White, Edwin

Edwin White is a South African contactee who claims he befriended an extraterrestrial from Koldas.

Usually referred to in the literature simply as "Edwin W.", he is the central figure in one of the more elaborate South African UFO contact cases, known as the "Koldas" contact.

According to the story, in 1960, at age 16, Edwin, who lived in Pinetown, a suburb of Durban, discovered that a colleague named George was actually an extraterrestrial called Valdar, from the planet Koldas. Koldas is described in this lore not as a planet in our galaxy but as a world in a parallel or antimatter universe, whose inhabitants ("Koldasians") are physically indistinguishable from Earth humans.

The "Valdar" backstory, as laid out in the book about the case, holds that he was an extraterrestrial of human-like appearance who claimed a shared ancestry with Earth people, and who lived and worked alongside Edwin at an electronics plant for roughly two years. The narrative says he had been dropped off on a remote beach near Durban in 1960 to spend two years living among humans as part of his training to eventually command an interstellar spacecraft.

What makes this case distinctive within contactee lore is the communication method. For about twelve years, the contacts allegedly came through an ordinary commercial radio set that one of the visitors had modified, before the communication shifted to a more telepathic mode.

The case was investigated and written up by Carl van Vlierden, a Dutch researcher based in South Africa, along with the well-known American UFO writer Wendelle C. Stevens, and reportedly involved the respected (and more skeptical) South African UFO investigator Cynthia Hind as well. Van Vlierden and Hind documented the contacts over many years and reported being unable to disprove the evidence. The resulting book, "UFO Contact from Planet Koldas: A Cosmic Dialogue," presents Edwin and his wife as ordinary, sincere, church-going people rather than attention-seekers, which is part of how the case built its credibility within ufology circles.

As with many contactee cases, this remains entirely within the realm of personal testimony and uncorroborated audio recordings - there's no independent scientific verification of any of it, and "Koldas" doesn't correspond to anything in mainstream astronomy (fitting, since it's described as existing outside our universe altogether). It's mostly notable today as one of the more durable and detailed "long-term contact" narratives from southern Africa, with a small but devoted following in ufology literature.