This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Yali Singina was a Second World War veteran from the Sor village area of the Rai Coast in the Madang district of what is now Papua New Guinea, initially promoted by Australian colonial administrators as a model local government figure. As his movement grew, it was widely read, and by some accounts deliberately encouraged by rivals for political effect, as a cargo prophecy promising the return of ancestral wealth once colonial and mission influence was set aside.
Yali himself repeatedly denied preaching cargo doctrine and framed his message instead as reform of custom, cooperative farming and community self organization, a denial anthropologist Peter Lawrence documented at length without fully resolving how far Yali's own followers understood him the same way. That an anthropologist's own sustained fieldwork left the gap between the leader's stated intention and his followers' understanding formally unresolved is itself part of the documented record rather than a settled conclusion either way.
That a leader's own repeated denial of cargo prophecy could not settle, even under close documented anthropological study, how his followers actually understood his message marks Yali Singina's movement as a documented case where a leader's stated intention and his movement's lived reception diverged in a way neither side's account alone can close.