False Prophet: The Aum Cult of Terror (long article -- scary stuff)

From the time he was a small child, Chizuo Matsumoto wanted only one thing, to be rich. It was quite an ambition considering his circumstances.

Born in Kyushu, southern Japan in 1955, he was the fourth son of a poor weaver, who carved out a meager existence making Tatami, the closely-woven straw mats, traditionally used as flooring in Japanese homes.

Ironically, the family was too poor to afford such luxuries, living as they did in a rough shack with earthen floors.

Poverty wasn’t the only challenge the young Chizuo faced. Smitten at birth with infantile glaucoma, he was blind in his left eye and only partially sighted in his right.

Because of his disability and timid manner, he was bullied and teased constantly at school until his parents enrolled him in a government-funded school for the blind.

He quickly learned that being the only partially sighted child in a class full of blind students had distinct advantages. It wasn’t long before he became the school bully, dominating and manipulating his classmates into doing his bidding.

The pursuit of money became an all-consuming passion. He very rarely performed favors for his sightless colleagues without extracting some form of payment in return.

As he grew, his reputation grew with him. He became known as a person who would do anything to gain notoriety and affluence. Many times during his school years he tried, unsuccessfully, to become student-body president. He never understood that his classmates feared, rather than respected, him.

By the time he had reached senior high school, he was well developed in both mind and body. His grades were good and he had earned a black belt in Judo.

The ability to make money had also developed so much that by the time he graduated he had amassed over $30,000.

His ambition continued to grow. He told friends that he intended to join Japan’s ruling political party and eventually become Prime Minister. As part of his master plan, he enrolled in a prep school in the nation’s capital, seeking entrance into the elite Tokyo University. His plans were foiled when, despite many months of study, he was refused entry.

It was a bitter, angry young man that returned home to the village of his birth. Shortly after his arrival, he was arrested for assault, following an argument in a massage parlor.

Several months later he returned to Tokyo where he met and subsequently married a bright, young college student. Their first child followed quickly, the first of six. His wife, Tomoko, became a steadying influence in his life and persuaded her family to invest money in a clinic to be run by her husband.

The Matsumoto Acupuncture Clinic was a success from the start -- due in no small part to the dubious herbal remedies that Chizuo peddled to the unsuspecting public. These “remedies,” accompanied by a three-month course of acupuncture treatments and yoga exercises were sold for $7,000.

One such “miracle-cure,” proved to be nothing more than tangerine peel soaked in alcohol. His exploits eventually came to the notice of police after Chizuo had been reportedly selling his “cure-alls” to elderly guests in many of the city’s luxury hotels.

He was fined only $1,000. A small sum compared to the $200,000 that the scam had earned him.

Chizuo Matsumoto was close to achieving his childhood ambition. Money was plentiful and his reputation as a healer, albeit dubious, was growing. Despite his success, he yearned for something more, some “purpose for being,” he told his wife, that would give his life greater meaning.

He delved into the worlds of geomancy and Chinese fortune telling. Feeling the need for a spiritual experience, he began taking part in weird religious rituals and spent long periods in deep meditation. It was after on of these meditative states that he told of the rush of “psychic energy” that had surged through his body, giving him the ability to see the auras that surrounded “evil” people. Chizuo believed that he was destined for greatness and made plans to seek a way of consolidating his new found spirituality.

"...He quickly learned that being the only partially sighted child in a class full of blind students had distinct advantages. It wasn’t long before he became the school bully, dominating and manipulating his classmates into doing his bidding..."

Hmmm...

In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man really IS king!

I think there was a related blurb in a National Geographic a few months ago about fallout from the Aum rycin attacks.

It described a couple who was sitting at home one night when suddenly the wife couldn't breathe. The husband rushed her to the hospital, where it was discovered whe was suffering from rycin poisoning.

Police first grilled the husband, but the incident was later shown to be due to a practice attack by Aum.

Now the wife is in a vegetative state. The husband carries her from place to place, feeds, her, combs her hair, talks to her -- in the hope that someday she'll recover.

I'll see if I can track down the article. Heart-breaking story.

The world of Aum conspiracy theory is a fascinating but nutty place. Personally, I don't believe in secret technologies based on suppressed fundamental physics - fundamental physics is too competitive and global for an obvious blind spot to be maintained for decades. You can try to suppress complex recipes like encryption algorithms or nuclear weapons designs for a while, but not something as simple as "scalar electromagnetism" - not if it has anything to do with reality, that is.

However, Aum did have an interest in Tesla, and they seem to have believed that the USA is the one with the secret weapons programs. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Aum's science minister said at a press conference that it might have been caused by American "seismic weapons". The journalists laughed at him, but Aum believed it was under constant high-tech attack, and I wonder sometimes if the quake (and the belief that the quake was an "unnatural disaster") ultimately prompted the sarin attack.

Another thing I wonder about is whether Aum's terrorism was ultimately abetted by North Korea, indeed whether it was part of a 1995 terror offensive from the "axis" that was also meant to include Ramzi Yousef's Bojinka operation. The craziest idea I've entertained is that the Kobe quake itself was caused by a North Korean nuke, smuggled in and set off underground. I doubt it - you'd think there'd be telltale radioactivity somewhere - but one day I'll have to look at the seismology in detail, just to make sure.

Personally, I don't believe in secret technologies based on suppressed fundamental physics - fundamental physics is too competitive and global for an obvious blind spot to be maintained for decades.

I'm no physicist; my awareness of exotic weaponry is limited to my internet browsings.

But my response to your statement is that how do we know that a blind spot exists ? The evidence for the Manhatten Project was the eventual use of its product. If the product is never used in a setting which makes its use public and obvious, how do we know that it doesn't exist ?

Have you read some of the articles on the strange happenings at Pine Gap in the Australian outback ?

I'm not a true believer, but I don't dismiss all possibilities out of hand. Just a curious person.

The leading nuclear physicists of the world were well aware, for years before the Manhattan Project, that an atom bomb might be possible. The uncertainty lay in its feasibility as a work of engineering; the basic concepts of radioactivity, nuclear decay, chain reaction were not in doubt, and they were discussed in the physics literature where anyone could read them. On the other hand, Tom says that there's this alternative physical paradigm that is universally ignored, and yet which has served as the basis of secret Russian superweapons for decades. On top of that, it's supposed to cure cancer, control minds, offer limitless energy, and explain the soul. It sounds like Space-Age snake oil to me.

Hidden breakthrough physics of any form is implausible for a number of reasons, but it boils down to the highly public, multinational and collaborative nature of high-energy physics, both theoretical and experimental. The experimental frontier can be found at internationally staffed facilities who post their experimental timetables on the web. Progress on the theoretical frontier relies on the pursuit of new ideas, so there's more scope for secret breakthroughs there, but it equally relies on the communal exploration of those ideas once they have been formulated. For years, only a few people were interested in superstring theory, and progress was slow; the breakthrough period didn't really start until lots of people were working on it.

Of course there really are big secret research projects in physics, but I would say they are all about engineering (nuclear weapons, X-ray lasers), not about "basic science".

Strange happenings in the outback... are you thinking of a series of articles on the "Banjawarn bang"? Banjawarn is a sheep station owned by Aum, where they gassed some sheep and tried to dig up uranium. Pine Gap, on the other hand, is a US military base, and to my knowledge contains nothing more than a bunch of satellite dishes (probably part of the ECHELON network), hidden under Fuller domes so you can't see which way they're pointing.

Thanks for your reply. I think the internet story refers to Pine Gap, and does not make the distinction between PG and the Aum property. As I wrote, I'm no physcist LOL, having only take high school physics. But I'm always interested in the out-of-the-box possibilities. The Aum is an intriguing sect, having been able to attract the scientists that it has. The willingness of this group to form alliances, just as terrorists did in the 1970s, and to utilize WMD, makes them quite a bit more than just a group of odd religionists.

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