In the 1990s Banjawarn was owned by the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, and following the Tokyo subway attack was the subject of an Australian Federal Police (AFP) investigation.
In his notes, he also praised the high quality of uranium ore, although it referred to the state of South Australia, not to Banjawarn.
Aum Shinrikyo used a front company headed by Yasuko Shimada, an Australian citizen of Japanese descent and a former member of Mahikari, to purchase Banjawarn.
According to the Australian Federal Police report, among the baggage was a mechanical ditch digger, picks, petrol generators, gas masks, respirators, and shovels.
The Australian government, finding that the wells in the region were not operating properly, demanded that a manager be hired to take care of the sheep.
On 20 March 1995, the Aum group released toxic sarin gas into part of the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 people and injuring over 1000.
The event sent shock waves through hundreds of miles of desert but was witnessed only by a few long-distance truck drivers and gold prospectors.
Ed Paull, a geophysicist from the Mundaring Observatory, said he received reports of a bright meteor traveling east[8] above the Leonora-Laverton Highway, at about the same time.
Alternatively, a bolide, or air burst, caused by a stony asteroid of up to some tens of metres in diameter, would not have reached the surface but would probably have exploded in the atmosphere, creating a large shock wave but not an impact crater.
[9] Following the revelation that Banjawarn was owned by the Aum, there was also speculation in 1997 that this event might have been the result of a test explosion of a nuclear device they had built.
The fireball and the seismic event initially went relatively unnoticed by the news media, except for an article in the Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper, on 1 June 1993.
According to a New York Times article, it was Mason who brought the seismic event to the attention of the United States Senate investigators.
[11] Mason remained convinced that at least some of the observed phenomena were caused by an undeclared test by the Laverton Jindalee Operational Radar Network facility.
[6] Importantly, the subcommittee's report says the cult members who arrived in Western Australia in September 1993 (bringing mining equipment and various chemicals with them) included Shoko Asahara himself.
The leader of the Aum cult arrived in Western Australia with a group of followers "including five females under the age of fifteen who were traveling without their parents".