WD Elements formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) can't read the information on it

Linux tends to do a better job of handling hardware errors than macOS where macOS is like a dog with a bone....macOS refuses to quit. Plus macOS may be trying to scan the drive before mounting.

Before doing anything else, you need to check if the drive is failing. This is easiest to do using Linux. Ubuntu should have easy access to the GSmartControl app (either installed by default or available in the repository). Post the complete health report from GSmartControl here (there is a button for Saving the Report in the app so you can copy & paste the contents). I can examine the report to see if the drive is failing and how badly.

If you do not have a backup, then stop right now. Don't even try to have macOS read the drive or the drive failure will get worse to the point where even a professional data recovery service will not be able to recover any data. macOS and most regular apps are not able to deal with all the I/O errors produced by a failing drive. Even many data recovery apps don't handle errors (at least they never used to)...data recovery apps are usually designed to recovered accidentally deleted data from a working drive, not a failing drive.

If the drive is failing:

If the data is really important, then I highly recommend you contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers. Drive Savers provides free estimates and is recommended by Apple and other OEMs.

If the data is not important enough to pay for the professional recovery, then you can attempt to clone the drive yourself using a Linux command line utility which is able to deal with the errors produced by a failing drive. You will need another drive the same or larger size though, plus another drive to actually store any data recovered from the clone. Once data is recovered, then you can erase the clone to use it as a data drive or backup drive. I can provide the name of the utility if you are not interested in a professional data recovery service.

You usually only get one chance at recovering data from a failing drive, so choose wisely.

People should always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.

Your hard drive is failing. It has already reallocated 317 sectors with 11 sectors remaining to be reallocated at the time of the report. These bad blocks have created 3,051 errors so far. I don't think any traditional app or even macOS will be able to access this drive to recover any data especially from what you have already reported. If the data is really important, then contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers since you only have one chance at possibly recovering the data.

Otherwise I can provide some very basic instructions for using Linux and a Linux command line utility to attempt to clone the drive. If you are not familiar with the command line this is risky & tricky, plus there are things you will need to decide on your own during the attempt. Of course this would just be the first step and may require even more work later on using other macOS utilities. I don't know if your current Mac is even compatible with booting Linux or if you have another non-Apple computer since I gave up attempting this type of cloning/data recovery while booted from macOS because macOS gets in the way and is unable to handle errors encountered during the process.

Decide whether the free estimate provided by Drive Savers is worthwhile to you. Otherwise I can provide some basic guidance on using a Linux system to make a low level clone of the failing drive to another healthier drive that must be the same size or larger. You would also need a second location to hold the actual files recovered from the clone (healthy drive). After the process is complete you can then erase the clone and re-purpose the drive.

It sounds like the drive is failing. Do you have a backup? If not, you will likely need to use file recovery software or a service. I’ve never used either, so I don’t have any recommendations.