A review of UFOs, ETs and Alien Abductions by Bill Chalker
Here is a review by Bill Chalker, an Australian Ufologist, who got it right about my intentions in UFOs, ETs and Alien Abductions. You will see why I appreciate his analysis. – Don Donderi
SCIENCE and the UFO controversy
by Bill Chalker
“UFOs ETs and Alien Abductions”
Psychologist, researcher and retired university professor Don Donderi provides intelligent and thought provoking arguments for the reality of UFOs, extraterrestrials and alien abduction in his book “UFOs ETS and Alien Abductions – A Scientist Looks at the Evidence” (256 pages, Hampton Roads Publishing, 2013).
Professor Donderi made a fascinating contribution – “Science, Law, and War: Alternative Frameworks for the UFO Evidence” – to the excellent book “UFOs and Abductions – Challenging the Borders of Knowledge” edited by David Jacobs (University Press of Kansas, 2000), where he concluded, “It is a serious error to assume that professional scientists are the best evaluators of the UFO evidence …. The critical, empirical attitude of a skilled attorney and the alertness and open-mindedness of a military intelligence analyst will both produce a clearer understanding of the UFO evidence than the theory-driven closed-mindedness of the professional scientist. And between them, the attorney and the analyst might just persuade the scientist that there is something here that merits paying attention.”
Donderi, a citizen of both the US and Canada, graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA and a BSC in biological psychology. He worked as an applied psychologist for IBM Corporation and worked at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, from 1962 to 2009, as an associate professor of psychology and became Associate Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research. He also co-authored the reference book “Textbook of Psychology” with Donald Hebb.
Don Donderi, with extensive professional training and experience in what people see and remember, namely human visual perception and memory, writes in his book introduction, “On the basis of that training and my knowledge of the evidence, I think that some of what people report as UFOs are extraterrestrial vehicles. I think that some of those vehicles are like our unmanned reconnaissance drones, but others are crewed by extraterrestrials. I think that some people have come into involuntary close contact with extraterrestrials, and I think that government statements about UFOs conceal more than they reveal.”
Donderi’s position originated in his foundational understanding that “We know the world best through direct experience. When our senses turn up something new in the world, there is something new in the world, and it is an obligation of a trained professional who understands the human senses to report on it.”
He introduces 3 events he helped work on that in his estimation describe something new in the world. These are a photographic case at Lake Baskatong in northern Quebec in March 1978, a sighting of “humanoid” figures behind windows in a UFO near Montreal in 1973 by a university professor and a study of symbols seen by abductees on-board UFOs, the latter being reported in a poster paper at the Association for Psychological Science in San Francisco during 2009 (See Stuart Appelle, Don Donderi, J. Bellissimo, and Budd Hopkins, “Common Symbols Are Remembered by People Self Reporting Alien Abductions”). Donderi concludes, “Nothing in the behaviour or personal history of any of them leads me to think that they are mentally disturbed or that they told fabulous stories for personal or psychological gain.”
Donderi extrapolates that much more evidence has been gathered by “many competent people over many years”, yielding “a consistent story reported by competent witnesses and evaluated by competent investigators.” As part of this evidence he examines well known cases such as the 1947 Kenneth Arnold sighting, the 1957 RB-47 case, and the 1973 Coyne helicopter incident.
With these cases as his stepping off point he describes the evolution of the USAF’s “estimate of the situation” from the legendary 1948 “estimate” which concluded that “flying saucers” were “probably extraterrestrial,” its rejection by the Air Force Chief of Staff, and the current status quo USAF position that no UFO reports represent a threat to national security, that they did not represent “technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge,” and there was no evidence that UFO sightings were extraterrestrial vehicles.
Much of Donderi’s book then is a broad brush marshalling of facts which he contends demonstrate exactly the opposite, namely that UFO reports do describe “machines that are technologically superior to anything humans can now produce. These machines are extraterrestrial vehicles, and they are a threat to national security because we cannot defend against them.” Further Donderi contends, “The truth of the ETH (Extraterrestrial Hypothesis) will become self-evident to any intelligent person who learns the facts.”
Don Donderi then focuses on what he calls the “chronology of doubt”, a period of UFO history he sees as running from 1947 to about 1980. He states, “The doubt resulted from the interaction of the UFO evidence with the gaols and personalities of the people and organisations responding to that evidence.” We then get a rapid tour through the main historical signposts that have defined this period, ultimately anchored in the engineered attempted burial of the UFO mystery by the so called Condon Report. Despite its obviously flawed nature, the Condon Report succeeded in getting the USAF out of the “UFO business” and many argued it was about the conclusion that “science has finally gotten rid of the UFO problem.”
Given we have this book “UFOs ETS and Alien Abductions – A Scientist Looks at the Evidence” in 2013 and at least another 40 years of the UFO controversy to contend with, it is patently obvious that the UFO “problem” has not gone away. I have written previously about the flawed Condon report and its agenda so I share many intersection points on the issues Donderi raises in his bold book.
Donderi then focuses on his “favourite skeptic” R.V. Jones who headed up British scientific intelligence during World War II. Jones was the author of a skeptical appendix in the Condon Report. Donderi secured from Jones in 1991 an update of his position, “I agree that we have to keep an open mind. There can certainly be some so far unidentified natural phenomenon which we have not so far understood, but I should be doubtful about an intelligent extraterrestrial origin until the evidence is very much stronger.”
Don Donderi utilizes Jones’ insightful tool of “touchstones” (using facts already known to evaluate and confirm “novel intelligence” or data), contending that “now the UFO evidence is very much stronger, there are many touchstones, and the chronology of doubt about the ETH is long past.”
Further, focusing on “low, big, and slow UFOs” as his “touchstone” Donderi argues that evidence from the 1965 Exeter sightings (see John Fuller’s classic 1966 book “Incident at Exeter”), the 1983 New York state “triangle” wave, the 1989 Belgian wave, the December 11 1996 Yukon Territory event and the January 2008 Stephenville Texas incident potently shows that “the End of Doubt” moment had definitely arrived and that in these sorts of reports UFOs “were flaunting their presence.”
Donderi musters a similar series of “touchstone” cases in the more controversial areas of “humanoids” and “alien abductions.”
With regard to “occupant” “touchstones cases” Donderi mentions the outstanding 1959 Reverend Gill Boianai entity sightings, the bizarre Ririe Idaho encounter of November 1967 (which Donderi examined in 1968 as part of NICAP’s “UFO occupant panel” made up of aerospace physicians, anthropologists, astronomers, biologists, psychologists, linguists, neurologists, philosophers, psychiatrists and sociologists, with Donderi concluding that the 6 occupant reports were “good reports … (and) this was just the first step in establishing the reality of the occupant phenomenon”), the fascinating 1967 Cussac France case (which was reinvestigated by the official French UFO agency GEPAN), and the 1974 Stonehenge Apartments entity encounters in North Bergen New York (which initiated Budd Hopkins career in ufology – see his book “Missing Time” (1981)).
The Ririe Idaho encounter was remarkable because it not only involved 2 Navajo Indians having their car control by a small UFO with a transparent dome with 2 occupants, one of who floated down and entered the car. It had supportive sighting events, including an unfortunate man who had an identical experience. The case was also a potent “touchstone” event, with that type of UFO with transparent dome and usually 2 occupants reported widely (see for example Richard Hall’s excellent foundational study “The UFO Evidence, Volume II: A Thirty-Year report” (2001) where Hall refers to them as “dyad “scout craft””).
Abductions are introduced in the book via “the index case” of Betty and Barney Hill and then Donderi covers his “touchstone cases,” namely those that include “credible, repeated facts that strengthen confidence that the reports form a consistent basis for understanding the abduction phenomenon.”
His cases are the 1968 Buff Ledge Camp case, the 1969 West Nyack, New York incident (one of Budd Hopkins’ cases in his book “Missing Time”), the 1976 Allagash abduction (described in Ray Fowler’s book “The Allagash Abductions”), an abduction near Goodland, Kansas in 1989 (reported in the Journal of UFO Studies), and the well known Linda Cortile Manhattan affair (described in Budd Hopkins book “Witnessed”). Donderi then discusses the elements of “the abduction narrative” that are in common and different in the cases, the attempts to explain the alien abduction experience, the problems with hypnosis and the various studies undertaken. He concludes, “Based on the consistency of the evidence, its congruence with other aspects of the experience, and its congruence with non-hypnotically obtained evidence, I think that hypnotically recovered abduction memories following a close encounter and missing time are accurate (within the limits of memory accuracy) accounts of what happened during the period of missing time.” He further concludes that aliens have abducted people.
Donderi then reviews “what we know about UFOs,” citing NASA aeronautical engineer Paul Hill’s research, described in the fascinating book “Unconventional Flying Objects,” as “a brilliant and informative book about UFO technology.” He also covers weapons system interference cases, specifically the 1976 Teheran Iran case and the 1967 Malmstrom missile base incident. He also gets into paranormal elements such as “occupant telepathy.”
Donderi ends this section with the following comment, “Besides Paul R. Hill, no scientifically or technically trained writer has tried to systematically explain how UFOs work or what occupants can do.” But here Professor Donderi perhaps should have included some references to works like the research of Kenneth Behrendt, described in his books “Secrets of UFO Technology” (2007) and “The How and Why of UFO’s” (2011), and Robert Schroeder’s book “Solving the UFO Enigma – How Modern Physics is Revealing the Technology of UFOs” (2011). There have been many other contributions to this aspect of the UFO mystery. While one may not agree with everything in the theories expressed in the works of “The UFO Propulsionists” (the title of the chapter Kenneth Behrendt wrote for the book “UFOs 1947-1987: The 40 – year search for an explanation” edited Hilary Evans with John Spencer (1987)) but it is intriguing to see to what extent their research accounts for the UFO evidence. Kenneth Behrendt graduated from Rutgers University with an MS in chemistry in 1980, holding various positions since then such as pharmaceutical chemist and metal industry engineering consultant. Robert Schroeder’s academic background includes a BA in mathematics from Rutgers University and an associate’s degree in aerospace engineering. He worked for 26 years in operations and product management for a major computer company.
In a chapter entitled “Science and UFOs” Donderi provides insights into why “Science has had a hard time dealing with evidence about UFOs.” In a nice synthesis of the elements of classical inductive science, Einstein’s concept of “physical bodies” and philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead’s contention that “the pre-occupation of science is then the search for simple statements which in their joint effect will express everything of interest concerning the observed recurrences,” Donderi argues, “The observed recurrences are the UFO phenomena and associated observations of UFO occupants and occupant behavior.”
The crux of Professor Don Donderi’s synthesis is simply and elegantly expressed, “Those experiences that establish the reality of UFOs, occupants, and abductions are sometimes raw eyewitness accounts of phenomena but are equally often the outputs from instruments like cameras and radars. The ensemble of these consistent sense perceptions allow us to identify a class of Einstein’s “physical bodies” that we call UFOs. The consistent multiple accounts of remembered experiences called abductions cannot be explained away as psychological abnormalities because the people who remember being abducted are not psychologically abnormal. This class of sense impression is consistent with other evidence about the existence of UFO occupants, and the witness accounts describe a consistent class of occupant behavior.”
Donderi doesn’t dodge the implications of this robust analysis. He contends, “From the performance of UFOs, and from the appearance, behavior, and physical and mental abilities demonstrated by the humanoids associated with them, I conclude that the machines were not made on our planet and their creators do not come from here. That is why the simplest way to classify these phenomena is to call them observations of extraterrestrial vehicles, some of which have extraterrestrial crews.”
With “the Psychology of Modern Science” Donderi gives his arguments for why the professional scientific community, despite the overwhelming body of observational evidence available and its extraordinary relevance, has consistently ridiculed or ignored the subject. He puts it down to the theories and legacies of 4 scholars, namely William James, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Kuhn and Leon Festinger.
Kuhn came up with the concept of excepted and prevailing science as the existing and mandated paradigm. That paradigm constrains mainstream science, despite the quality of evidence for UFOs, and does so because “no physical theory published in the open literature explains how UFOs work.” Therefore in the prevailing paradigm generally scientist would always view UFOs “as a puzzle to be explained by reference to atmospheric, meteorological, or psychological processes. Barring a dramatic, attention-riveting change in the UFO phenomenon, or an even more unlikely change in scientific attitudes, scientists will not agree that UFOs are real until there is an excepted theory about how to make a machine that will do what UFOs have repeatedly been seen to do. Until then, the scientific community will always say it is “premature” to so much as acknowledge the existence of facts that no theory can explain.”
The problem is that UFOs represent, at best, anomalies to scientists that are not readily explainable, and they do not fit into the prevailing paradigm. Indeed scientists are trained to disregard anomalies, particularly those that don’t fit the prevailing paradigm, nor contribute robustly to constructing a new scientific paradigm. This situation creates a problem, because no government research grants or scientific establishment funding would fund UFO research with the limiting attributes of novel but unexplainable anomaly status. An exception, as Donderi points out, might be the narrow framing of UFO sightings and alien abduction “as a study of psychological abnormality.”
Psychologist William James characterised scientific thinking as so conservative that it could ignore phenomena that did not fit the prevailing consensus. In 1890 he wrote, “we feel neither curiosity nor wonder concerning things so far beyond us that we have no concepts to refer them to standards by which to measure them.” Donderi contends little has changed, as science in practice almost ordains it. Psychologist Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is central, according to Donderi, to understand “how the scientific community has responded to UFO and close encounter evidence.” Evidence that falls outside the standard paradigm is often deemed to be unreliable and the source is seen as suspect, even if that source may have a credible scientific background. Donderi also draws in Freud’s concepts of repression and sublimation to explain how “normal science” often borders on the irrational to avoid a direct embrace with the UFO mystery.
Donderi concludes, “During the half-century or more since government-supported science began to function less by observation and induction and more by the principles described by Kuhn, James, Festinger, and Freud … the scientific establishment has lost the ability to absorb, comprehend, and respond to anomalous data. This means that the recognition of, and response to, the presence of extraterrestrials will not be led by the government-supported scientific establishment. It will be led by people whose curiosity about the natural world has not been curtailed by the excessive conservatism of modern science.”
Dwelling on the Roswell saga and the JAL Alaska sighting as having “coverup” dimensions, and the Kirtland AFB events that drew in Paul Bennwitz and Linda Moulton Howe are examples of disinformation, Donderi argues that evidence of government oversights of “Unacknowledged Special Access Programs” (USAPS), further validating that there is a UFO reality behind these controversies. A more transparent and forward thinking approach to the problem is argued for, that would allow mankind to have a more proactive and viable interaction with what is essentially still not a well understood phenomenon. Donderi airs the political dynamics inherent in the handling of the UFO problem by governments and sorveign states, agreeing with the ideas of political scientists Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, who argue that some members of “the cultural elite” have sought to minimize the significance of the UFO phenomenon, because not to do so, may lead to an erosion of their authority, through, as Donderi puts it, “relegating the frightening idea of superior extraterrestrial technology to the fringe of cultural awareness” – a “soothing oblivion” aided and abetted “by the secrecy and disinformation practiced by people in positions of authority who know the facts but won’t reveal them.”
Ultimately Don Donderi is arguing for a more imaginative and realistic response to the UFO phenomenon.
While this territory and perspectives are personally well understood , I admired the bold synthesis Professor Don Donderi has undertaken with his memoir “UFOs ETs and Alien Abductions – A Scientist Looks at the Evidence” and recommend it as an impressive exploration of the potent touchstones of the UFO mystery. The enduring UFO enigma needs to be more appropriately revealed and examined, rather than the conflicted and skewed sorry history of neglect and misrepresentation that has been the main game of governments, society and science for far too long. Don Donderi’s potent meditation on the UFO enigma is a touchstone for a renewed and better-informed approach to the extraordinary UFO mystery.