The evidence that extraterrestrials (ETs) are in our neighborhood, and that they interact with us regularly, is overwhelming. It overwhelms our capacity to manage our own world, because we do not have the technical capacity to prevent their routine interference with our lives, and it overwhelms our capacity to confront the reality of the ET presence because our emotional defense mechanisms resist accepting dangerous realities that we cannot control. Don Donderi, a retired psychology professor from McGill University, understands both the ET evidence and our individual and collective reactions to it. He wrote UFOs, ETs and Alien Abductions: A Scientist Looks at the Evidence to discuss both the ET evidence and our individual and social response to the evidence. He lectures frequently on the topic, both to explain the evidence and to encouraging his fellow humans to take it seriously. He thinks that we need to develop a social consensus and a collective political response to the ET evidence
Don C. Donderi, PhD Background Don Donderi is a co-founder (1982) and principal consultant of a human factors and ergonomics consulting company based in Toronto, Ontario. He spent 47 years at the department of psychology of McGill University, Montreal, retiring in 2009 as an associate professor after also serving a term as associate dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, as well as a term as an elected member of the university Senate. While a graduate student in the United States he worked summers and part-time at IBM from 1958 to 1962, with secret clearance, on perception problems related to the design of navigation displays for high-altitude aerial reconnaissance. He earned a doctorate in experimental psychology from Cornell University in 1962, after which he joined the Psychology Department at McGill. He has written, co-authored or edited three books, contributed chapters to two other books, registered a patent and a design copyright, and has written over fifty peer-reviewed scientific articles. Since co-founding the consulting company, he has worked with private companies and civil and military agencies involved with flight simulation, marine navigation, rail transport, road transport, air traffic control, nuclear power, and marine search and rescue. He has carried out field research on marine navigation and on search and rescue in the Canadian Arctic and in the Atlantic Ocean in cooperation with the Canadian and US Coast Guards and the Canadian Department of Transport. He has designed wheelhouses for Canadian Coast Guard cutters. He has designed avionics displays and has carried out research and literature reviews on marine navigation displays for the Canadian Department of National Defence. This research and development work has been presented in over fifty technical reports. He has also provided expert advice to law firms on civil and criminal cases involving aspects of human perception, memory and judgment. This advice has been presented in more than 80 legal reports, and has been supplemented, in seven cases, by courtroom testimony. Interest in Extraterrestrials Since 1965, Donderi has been using his specialized knowledge and research skills in the areas of human visual perception, memory, and thinking to study the evidence about and the behavior of the extraterrestrials who have been present, on or near our planet, for over half a century. He has published several peer-reviewed scientific studies on this topic, and in 2013 he wrote UFOs, ETs and Alien Abductions: A Scientist Looks at the Evidence (Hampton Roads Press), which is a comprehensive historical and theoretical review of the UFO evidence and its reception by both the general public and the scientific and academic communities. He lectures regularly on the topic of extraterrestrials to university audiences and the general public.
