Hello everyone out there in Acorn land. I hope everyone has been making it safe and sound through our Coronavirus ordeal and is adjusting well to what seems like our new norm for some time to come. You might have wondered where has my weekly Acorn Blog gone, but don’t worry, I’ve only been away on what I like to call a vacation, but now I’m back with another great mystery or concern, depending on your point of view.
In the world today, there are only a handful of nations that have successfully detonated a nuclear bomb, but there are many wanting to put their countries name on this checklist. Even with these weapons out there, you hope that those countries’ leaders have the rational thought of not using them ever. Now let’s look at a nightmare scenario where a terrorist group had the ability to acquire a nuclear device. Many groups are actively looking on the worlds black market to get this technology, and the scary thing is that they would probably use it sooner or later.
How about if a group built their own bomb? After putting it all together, you almost have to test it out to ensure that the thing would work. There would be nothing as humiliating to a terrorist group is to have a dud on their hands and be the laughing stocks of all rogue regimes and other like-minded groups. So, we get back to the fact that you have to test it somewhere, but where? How about I tell you a story about a group that might have already done this. If you are interested, then keep reading this fine piece of literature.
The location is Banjawarn Station, located in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. Let’s just say that there’s nothing in this location except for a lot of desert and a good place to put a sheep and cattle station and let them roam to their heart’s content. To say that there’s nothing really out here is an understatement. Banjawarn Station takes up about a million acres, of which 500,000 acres are owned by one ranch. If you were the nefarious type of person or group, and had some money to throw around, this would be a great place to keep away from nosy neighbor’s simply because the closest might be hundreds of miles away.
On the evening of May 28, 1993 this location was rocked by an enormous seismic shock that rattled hundreds of square miles of desert wasteland and created a boom that shook this sleepy corner of the world. If you can believe it, there were still people in this area when this boom took place. Truckers, Aborigines, and gold prospectors, from near and far, reported seeing a blinding flash of light and a massive fireball, which created a “huge red colored flare” in the night sky. Some people reported of being knocked off their feet by the violent tremor. I’m sure if they were like me, they probably said, “well, there’s something you don’t see every day.”
Days and weeks after this event, many people started to speculate on what this explosion could have been. Many talked about secret experiments, nuclear weapons, conspiracies, and a Japanese doomsday cult. Ok….What? I know that Australians pride themselves on marching to their own drummer, but how do you jump to the conclusion of a Japanese doomsday cult? It would seem that Australians are “as mad as a bag of cut snakes.” Or are they now? So, keep reading.
Meanwhile, back at Geoscience Australia, a company who prides themselves on their accuracy when it comes to earth movements, concluded that it was nothing more than an earthquake. Not being very frequent in this part of Australia, but on occasion, they have been known to happen, but how do you account for the giant fireball in the sky? Other agencies from all around the world came up with a conclusion that a meteor strike caused it, but yet there were no craters found from government airplanes that overflew this area in attempts to locate this supposed strike site. There is the possibility that the meteor had simply exploded in the air, and this is the reason no craters were found. Some people even came up with the idea that a mine explosion could have simply been the cause. This area has a lot of mines in the general vicinity if you consider hundreds of miles being close by, only in Australia. Mining officials then looked at the charts and decided that there was no way that a mine explosion could have caused that much shaking to have happened. The Arlington, Virginia based Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) would estimate that the explosion would have been 170 to 250 times larger than any known mine explosion in the world, and more like the magnitude of a small nuclear blast, “about equal to up to 2,000 tons of high explosives.”
Weeks turned into months and months turned to years, and everyone sort of forgot about the unsolved mystery, and because no one was injured, this event simply faded away. Then on March 20 of 1995, the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo shocked the world with its sarin gas attack on a commuter train on the crowded Tokyo subway system. This attack left 12 people dead and thousands more injured for life because of the gas attack. This deed led to the downfall of the cult and its crazy leader Shoko Asahara, but it also raised eyebrows about the mystery of the explosion in Western Australia a few years before.
As police started looking into this doomsday cult, many scary things were found out about what this group had been up to. The full list of items that the group had been working on included the sarin gas, VX gas, and stockpiling anthrax and other biological agents to purge the earth of non-believers in preparation for the end of days. Like I said, it’s your everyday doomsday cult who wanted to kill everyone, but this one had the knowledge and money to accomplish a lot of its deadly ideas. This was all very ominous stuff but only a precursor to even more lethal attacks the group had in mind for the extermination of non-believers. The Aum Shinrikyo cult was simply believed to be a bunch of your everyday “nutjobs,” and no one took them seriously, so they flew under everyone’s radar. In fact, most people from around the world have never heard of this group until their attack on the Tokyo subway system. So, you might be asking yourself, how does this bring the 1993 Banjawarn Station unexplained explosion together with Aum Shinrikyo? Well, it seems that the group in April of 1993 decided to purchase the sprawling ranch in Western Australia. Why would a doomsday cult buy a remote ranch on another continent is now starting to come into focus. A location surrounded by nothing but desert with no snooping neighbors getting into your business and the ability to bring together likeminded people together at one location is simply perfect. Was it just a coincidence that a seismic event just happened to have occurred while the Aum Shinrikyo owned that property, or were they up to something big?
Another revelation the authorities discovered is that Aum Shinrikyo was interested in acquiring a nuclear bomb or just radioactive material to create a dirty bomb for many years before the Tokyo attack. Did I happen to tell you that they also purchase the services of two nuclear engineers from Russia who happened to be out of work. This new information was starting to lead many to the notion that Aum Shinrikyo had in fact, succeeded in making and detonating a small but yet destructive nuclear bomb.
At first, this idea sounds very implausible, even with everything that was mentioned above. To add some credibility to this story, some members of an Aborigine community in the area claimed that they saw Aum members in full length, helmeted suits similar to hazmat suits on the property, and a twin-engine airplane was frequently seen landing and offloading mysterious large containers. Other factors to think about are that the group’s construction leader and one of its top members, Kiyohide Hayakawa, had made a trip to the ranch on his way back from Russia just weeks before the mystery explosion. Other Aum members had been caught trying to sneak some chemicals into the country by mislabeling the contents, and when asked about it, they had no real good answer. Some of the chemicals included hydrochloric acid, ammonium chloride, sodium sulfate, perchloric acid, as well as sophisticated laboratory and mining equipment. Other items seized were glass tubing, glass evaporators, beakers, Bunsen burners, mixing bowls, generators, ditch diggers, and a rock-crushing machine. Some speculate that the group was attempting to mine uranium deposits, which are known to exist in the area, and develop a nuclear weapon on site. Could it be that Aum Shinrikyo happen to make the world’s biggest firecracker?
As Dr. Evil as this sounds, there are some problems with this story of a cult building and detonating an atomic bomb where only maybe 100 people reported seeing something. First of all, the recorded wavelengths were investigated by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology and compared to other tests from around the world. The results were that the signature was quite different and couldn’t have been a nuclear blast. Another problem is that it’s believed that there were no cult members in the country at the time of the explosion, and the ranch was sold after a raid by authorities in October of 1994. Some of the items that were discovered in the raid were lab equipment and paraphernalia for making chemical weapons. While it was found that they had indeed been working on and testing sarin gas on the ranch, there was no evidence of any radiation or equipment for making a nuclear weapon.
Now for some really out of the box thinking on some possibilities of what this blast was. The New York Times reported in 1997 that the group had created an “Earthquake Machine” or possibly electromagnetic weapon of some kind. The story states that cult members became fascinated with Nikola Tesla’s electromagnetic earthquake-inducing weapons technology designs. It also reported that some members visited the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, where Tesla toyed with the idea and wrote about seismic weapons theory before he died in 1943. Members were reported to have reviewed Tesla’s thesis and other research papers concerning such electromagnetic weapons.
This theory sounds like a good story for a James Bond book, but you have to take this as a good spooky story in reality. One problem to this is that on the property, no such equipment was ever found. This earthquake inducing technology, scientist have stated that this is out of the realm of possibility for a rogue cult on a shoestring budget. Sure, they had money, but the amount they would need would be comparable to governments’ budgets, like the US, Russia, and China. Even with the money, the current state of technology makes this prohibitive.
So, what was the big explosion and bright light that rocked western Australia back in 1993? The odds are that this was most likely caused by what scientists call a bolide, a bright meteor that explodes and thus leaves no crater that coincides with a naturally occurring earthquake. In a Senate subcommittee on the matter, they stated that “‘the meteorite scenario is consistent with the eyewitness observations and with the energy levels derived from seismic records.”
So, there you have it; but still today there are many people who don’t believe this report and have even suggested that a UFO crash caused all of this and the government is merely covering the evidence up. What happened at Banjawarn Station is still a mystery. Was it just a meteor with an earthquake happening simultaneously, or was it linked to a Japanese doomsday cult? This group was testing out weapons, so why couldn’t they have tested a low-grade nuclear device? Whatever the answer truly is, this is a strange occurrence, and it will generate conversations and theories for some time to come.