Aum Shinrikyo and the Axis of Crazy

This caught my eye this morning:

A former Japanese cult guru was sentenced to hang on Friday
for masterminding a sarin nerve gas attack on Tokyo subway trains in
1995 that killed 12, sickened thousands and shattered Japan's myth of
public safety.
Shoko Asahara, 48, who led the Aum Shinri Kyo (Supreme Truth Sect), was
found guilty at Tokyo District Court of 13 charges including
responsibility for the subway attack and a series of other crimes that
killed another 15 people.
"His crimes did not stop at the murder of specific individuals but
expanded into indiscriminate acts of terrorism," said Judge Shoji
Ogawa.
"I sentence the defendant to death," Ogawa said after Asahara stood to
hear the verdict that concluded the eight-year trial. Eight guards had
to help him rise at the judge's order to stand.
The gassing, with its images of bodies lying across platforms and
soldiers in gas masks sealing off Tokyo subway stations, stunned the
Japanese public, accustomed to crime-free streets.
Aum's arsenal including sarin, first developed by the Nazis, raised
concern worldwide about the ease with which biological and chemical
weapons of mass destruction could be made.
[...]
Asahara set up the cult in 1987, mixing Buddhist and Hindu meditation
with apocalyptic teachings and attracting, at its peak, at least 10,000
members in Japan and overseas, among them graduates of some of the
nation's elite universities.
The pudgy, nearly blind guru predicted that the United States would
attack Japan and turn it into a nuclear wasteland.
He also claimed to have traveled forward in time to 2006 and talked to
people then about what World War Three had been like.
Asahara and other cult members ran for parliament in 1990 but won only
a smattering of votes.
"After failing badly in the national election, Asahara turned to arming
the cult and eventually came to desire to rule Japan and become a
king," Judge Ogawa said.
After this, Aum set up a huge commune-like complex at the foot of Mount
Fuji where members not only studied his mystical teachings and
practiced bizarre rituals but also built an arsenal of weapons
including the sarin used in the subway attack.

Pretty scary, right? But there's more. In Bill Bryson's book In a Sunburned Country, he reports that:

• At 11:03 PM local time on May 28, 1993, a large-scale seismic
  disturbance, elsewhere reported as measuring 3.9 on the Richter scale,
  was detected near the Banjawarn sheep station in remote western
  Australia. The few observers in the area reported seeing a flash in the
  sky and hearing an explosion.
  
• The blast was 170 times more powerful than the biggest mining
  explosion ever recorded in the region and was consistent with a
  meteorite strike, but no crater could be found.
• In 1995, after the Aum Shinrikyo in Japan had released nerve
  gas in the Tokyo subway system and killed 12 people, it was revealed
  that the cult owned a 500,000-acre property in western Australia near
  the site of the mysterious boom.
• The cult has two former Soviet nuclear engineers in its
  ranks, hopes eventually to destroy the world, and maybe wanted a bit of
  practice, eh?
• In 1997, scientists finally got around to investigating this
  disquieting possibility. "You take my point," Bryson writes. "This is a
  country . . . so vast and empty that a band of amateur enthusiasts
  could conceivably set off the world's first nongovernmental atomic bomb
  on its mainland and almost four years would pass before anyone noticed."

Of course, we can't just leave it at that. I did a bit of poking around and came up with the following correspondence between Cecil Adams and the Australian Geological Survey Organisation:

Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding the event
observed and recorded in Western Australia on 28th May 1993. We are not
aware of any further information that has come to light since the
analyses undertaken between 1993 and 1997.
The event was analysed by the Incorporated Research Institute for
Seismology (IRIS). They concluded that it was consistent with the
impact of an iron meteorite with a radius of between 0.5 and 1.6 m. However,
a search by light plane shortly after the event failed to locate any
impact crater, which could be expected to be 90 m or more in diameter.
They also concluded the seismogram which was recorded was inconsistent
with a mine explosion, but were inconclusive as to whether it was a
local earthquake.
As no impact crater has been found it is most likely that the event
recorded by the seismic network was a small magnitude 3.6 earthquake,
which is not unusual in this region and consistent with the
seismograms. Since 1993, two earthquakes occurred in an area of 50 km
around the epicentre of the 28 May 1993 event. The seismic records of
these earthquakes were compared with the seismic records of the 1993
event, and showed similar characteristics consistent with typical
seismic activity for Western Australia. The observation of a meteor is
also not unusual in this region because of the clear skies and flat
topography, but we are unaware if there was an unusually large number
in the 1990s. --Clive D.N. Collins, Urban Geoscience Division, AGSO -
Geoscience Australia, Canberra, Australia

Adams then wrote back asking what AGSO (the Australian Geological
Survey Organisation) made of reports of a giant fireball concurrent
with the seismic event in 1993:

As we do not have any information other than what was
recorded on our seismic network we are unable to comment on reports of
phenomena in the atmosphere. We do however note that there is no
evidence of atmospheric sound waves (a 'sonic boom' for instance)
visible on the seismic records. Evidence for these waves have been
observed on records associated with known meteor sightings.
--Clive Collins

Very strange indeed. I guess the worst case scenario here would be that
some crazy Japanese doomsday cult has had The Bomb for the past 10
years. If it's true then making a martyr out of their pudgy blind
leader might not be such a fantastic idea.
However barring the worst case scenario, I'd say that at at a bare
minimum all of the above is simply more evidence supporting:

Jeremy Frazao's Grand Unification Theory

Everything and everyone is completely fucking insane.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 27, 2004 at 08:58 AM | Permalink