Maputo — The escapade on the Cahora Bassa lake in which four members of the "Orgonise Africa" New age cult got themselves arrested last month, and were then accused by a police spokesman of trying to sabotage the Cahora Bassa dam, is not the first time that this weird group has set foot in Mozambique.

According to their website, a team from Orgonise Africa "deHAARPed" Maputo in July 2004. This team was led by German architect Georg Ritschi, who is one of the four now under arrest in Cahora Bassa district

DeHAARPed? To understand this peculiar term, you have to enter the conspiratorial mindset of the group. They believe that the world is run by a Satanist cabal known as the Illuminati, who are trying to control humanity through microwaves which also interfere with the weather. They have poisoned the skies with what the true believers call "chemtrails".

The most sinister part of the weather control conspiracy is HAARP. This really exists - the acronym stands for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme. It is a facility in Alaska run by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research. Its website states that its purpose is "to further advance our knowledge of the physical and electrical properties of the Earth's ionosphere which can affect our military and civilian communication and navigation systems".

Conspiracy theorists, however, think that HAARP is a weapon. We are told that HAARP will "boil the upper atmosphere", spray electromagnetic waves all over the planet, disrupt communications, alter the weather, and even control people's minds and behaviour.

This paranoid nonsense extends to mobile phone technology, and anything else to do with microwaves. The masts used by cell phone companies are described as "entropy transmitters" (entropy is a scientific term that simply means an increase in disorder within systems. It has nothing to do with cell phones or microwave transmitters).

With that as background, let us see how Orgonise Africa set about "deHAARPing" Maputo in 2004.

"When we approached the Mozambican border on 8 July, a wall of negative energy seemed to tower in front of us", Georg Ritschi begins. "The cloud formations looked gooey and held in place by means of electromagnetic fields, which we shall further refer to as HAARP for simplicity's sake. My heart was dropping down to about knee height: Would be able to make a difference here with our modest arsenal of 200TBs, a few water busters and two cloud-busters?" TBs are nothing to do with tuberculosis. The acronym stands for tower busters. They, the water busters and the cloud busters are all forms of orgonite, the substance that the four men currently under arrest say they dropped into Cahora Bassa lake. All the problems of the world, caused by the evil illuminati, can be solved with the judicious use of orgonite.

Orgonite, so the theory goes, transmits orgone, the universal or etheric energy discovered by the crazed Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. Reich claimed that orgone was the secret of the universe and the cure for all ills, but the unfortunate reality is that no such panacea exists.

Orgonite, however, certainly exists, and anybody could knock up a few hundred kilos in their garden shed at minimal expense. It consists of polyester or fibre-glass resin, some metal shavings (apparently any metal will do - aluminium was the choice of the four arrested on Cahora Bassa lake), and quartz crystals. Thus orgonite is, quite literally, a heap of rubbish.

The mission of Orgonise Africa is to put this stuff at or near cell phone masts, or anywhere else that the group thinks is orgone deficient.

So, as the group drove to Maputo in July 2004, "all the death ray emitters along the way (of which there were many) were treated in the usual way" (i.e. with orgonite).

In the evening they erected one of their "cloud busters" and claim that this orgonite device caused a drizzle of rain "which lasted the whole night".

The following day several of the group "went to bust Maputo and the surrounds". The sky was unpromising "Despite the initial cleaning effect of our approach Maputo's sky was covered with poisonous chemcrud, HAARPed into a rippled carpet".

So the "etheric warriors" (one of the many names the orgone enthusiasts use) set to work cleaning up the Maputo sky. They claim that the sky "changed significantly in the course of the day as visible result and confirmation of our work". To prove this, they present a series of pictures of the sky, with such captions as "An etheric Battle rages: healthy cumulus and dissolving chemcrud" and "A telling picture, showing how the "false" HAARP cloud dissolves under impact of orgone energy".

To unenlightened eyes, such as mine, they all just look like pictures of clouds.

Among the "HAARP installations" they visited were the MOZAL aluminium smelter and the nearby electricity sub-station which were treated with orgonite. The MOZAL management does not seem to have noticed and no doubt local gardeners or rubbish collectors swept aware the "tower buster" lumps of orgonite into the trash can the following morning.

The group then drove up the coast to the tourist resort of Vilankulo. They entered the town at night and "again it was a feeling as if hitting a solid wall of negativity".

"Since the local HAARP array was easily spotted in the centre of town, we hit it right on arrival with one of our last TBs", Ritschi writes. "Interestingly I never noticed the same level of pollution again during our 5 day stay".

Well, this trip to Mozambique must have been a pleasant enough camping holiday for the three children in the group. But the adults can only described as deluded fantasists.

Among the other extraordinary claims they make is that they "unlocked the rainfall" along the southern African coast in December 2003 and January 2004 and thus "managed to stop a terrible drought". Perhaps the "etheric warriors" are unaware that December to February is the rainy season in southern Africa.