Ann Druffel

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Ann Druffel is an American UFO researcher and author of UFO books and articles as well as a researcher and author in various aspects of parapsychology such as paranormal photos, apports and psychic archeology. She and her husband, Charles K. Druffel, raised their five daughters and live in their home in a wooded glen in Pasadena, California.
Ann Druffel's education includes: B.A. in Sociology Major, Minors in Speech, Philosophy, and Economics at Immaculate Heart College, Hollywood, California; one year's post-graduate studies and field work toward an MSW. at Catholic University, Wash., D.C.; graduate studies, Screenplay and Creative Writing at Immaculate Heart College, Hollywood, CA.; hypnosis certificate at American Institute of Hypnosis.

Contents  [hide]  1 Ann Druffel and the UFO phenomenon 1.1 James McDonald Biography 1.2 The Tujunga Canyon Contacts 1.3 Defense against alien abduction 1.4 Hypothesis of origin(s) 2 Ann Druffel's and the psychic realm 2.1 The Psychic and the Detective 2.2 Past Lives Future Growth 2.3 Standing in God's Light 3 Publications 4 External links

[edit] Ann Druffel and the UFO phenomenon

Ann Druffel dates her interest in the UFO question from 1945 when, as a schoolgirl, she viewed a bright yellowish object, very high in clear blue skies over Long Beach, California. She and her mother, Aileen Walsh McElroy, watched the object as it slowly traveled westerly. After about an hour the and one-half, the object having traveled about 30 degrees from the NNE to the NNW, released 15-20 smaller shiny objects, which took varying paths out and away from the main object. Years later, it was determined that this sighting occurred at about the same time the first experimental atom bomb was exploded in New Mexico.
Interested in earth mysteries of all kinds, Druffel has researched various aspects of the UFO question and investigated reports of all kinds since 1957. She was one of the first investigators for NICAP, remaining with that organization from 1957 to 1973. During the NICAP years she became acquainted with the renowned atmospheric physicist, Dr. James E. McDonald who had good contacts with NICAP, and participated with him in several UFO cases during his six years of public research with civilian UFO research organizations. After NICAP's downfall in 1969, Druffel joined the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) with which she is still actively associated as investigator, frequent contributor to their journal and other official capacities. She also joined the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and contributes articles on California sightings and other UFO subjects to IUR (International UFO Reporter). She was a U.S. consultant and regular contributor for the British research journal FLYING SAUCER REVIEW (FSR) through 2004. Her six published books include:

[edit] James McDonald Biography

Firestorm: Dr. James E. McDonald's Fight For UFO Science (2003) is Ann Druffel's most recent UFO-related book. It is an authorized biographical account of the meticulous UFO research by Dr. McDonald, a prestigious atmospheric physicist. McDonald was a fearless, tireless scientist who dared to enter the UFO field publicly in 1966, after eight prior years of private UFO research in and around his hometown of Tucson, Arizona. He was Senior Physicist and Meteorology Professor at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson and worked with several U.S. government offices on multiple projects in climatology and meteorology.
He tapped numerous, highly-placed colleagues in the military, government and scientific fields for information during 1966-1971, known in the UFO field as "the McDonald years." He never neglected his climatological and meteorological projects, but additionally spent a lot of time researching the UFO phenomenon, often in close contact with objective private UFO researchers, solving numerous cases and adding information to unsolved sightings, the true "UFOs."
The book also deals with the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) with which McDonald was in contact and worked together, respectively. The book presents an account especially on the ousting of Donald E. Keyhoe, director of NICAP, under mysterious circumstances - Ann Druffel and others suspected that this was done by the secret undercover agents of CIA and the FBI who had penetrated the organization. Afterwards, without Keyhoe as Director, NICAP degenerated into total insignificance.
At the end of the 1960s, James McDonald was preparing to write a book on the UFO phenomenon, in which he intended to include his critique of the controversial 1968 Condon Report on the basis of which the US Air Force's terminated its 20-year UFO investigation Project Blue Book about one year later. By 1970, after contact with "higher ups", whose names and comments he did not disclose, McDonald seemed on the verge of actually breaking through the government cover-up but unexpectedly apparently committed suicide in June 1971. The majority of the scientifically-oriented UFO research field at the time, however, felt that his apparent suicide was brought on by depression induced by several factors, among which seemed to be government intervention. Druffel includes two hypotheses in Firestorm to explain his apparent suicide, one due to family problems which were affecting his life, the other being descriptions of several occurrences which seem very possibly government-induced, which led to deep depression and his apparent suicide.

[edit] The Tujunga Canyon Contacts

Ann Druffel's book The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (1980), co-authored by parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo, was only the second book written in the UFO research field about so-called "alien abductions", a phenomenon which virtually took the attention of most investigators beginning in 1973.
It tells the experiences of five young women "abductees" who lived in and near Tujunga Canyon, northeast of Los Angeles, all of whom knew each other well. The Tujunga Canyon area is noted for bizarre UFO sightings of all kinds, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind and reported landings, as well as other parapsychological phenomena. This book details seven types of abduction events experienced by these women, which were investigated by Druffel for five full years and later by Druffel and Rogo together, using a combination of ufological and parapsychological research methods.
This classic book was updated in 1989 with two new chapters and in 2008 was again republished. During the updating, author Ann Druffel first came to a solid realization that abduction scenarios can be fended off by strong-willed, confident experiencers, since three of the five young women intuitively discovered, and used, various "resistance techniques" to fend off and eventually end the harrowing attacks.

[edit] Defense against alien abduction

Druffel's 1998 book, How To Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction has caused its own controversial "firestorm" in the UFO field, ever since it released the idea that simple mental and physical "resistance techniques" can fend off harassing "alien attacks." Many top researchers, and other UFO investigators have entered the ongoing controversy, contending that "abductors" are physical, technologically-superior aliens from physical UFOs and consequently cannot be resisted successfully. Yet, Druffel's twenty-five years of research into the "UFO alien abduction" phenomenon reveals that strong-willed individuals with a powerful sense of their own rights can "fend off" these apparent entities which repeatedly harass and/or sexually interfere with them.
Documented by numerous worldwide folklore, historical and religious writings, the book hypothesizes that so-called "UFO abductors" are an order of shapeshifting, deceptive creatures which share the earth with mankind, but in another "dimension", and that these creatures have sexually harassed and plagued individuals in all major world cultures throughout the millennia.
These creatures, existing normally in an altered reality separate from our ordinary space/time, ordinarily confront their victims when they (the victims) are in an altered state of consciousness, but the ensuing events seem so real that they are perceived as occurring in physical space/time.

[edit] Hypothesis of origin(s)

In general, as regards UFOs, Druffel hypothesizes that the so-called "UFO phenomenon" is actually two separate phenomena. Like James McDonald, she favors the extraterrestrial hypothesis to explain UFOs seen from a distance, in which no contact or only minimal contact occurs between the witnesses and craft/occupants. From the weight of evidence, she accepts that reports by credible witnesses of seemingly metallic, physical aeroforms which are detected on radar, chased by jet pilots, photographed by verifiably honest witnesses, and occasionally viewed landing on the earth constitute a serious scientific question which has been neglected by the scientific establishment and that secrecy imposed on the subject by the US government is unreasonable and ill-founded.
On the other hand, Druffel considers so-called “abduction- scenarios” to be separate phenomena from the apparently extraterrestrial UFOs, as described above,. Since most abduction scenarios obviously take place in altered states of consciousness she doubts the physical reality of so-called genetic manipulation, missing fetuses, alien-military cooperation and "alien implants" due to the lack of solid scientific proof. The widespread knowledge, shared by most abduction researchers, that this phenomenon itself demonstrates deceptive components leads her to hypothesize that so-called "abducting UFO aliens" perceived in the Western world are posing as physical UFO occupants from physical UFOs.
However, she accepts many abduction scenarios as “real” in some form of "altered reality", especially those reported by undeniably rational, honest, and productive individuals. She accepts the possibility that such witnesses may be interacting with interdimensional beings which delight in harassing, deceiving, and assaulting unsuspecting human beings, often in a sexual manner. The orders of creation described in Celtic accounts (known as “bad faeries”), in the Muslim KORAN (known as jinns), in various European sources (known as incubi/succubi), by numerous names in Native American tribal cultures and in similar accounts from all world cultures. In every culture throughout the millennia "paraphysical creatures" are reported to act in intrusive ways very similar to our present so-called alien abductors. These orders of creation are described worldwide as (1) having the ability to shape-shift at will; (2) entering our Space-Time temporarily from their own space-time continuum(s); (3) sexually harassing their victims and performing other harmful mischief; and (4) appearing in various forms and "clothing" consistent with their victims' own cultural backgrounds..

[edit] Ann Druffel's and the psychic realm

[edit] The Psychic and the Detective

As far as Ann Druffel's books concerning her longtime research on various paranormal phenomena, The Psychic and the Detective, co-authored by renowned clairvoyant Armand Marcotte, is a comprehensive account of several of the cases on which Marcotte worked at the request of various police and sheriff departments in California, including Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino, and Imperial counties. For decades, Marcotte, a well-known psychic consultant, also assisted various law enforcement departments throughout the Southwest and Midwest, often giving clues which led to solution of previously- unsolved cases, among them the vicious murder of D. Scott Rogo, renowned parapsychologist and author who, among his own numerous books on parapsychological subjects, had co-authored Druffel's The Tujunga Canyon Contacts in 1980 and 1989.
Although most of Armand Marcotte's work with law enforcement was necessarily confidential, he received credit from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in the Los Angeles Daily News for his part in solving Rogo's murder. The Psychic and the Detective is also intended as a working manual for law enforcement officials who wish to consult qualified psychics in seeking solutions to unsolved crimes.

[edit] Past Lives Future Growth

Past Lives: Future Growth was authored by psychic Armand Marcotte, and co-authored by Ann Druffel. It is a hypothetical overview of reincarnation from the Western point of view. Both authors are Catholic, but since the Catholic Church has no dogma or doctrine regarding reincarnation, Marcotte and Druffel were free to research for themselves the truth or untruth of this widely-held theory. The Western theory of reincarnation is a logical explanation of the apparent inequality of human lives, and Past Lives: Future Growth details several true cases of people caught in disturbing life problems, for which they sought psychic counseling from Marcotte.
In each case, Marcotte perceived that the problems were caused by unsolved situations confronted by these clients in former lives, and his counsel brought about relief and solution for these individuals. Together with true accounts giving evidence of reincarnaton, the book also addresses the mystery of the Nag Hammadi Manuscripts found in Egypt which are considered possible former biblical writings which, among many other topics, explicitly discussed reincarnation and its relationship to the soul's progress, concepts possibly discarded by the Church in the early centuries.

[edit] Standing in God's Light

Standing in God's Light: In End Times is the third book co-authored by Ann Druffel and Armand Marcotte. It was begun in 1995 when Marcotte began receiving specific data regarding the approach of so-called end times and in particular the ways in which people could conduct their lives in order to be among those who would survive coming worldwide chaos.
The actual writing of the book was begun in 1997. They were able to complete four chapters together, but then Marcotte died in February 1999 of cancer. However, he advised Ann before he died that he would "come back from the other side" to help her finish it. In 2000, inspiration seemed to come to Druffel and she quickly completed the last five chapters, using readings Armand had given before his death, the details of which she researched intensely from numerous sources..

[edit] Publications

• Standing in God's Light: In End Times, with co-author Armand Marcotte, Timeless Voyager Press 2006, ISBN-978-1-892264-19-0
• Firestorm: Dr. James E. McDonald's Fight for UFO Science, Granite Publications 2003, ISBN 0-926524-58-5
• How To Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction, Three Rivers Press, Random House, NY 1998, ISBN 0-609-80263-1
• The Psychic and the Detective, Hampton Roads Publishing Co. 1995, ISBN 1-57174-029-5
• The Tujunga Canyon Contacts, (reprint of 1989 edition) Anomalist Books 2008, ISBN 1-933665-33-5
• Past Lives Future Growth, ASC Publications 1987, ISBN 0-917086-88-0

[edit] External links

• http://www.anndruffel.com

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Remembrances of Lives Past

Dustin Leader for The New York Times

Peter Bostock and his wife, Jo-Anne, of Winnipeg, Manitoba. He believes they loved each other in past lives working on an estate in 1880s Derbyshire, England.

By LISA MILLER

Published: August 27, 2010  Ref New York Times

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IN one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office — leather couch, granite-topped coffee table — makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.

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Lisa Hogben for The New York Times

Dr. Brian Weiss, conducting a group hypnotherapy session at the convention center in Sydney, Australia.

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Lisa Hogben for The New York Times

Peter and Jo-Anne Bostock, in a prairie near Winnipeg, believe they have a connection from past lives.

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Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

Dr. Paul DeBell, a psychiatrist who believes he was a caveman.

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Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, a Hindu chaplain at Columbia, says reincarnation is “a re-do.”

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In that earlier incarnation, “I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten,” said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in hypnotizing those hoping to retrieve memories of past lives. Dr. DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter one’s sense of self. He, for example, is more than a psychiatrist in 21st-century Manhattan; he believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk and a conscientious German who refused to betray his Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.

Belief in reincarnation, he said, “allows you to experience history as yours. It gives you a different sense of what it means to be human.”

Peter Bostock, a retired language teacher from Winnipeg, Manitoba, says that in the early 1880s he managed a large estate — possibly Chatsworth — in Derbyshire, England.

In a twist that would make Jane Austen blush, he thinks he was in love with the soul of his current wife, Jo-Anne, then embodied as a cook in the estate’s kitchen. Married to someone else, Mr. Bostock could not act on his feelings.

He says he and his wife share the kind “of attraction and recognition that a soul makes when it encounters the familiar.” In that spirit, the couple traveled last month to Rhinebeck, N.Y., where they and more than 200 others paid $355 each to attend a weekend seminar run by one of America’s pre-eminent proselytizers on the subject of reincarnation, Dr. Brian Weiss.

On this second, sweltering day of the seminar, Dr. Weiss, a 65-year-old Florida resident with a hawk-like visage and placid blue eyes, was wearing a polo shirt the color of robins’ eggs. He took a break from teaching and, over a healthy lunch, reflected on the rise of interest in the West in reincarnation. Like Dr. DeBell, he is a psychiatrist with an Ivy Leaguepedigree (Columbia University andYale Medical School).

Dr. Weiss was censured by the medical establishment in 1988 after he published “Many Lives, Many Masters.” In it he details his work with a patient he calls Catherine, who, under hypnosis, the book says, remembered multiple past lives, relieving her of paralyzing phobias. It has sold more than a million copies.

Now, Dr. Weiss said: “Doctors are e-mailing me. They’re not so concerned with their reputations and careers. We can talk about this openly. And it’s not just psychiatrists, but surgeons and architects.”

According to data released last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a quarter of Americans now believe in reincarnation. (Women are more likely to believe than men; Democrats more likely than Republicans.) Julia Roberts recently told Elle magazine that though she was raised Christian, she had become “very Hindu.” Ms. Roberts believes that in her past life she was a “peasant revolutionary,” and said that when her daughter sits in a certain way she knows “there’s someone there I didn’t get the benefit of knowing ... It’s an honor for me to continue to shepherd that.”

At Cannes in May, a Thai film about reincarnation, “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” won the highest prize. In it, an old man on his deathbed sees the dead as vividly as the living, and his past life as an ox is as clear as his present one.

In religious terms, the human narrative — birth, life, death and rebirth — has for millennia been relatively straightforward in the West. You were born. You lived. You died. After a judgment you went to heaven (or hell) forever and ever. Eternity was the end: no appeals allowed.

But nearly a billion Hindus and a half-billion Buddhists — not to mention the ancient Greeks, certain Jews and a few Christians — have for thousands of years believed something entirely different. Theirs is, as the theologians say, a cyclical view. You are born. You live. You die. And because nobody’s perfect, your soul is born again — not in another location or sphere, and not in any metaphorical sense, but right here on earth.

Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, Columbia University’s first Hindu chaplain, called it “a re-do,” like a test you get to take over. After an unspecified number of tries, the eternal soul finally achieves perfection. Only then, in what Hindus call moksha (or release), does the soul go to live with God.

SPIRITUALLY minded Americans have had a love affair with Eastern religion at least since the Beatles traveled to India in 1968, but for more than a generation, reincarnation remained a fringe or even shameful belief.

“I can remember, 30 years ago, if a person wanted to learn about reincarnation, they would go into a bookstore and go into a very back corner, to a section called ‘Occult,’ ” said Janet Cunningham, president of the International Board for Regression Therapy, a professional standards group for past-life therapists and researchers. “It felt sneaky.” Now the East is in our backyards, accessible on the Internet and in every yoga studio.

At the same time, Western religion is failing to satisfy growing numbers of people — especially young adults. College students Mr. Dasa encounters, most of them raised as Christians or Jews, “haven’t given up on the idea of spirituality or religion,” he said. “They’re tired of the dogma they grew up with.” According to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, 15 percent of Americans express no affiliation with any religious tradition, nearly double the number in 1990.

Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University and author of “God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World,” has made a study of Western interest in Eastern religious practice and suggests that our fascination with reincarnation is related to Americans’ relative prosperity. Modern Americans, in their optimism and material success, see reincarnation as a chance to postpone eternity for another day, he explained by e-mail. “Reincarnation means never having to say you’re dead,” he wrote.

The popular purveyors of reincarnation belief these days are not monks or theologians, but therapists — intermediaries between science and religion who authenticate irrational belief.

Dr. Weiss stresses that he is a medical doctor who was not expecting to encounter past lives in a conventional therapeutic setting. (His favorite title, he says, is not “guru” but “professor.”) Under hypnosis, Catherine, the patient in his book, had memories of times and places, and in such extraordinary and historically accurate detail, he said, that she could never have invented them. (In one life she is an Egyptian servant in charge of embalming corpses. “I see eyes,” she told Dr. Weiss under hypnosis. “I see a woman, a goddess, with some type of a headpiece on ... Osiris ... Sirus ... something like that.”)

Critics of hypnotic regression dismiss such visions as scientifically dubious. “The mind fills in the blanks, basically,” said Dr. Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who studies accounts of past lives. “How are these visions different from dream material: that’s quite the question.” Nonetheless, Dr. Weiss’s elite credentials, and his initial skepticism, open the door to belief for people who might otherwise stay away.

“I’m not a big New Age person,” said a 47-year-old woman from Harlem who saw Dr. DeBell to cope with grief after her mother’s death. “I was really, really angry at the way my mother died. It’s almost as if I took it personally. How could this horrible thing have happened to my family? I’ve been such a good person.” (She declined to have her name published.) After two sessions of conventional talk therapy, Dr. DeBell hypnotized her and, she believes, led her to discover images of past lives. In one, she was an Italian merchant, a man, who sold textiles along the Amalfi Coast; in another, she was an African herbalist; in a third, she was a freed slave in New Orleans who healed the sick and ministered to those in need. This deep dive “was a tremendous help,” she said. It gave her a broader perspective on her life — and on the death of her mother: “I felt more at peace. My mother came, she did great things for me and she moved on.”

In a post-Freudian world, past-lives therapy has its advantages. For one thing, it’s quick. A regression session usually takes several hours — and costs more than $100 an hour. Under hypnosis, the patient follows a guided visualization. In his workshop in Rhinebeck, Dr. Weiss talked more than 200 people into a meditative state and then encouraged them to imagine walking through one of five doors. One had on it the year 1850, another 1700, another 1500 and so on. (All this reporter could visualize were Vermeer paintings; peasants in homey kitchens and the bourgeoisie at play.) “Any good therapist can use these techniques and you can learn them in a week,” Dr. Weiss said.

Whereas in classic psychoanalysis, patients used to have to see their doctors multiple times a week to talk about parents, childhood traumas and dreams, past-life therapists promise they can access the memories from which troubles stem in just one session. Catharsis and healing are nearly instantaneous results, Dr. Weiss said. “You don’t need six months of trust,” he explained. “This is the fast form.”

Among past-lives therapists, a debate rages about whether it’s possible to solve emotional problems by “changing” a past-life memory. To learn to swim instead of drowning, for example; or to strike a killing blow at a killer. Dr. Weiss said he opposes such memory manipulation. “I want the memory to come out unedited, unchanged,” he said. Further, therapists have begun to broaden their definition of “memory,” leaving aside the question of whether a scene uncovered during hypnosis is “real” or not.

“I have done several thousand individual past-life regressions,” said Ms. Cunningham, of the International Board for Regression Therapy. “And I will also say that I don’t know where these memories come from. So when we say ‘reincarnation,’ it may be our singular soul that reincarnates again and again and again. It may be an aspect of soul energy. It may be a collective unconscious. I think some people might go into fantasy. It may be an allegory or metaphor from the mind.” No matter what these visions are, Ms. Cunningham said, uncovering them can be therapeutic.

ON the fringes of legitimate science, some researchers persist in studying consciousness and its durability beyond the body. Though Dr. Tucker, who directs the Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Virginia, has few kind words for regression therapy or its practitioners, he continues to be committed to the scientific study of what can only be called reincarnation.

He is carrying on the pioneering research of his mentor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who beginning in the 1960s collected more than 2,000 accounts of children between the ages of 2 and 7 who seemed to remember previous lives vividly without the help of hypnosis.

Dr. Stevenson did most of his casework in Asia, where belief in reincarnation is common. There he found a child born with a deformed hand who remembered having his fingers chopped off in a previous life (Dr. Stevenson went to the village the child recalled and verified that such an incident had taken place), and Burmese children who said they had previously been Japanese soldiers killed in World War II and preferred sushi over their native cuisine.

Dr. Tucker studies American children and in one case found a young boy who started to say, around the age of 18 months, that he was his own (deceased) grandfather. “He eventually told details of his grandfather’s life that his parents felt certain he could not have learned through normal means,” Dr. Tucker wrote in Explore, which calls itself a journal of science and healing, “such as the fact that his grandfather’s sister had been murdered and that his grandmother had used a food processor to make milkshakes for his grandfather every day at the end of his life.”

Dr. Tucker won’t say such cases add up to proof of reincarnation, but he likes to keep an open mind.

“There can be something that survives after the death of the brain and the death of the body that is somehow connected to a new child,” he said. “I have become convinced that there is more to the world than the physical universe. There’s the mind piece, which is its own entity.”

Lisa Miller, the religion editor for Newsweek, is the author of “Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 29, 2010, on page ST1 of the New York