At first, the Austrian motorway authority ASFINAG was skeptical about hiring druids to lower the rate of fatal accidents on a stretch of road near Salzburg. But the project has been so successful — deaths have gone down from six per year to zero in under two years — that Austria has finally gone public with its use of druids, and wants to extend the project nationwide.

Arch druid Ilmar Tessmann, the head of the project, installed monoliths as a way to counter radiation from a nearby mobile phone mast disrupting the area’s normal “terrestrial” radiation, which he claims was responsible for the crashes. “‘Plastic was not available in ancient times,” says the druid, “but it seems to work well.”

Naturally, scientists remain unsure that druid power really does anything. Dr Georg Walach from the geophysics department at Leoben University in southern Austria has been a sharp critic of what he calls the natural sciences. “These energy lines and their flow cannot be grasped or measured, therefore their existence is rejected by scientists.” Tessmann says the proof is in the project’s strong results.