Earth’s Extraterrestrial Visitors
- Don C. Donderi, PhD
- Jun 7
- 10 min read
Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth – Samuel Johnson
The US House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs was told by retired government officials that UFOs - also called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP - are extraterrestrial spacecraft. The government officials said that earth is under surveillance by intelligent beings from elsewhere in the universe, and that the government has known this for decades. This happened on November 13, 2024.
Some of us already knew that. UFO study groups have reported for decades that machines with performance better than human aircraft are seen and recorded in the air, on the ground and in the oceans., UFO study groups also know something that the subcommittee did not mention: extraterrestrials (ETs) abduct people into their extraterrestrial vehicles (ETVs), study them and return them to earth with no memory of what happened.
Evidence about extraterrestrials has been growing for over 80 years, but some people still think that ETs are a fantasy created by the self-deluded. Many people who know that ETs are real cannot or will not write or talk about it. I know that ETs are real and I can write and talk about it. I retired from the psychology department at McGill University in Montreal after spending 47 years studying human vision and memory. Human vision and memory, supported by photos, videos, radar and sonar recordings, establish the reality of extraterrestrials. Here I will summarize what we know about extraterrestrials and suggest what we should do about them.
The Beginning
Extraterrestrials came to our attention in the mid-1940s. Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, was flying across the Cascade Mountains in Washington State on June 24,1947 when he saw a formation of nine bright objects skipping over the mountains. After he landed he described what he had seen to people he met at the airport. His observation was reported in local newspapers and then across the country. A newspaper headline described the objects as “Flying Saucers,” based on Arnold’s description of how they seemed to skip across the sky .
I read Sidney Shallet’s What Can You Believe about Flying Saucers when it was published in the
Saturday Evening Post on April 30,1949. Shallet was cautious about flying saucers but he knew that the Air Force was interested. He finished the article with: “If you've really seen something and can prove it, you may scare the wits out of the United States Air Force, but it will be grateful to you.”
One evening many years later I left my desk and stepped out onto a balcony that overlooked the neighborhood. I saw a luminous ball of light moving from north to south that paused briefly at the high point of its trajectory, then dipped and rose again, like a saucer skipping across the water. The “flying saucer” I saw moved like the ones Kenneth Arnold described.
Media coverage of “flying saucers,” “unidentified flying objects” (UFOs) or “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP) has been continuous but intermittent from Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting until now. I prefer to call them what they really are: extraterrestrial vehicles (ETVs).
We are not Alone on the Block
Human civilization is like a noisy family living in the middle of the block: we play loud music and hold all-night parties that attract the attention of our neighbors. We began to attract extraterrestrial attention when we started to send electromagnetic signals through telegraph wires during the nineteenth century. Now we advertise ourselves with signals from radios, radars, microwaves, telephones, TVs, and nuclear explosions. Intelligent beings living elsewhere in the universe noticed, and have come by to have a look at us.
