Cargo is an English word meaning cargo (by ship, plane). From the point of view of a person who is at the level of the Stone Age, cargo of aliens are all those extremely tempting objects that aliens have in large quantities and that are delivered to them by airplanes or steamers - packs of cigarettes, canned food, knives, chewing gum, cans from under beer and so on.
Obviously, the natives conclude, the white aliens somewhere far away (in the sky, across the sea) have an inexhaustible source of this cargo. And in order to gain access to it, it is necessary to perform all those rituals that the aliens perform.
A classic example of a cargo cult
A classic example of a cargo cult (and there are about a hundred such examples by scientists) is associated with the same New Guinea. On one of the small islands off its coast, the Americans in 1945, at the very end of World War II, equipped a temporary air base.
There, large "iron birds" were constantly landing and taking off, carrying hundreds of soldiers and whole mountains of cargo in their bellies. The soldiers gave the local residents knives, cigarettes, lighters. But the aboriginal paradise on earth ended as suddenly as it began. After the victory over Japan, the Americans quickly liquidated the airbase and flew away. The flow of the blessed cargo has dried up.
After some time, officials of the Dutch colonial administration and missionaries who occasionally appeared on the island were surprised to see that the locals were busy with an incomprehensible business. On the runways abandoned by the Americans, they set up fake "planes" made of reeds and straw, and signal fires are lit on these runways at night.
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Kargokult today
On the territory of the abandoned airbase, the natives pulled "wires" from plant fibers and installed bamboo "antennas" with "insulators" from rolled up leaves. The elders of the tribe all day mumble incomprehensible words into "microphones" made of wood, and young Papuans march on the parade ground with bamboo "guns" on their shoulders.
In the premises of the abandoned hospital, "doctors" and "nurses" are busy, and next to the landing strips, large warehouse huts have been built for receiving cargo.
The Dutch at first tried to persuade the natives to give up this useless occupation, but then they gave up on them. The cult continued to exist for several years - apparently, I really wanted to get a "permit" to the blessed source of cargo!