signed over parental rights to the children to Jackson, who later had a third child, Prince Michael II, by a surrogate.

AFP