Aum Shinrikyo and Cults that Went Wacko

Aum Shinrikyo
Leader: Shoko Asahara

Born Chizuo Matsumoto and partly blind, the Japanese accupuncturist and yoga teacher in 1987 assembled a "new" religion called Aum Shin Rikyo (Aum Supreme Truth) with ostensibly Buddhist but mainly New Age tenets. His followers (perhaps 10,000 at one point) believed his claims of levitation, of anti-Semitic and U.S. plots against Japan, and that the world would end sometime before 2000...

Prophet of Poison

• The 1992 Waco Standoff