Unusual earthquakes and strange lights in Australia, cult warfare and arms deals in Japan, suppressed technologies in the USA - David Guyatt adjusts his set and tunes into the vibrations emanating from the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

When it comes to Aum Shinrikyo the sinister Japanese cult said to be responsible for the Tokyo subway Sarin attack in 1995 almost anything is possible. Now investigations into the shadowy background of Aum, are unravelling sinuous connections that leap-frog the Aum story into another league altogether.

It is claimed that Aum are intimately involved in the development of futuristic doomsday weapons that make today's nuclear missiles look like children's toys. Said to be so advanced that they don't 'officially' exist in the armouries of the major powers they include the use of electromagnetic pulse, earthquake inducing and 'plasma weapons' being covertly tested in remote regions of the world.

At the centre of these allegations are a series of powerful earthquakes, strange fireballs and aerial lights manifesting above Western Australia. They also revolve around the major January 1995 quake which laid waste to the Japanese City of Kobe. The latter resulted in the crash of the Tokyo stock exchange itself directly leading to the collapse of England's spook-infested Barings bank. Suggestions that the Kobe event may have been caused by a laser-powered seismic weapon continue to circulate.

Extraordinarily, the Kobe quake was predicted nine days before the event by Aum's charismatic guru Shoko Asahara. In a radio broadcast on 8 January 1995, Asahara stated: "Japan will be attacked by an earthquake in 1995. The most likely place is Kobe."

Hideo Murai, the late Science and Technology minister for Aum Shinrikyo also adhered to this view answering questions about the Kobe quake in a news conference at the Foreign Correspondent Club in Japan on 7 April 1995, Murai said: "There is a strong possibility of the activation of an earthquake using electromagnetic power, or somebody might have used a device that applied force inside the Earth." The Aum leadership believed the Kobe quake to be an act of war. "Kobe was hit by a surprise attack," they claimed, adding that the city was an "appropriate guinea pig." Murai said to have been the most intelligent Japanese who ever lived was murdered in a Yakuza orchestrated assassination shortly after speaking on the record to foreign news correspondents.

Aum's interest in weapons of mass destruction was considered serious enough to merit the launch of a special investigation by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Chaired by Senator Sam Nunn, the committee spent five months conducting hundreds of interviews of "government and private individuals" and included classified briefings from numerous US intelligence agencies. Their 100-page report was published in October 1995.

The Nunn report, in addition to outlining Aum's large international membership and US$1billion plus finances, revealed the cult's fascination for so-called Tesla weapons after their inventor Nikola Tesla. The report mentions Tesla's development of a "ray gun in the 1930's, which was actually a particle beam accelerator", and which was said to be able to "shoot down an airplane at 200 miles". Aum personnel also travelled to the Tesla Museum in Belgrade to research the so-called Tesla Coil a device used for (amplifying?) alternating currents and uncovered Tesla's work on "high energy voltage transmission and wave amplification, which Tesla asserted could be used to create seismological disturbances".

Do powerful Tesla-type earthquake weapons exist? Not according to conventional scientific wisdom, but there are many who harbour doubts, and still others who maintain that "conventional wisdom" in the scientific community merely reflects a mind-set rusted shut by prolonged conservative values.

In 1995, British born Geologist/Geophysicist, Harry Mason, stumbled across a strange, unaccountable earthquake which rumbled across the vast open spaces of Western Australia two years earlier. The event took place at 11.03pm on 28 May 1993 with an epicentre close to Banjawarn sheep station in the Leonora-Laverton area north-west of Perth. The event registered 3.7 on the Richter scale and was assumed to have been the first ever recorded quake in that part of Australia. Mason, who was very familiar with the region and it's geological composition, was intrigued. Initially believing the tremor was the result of a meteorite impact, he set about gathering data.

Witnesses reported sighting a fireball trailing across the sky, followed by a bright blue flash and shortly afterwards, by an earth tremor measuring 3.7 on the Richter scale. This was rapidly followed by a "large hemisphere of orange light, lined with a silverish glow, rose above the apparent blast site". Extraordinarily, the dome of light remained in place for two hours and then vanished like "someone turning off a switch".

Extensive interviews soon revealed a number of major inconsistencies with Mason's meteorite theory. For one thing the object was heard before it arrived overhead and was moving at a sub-sonic speed. Aware that meteorites generally have entry speeds of about 25,000mph, Mason was bemused. In addition the object gave of "no sparks or other drop off fragments, and appeared to arc up over the observers before seeming to plunge down to the North". Moreover, the fireball emitted "a fiery spherical white-blue-yellow light", "flew at relatively low altitude" and "emitted a regular pulsed swooshing roar" similar to a Diesel freight train engine roar. As his detailed investigation continued, Mason became increasingly convinced that the Banjawarn event was not a meteor. In time, his thoughts increasingly turned towards the peculiar group that had purchased the Banjawarn sheep station...