Carole M. Cusack, Hauntology and Apocalypse in Australian UFOlogy: Paranoia, Colonialism, and Indigenous Identity at the End of the World By Carole Cusack

https://www.academia.edu/145293063/Carole_M_Cusack_Hauntology_and_Apocalypse_in_Australian_UFOlogy_Paranoia_Colonialism_and_Indigenous_Identity_at_the_End_of_the_World?email_work_card=title This paper addresses Australian UFOlogy which is to date a little-researched area, and which participates in multiple global UFOlogical discourses, including: reinterpretation of the Bible and other traditional religious texts as records of alien encounters; White UFO beliefs and new religions (the Aetherius Society, Raelism, etc.); Indigenous stories recast as alien encounters which affirm Indigenous identity, the primacy of Aboriginal ownership of the land, and rejection of colonialism; and a special role for the continent at the end of the Earth (geographically) in the end of the world (temporally). I draw on Richard Landes, Michael Barkun, and Brian L. Keeley to establish the vital importance of paranoia and conspiracism in third millennial Australian UFOlogy, and on Guy Debord and Mark Fisher to demonstrate that Australian UFOlogy (of all types, not merely the Indigenous version) is haunted by the colonial past – with its massacres and atrocities, dispossessions and ongoing violence - and the ecological eschaton of the future, given that Australia has experiemced the largest decline in biodiversity of any continent, and the highest rate of extinction (plant, but most tragically animal, in the modern world). ...