Cargo Cults and Beyond by Colin Bennett
Few today know the story of what are now called Cargo Cults. During the fast and furious, island-hopping campaign against the Japanese in World War 2, American land, sea, and air units used many scores of thousands of unnamed islands in the Pacific as temporary bases. Often this was the briefest of encounters with native, near-stone-age populations, most of whom had experienced almost no contact with the Western world.
They could do nothing but gaze on in wonder as a carrier task force emerged from the dawn, and tank landing craft hit the beach with hundreds of aircraft screaming overhead. Often there was no need for battle. The Japanese had long fled (if they had ever been there at all), and were preparing themselves for the massive battles of Okinawa, Taiwan, and Iwo-Jima.
A particular island would be used as a base for a matter of weeks, but with the war moving rapidly on, such bases (with only tented accommodation) would be abandoned, the stores and men taken off quickly in ships and transport aircraft, never to be seen again.
Inevitably, not having the time or inclination to clean up, a lot of material was left behind. The islands were littered with waste and rubbish, from workshop, accommodation, and canteen areas. Left to rot was faulty equipment that was not worth repairing, crashed and damaged aircraft, and base junk of any and every kind, including abandoned food, fuel, and clothing stocks.
For generations these obscure island tribes were forgotten, as an exhausted world was preoccupied with building an entirely new future. Japan was to become an economic giant and affluence and consumerism were to put the Pacific battle experience into the history books.
Interest in the culture of these islands revived when in the late 1960s interesting reports from missionaries and a new generation of young anthropologists began to arrive from the West. What they found in many cases was quite astonishing. Many tribes had fashioned whole and complete new religions based on their very brief experience of “contact” both with human beings and multi-layered land, sea and air phenomena they had brought with them. They built churches of old aircraft-parts that they regarded as holy relics left by the “gods.” On the altars of such churches were broken radio sets that they hoped would burst into life some day because of their prayers. God help us we should not laugh in instances such as this; but inevitably we do. Flanking the radio sets were tins of old U.S. rations, sausages, fruit and soup, etc. On festive occasions a few of these cans were opened and the contents placed upon tongues, rather like a Catholic wafer.
Of course, the natives had no chance of explaining what they saw in rational terms; if only because rationalism (even less any kind of technology) as a culture was countless thousands of years ahead of their social and cultural development. They had not invented the wheel; they had no written language and hardly any sign of the kind of mathematics that arose from observations of seasonal changes and planetary and star motions in the West.
Undoubtedly, these natives had experienced what we now call “culture shock,” and this of course cuts both ways. For us, the idea of an absolutely authentic “religion” founded on material junk is a frightening idea to many people of religious convictions in the West. Extrapolating upwards, could this kind of experience have been ours indeed? Could it have happened through history and (most frightening of all) could it still be happening now?
The planes of cultural interpretation and the necessary confusions therein should be modelled in preference to simple mechanical facts and fictions. Not many thinkers make models of cultural confusions. Perhaps they should. Perhaps here we have a possible theoretical foundation for a New Ufology.
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