Man that page is crap. Have you read the explanations section ? WTF.<p>Cargo cults existed because that&#x27;s how humans work, that&#x27;s how humans learn. That&#x27;s how the machinery that is our brain operates. We copy behavior. We do not discover, learn, think rationally, or any of that (though some of those are tricks we&#x27;ve learned at some point and now make sure to teach our children, but they&#x27;re learned behaviors, very different from human brains, similar to how you can run logic circuits or multiplications on neural networks).<p>Here&#x27;s a stupid assumption that page makes as well. It assumes that cargo cultism had no chance of success. That&#x27;s just stupid. They built these planes. It would only take someone pushing them off a cliff and paying attention to their fall to discover lift. I don&#x27;t mean explaining and calculating lift (we can&#x27;t even do that (the problem &quot;here&#x27;s a wing shape, now calculate the lift equations&quot; is still unsolved except for special cases, doubly so in supersonic situations, so their chances seem limited). Once they see lift they would only need to get propellers rotating, already a much, much simpler problem. It would certainly not be impossible to make a 10-15 minute human powered flight, or they could simply learn to ride the winds. Difficult, but given enough tries that would certainly work.<p>Therefore I&#x27;d like to offer a very much different explanation for cargo cultism : it&#x27;s how humans learn. Had these tribes had 100 years or so to figure it out, we would have seen one land in a homemade bamboo airplane on Haiti.