They come from other worlds and dimensions. Our laws mean nothing to them. Physical matter and brain waves are theirs to control. And now you can defeat them thanks to HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF AGAINST ALIEN ABDUCTION by Ann Druffel (1998). Please don’t get it confused with The Alien Abduction Survival Guide, which was more about how to sort of cope with a rocky alien friendship. Today we’re learning how to fuck these moon fuckers up.
Ann Druffel has interviewed and breathlessly believed many people taken into space and she has used their stories to come up with eight alien resistance techniques. Some of them are pointless, but others are a funnier kind of pointless. It’s more of a case study in how dumb you can make your brain if the only thing you trust is every alien story you hear.
The first chapter is how to defend yourself against the very ordinary thing known as sleep paralysis. I figure you know this, but it’s when your sleep patterns are disrupted and you wake up after your body has turned off your muscles which it does so you don’t tear your groin tendons dreaming about Bloodsport. A lifelong alien hunter such as Ann had to have had this explained to her thousands of times, but her mind is made up– it’s alien freeze rays. But there is one flaw in the space rays that cunningly mimic a common, diagnosable sleep disorder: they don’t work on courage!
Using the power of Mental Struggle, you can resist their paralyzing beams! And since that’s true, top “researchers” have concluded space beasts, “whatever or whoever they might be,” feed on fear. Which means somewhere in the stars, a pilot was handed an orb or whatever by a technician who said, “This will inhibit the movement of imaginative Earthlings with poor sleeping habits, but beware! It only works on bitch ass pussies. What do you do if they’re brave? Psh. What am I, a Karate scientist? I’m in charge of coward tranquilizers. Get the fuck out of my space office.”
Every alien book is pretty much identical since they’re all written by the same forty people from one big speaking tour/support group. But one of the things that makes Ann special is how she waffles from academic certainty to wild, magical speculation about every single subject, sometimes on the same page. Like how earlier she had no idea who or what was in your bedroom, but suddenly she references a known database of alien races you’re already aware of.
There are twenty more pages in the Mental Struggle chapter rewording how you should try really hard to move when extraterrestrial intruders are in your house. She shares several examples of people who have done this and lived. I don’t know how impressive that is since she doesn’t share any stories of people who fucked up their Mental Struggle and got killed by aliens. It almost sounds like she met a bunch of nerds who had sleep paralysis and then got cranky and woke up. And speaking of Ann’s fellow abductees, she has met so many of them she has put them into categories.
You don’t need to know all the groups since they are “different personalities” from a group of “people trying very hard to believe a very silly thing.” But Group Five gives us one of the most revealing statistics of the book. Ann is aware some people might be making up alien stories for attention, but it’s only one or two percent. That means no matter how unprovable or insane your story is, Ann Druffel has at least a 98% chance of believing you. So keep in mind that the curator of the facts in the book we are reading thinks 98% of UFO stories are true, and the fake ones are the work of psychic vampires.
I’m probably more pragmatic than a woman whose first and last step in any research project is remembering there’s magic. So I wanted to know what good it does to slowly, very slowly apply Mental Struggle techniques while there’s a room full of monsters watching me. Ann mentions many times how impressed they’ll be at my resistance, but then what? Do they leave? Do they complain how my bravery fluids ruined the flavor of my meat? You’ll be amazed at the inadequacy of Ann’s Resistance Technique #2: Physical Struggle.
We are not going to learn star kung fu. We are going to learn how to threaten your imagination with weapons.
Physical Struggle is made up mostly of stories troubled people told Ann about the times they scared aliens out of their rooms or yards. Even if you believe they were being visited by beings from the stars, they are pathetic. If I’m here to learn how to defeat an alien in combat, you’re not helping me by telling me about some guy who assertively threatened a shadow with a clock radio. But there was one inspiring story from a space victim named Patsy.
Patsy fucking grabbed an alien by the throat and murdered it. Did you travel thousands of light years to see her, amazing being? Well, too bad you brought such a shitty neck. Patsy even drew a picture of the event. Well, not of it, but of what the three aliens looked like before she ripped one of their heads off.
Look at her note!
“this one slightly taller
I killed him.
I Broke his neck
it sounded like a Twig
Breaking.”
If you believe this story, and Ann so does, why do I need a chapter on Physical Struggle? Patsy is a woman who makes little poems and drawings about sci-fi creatures and she accidentally obliterated an alien with a light gesture. I think Earth will be fine. How could you possibly not prepare for battle against these things? “General, our planet is being invaded, and I know your instincts are to send in the babies learning to use spoons first, but I found a book written by someone who has fought these things before. It takes a widowed scrapbook hobbyist’s entire ungloved hand to break through these bastards’ defenses!”
One of the advantages of knowing Ann Druffel is how you can tell her “I fight aliens all the time,” and she will not only believe you, she will think you’re awesome. Ann will not shut up about her friend Morgana Van Klausen and how amazing she is. Morgana has fought off so many aliens they haven’t abducted her “for the past several years[!]” Ann also calls her a talented artist, which is honestly less believable than Patsy’s story of casually throttling a martian to death.
I know we’re starting to have fun, but there is a downside to trying to explain everything wrong in your life with aliens. Let’s talk about Billy.
Billy was made gay by outer space. The last thing Billy needed in his life was a group of people to say, “That sounds exactly right, let’s indulge that idea.” They did, and it helped Billy, the adult confused gay man who lives with his mother, understand he was special. So special, in fact, the aliens were hunting him personally. So he started sleeping with a gun. And if you’re thinking sleeping with a gun is a bad idea for someone with a sleep disorder who mistakes shadows for the aliens who implanted him with his accursed thirst for hunks, congratulations. You’re smarter than UFO researcher Ann Druffel.
So Billy told Ann about the time he woke up with a bad feeling and shot his fucking gun out the window at three aliens that had already left. And instead of saying, “Holy shit, you are literally insane,” Ann said, “Oh my god, they left before you shot them? Perhaps they had telepathically realized you’d armed yourself. Can I include this in my real book about real things that happened?”
And that’s not even the only story about Billy firing off a gun at aliens in his house!
The good news is after Billy accidentally kills his garbage man, he’ll be able to tell the police he was trying to scare away those dadgum mostly invisible Zeta Reticulans, which is not a felony if it’s Mississippi and they made you gay.
Getting mad at aliens doesn’t help. However, UFO researchers have found getting mad with purpose and moral authority is something space never expected.
Righteous Anger is basically Mental Struggle with more entitlement. I wasn’t sure why Ann gave it its own chapter in the book until I realized most of her anecdotes were about “experiencers” who weren’t pissed off at aliens, but at the asshole humans who keep making fun of them. For instance, Harrison Bailey encountered a group of aliens who landed, gave him a gallbladder disease, and told him to get permission for them to land. I know that sounds stupid and not possibly right, but it was fact-checked by Ann Druffel herself.
While he was in the hospital, suffering from organ failure and under the influence of drugs, he would have dreams so vivid he would wake up and ask nurses if he was teleported out of the room by star magic. And when he learned he wasn’t, he knew it could only mean one thing: when he was asleep his brain was taken to another reality by that world’s beings so a sick steel worker could call the President and get UFO clearance. All this was carefully fact-checked by Ann Druffel who finds it ridiculous people find it ridiculous.
After reading the entire chapter, I think the thing that most defines anger as “righteous” is when everyone says the thing you’re angry about doesn’t exist. Say, for example, you were mad about systemic racism. Most people would listen to you and find your frustration reasonable, so it’s only anger. But if you were, say, pissed off about the Chinese working with the fish to stink up your garage, suddenly you’re some “ranting madman.” Thus your anger is righteous. It aligns well with my theory of how UFO abductees have excellent judgement and should always be trusted.
Okay, so the next chapter is also about righteous anger, but extra righteous– the bonus level of anger you reach when those goddamn aliens start coming after your kids.
Interestingly enough, it’s helpful to work yourself up into a nice Protective Rage even after the aliens have left. If you do “this technique” correctly, Ann suggests it might create a kind of alien-proof force field around your house. It’s important to me you know I’m not taking any liberties with that description. Ann Druffel, without exaggeration, wrote down how getting really, really mad about the idea of aliens taking your kids will generate a field of energy around your home that disrupts mind powers from beyond the stars. And she thinks it’s “advice.”
So far we’ve learned how to get really angry when we wake up during our REM cycle, how to fire our gun at shadows the moment we can move again, how to get angry, and how to get angry. If there are still any aliens left alive by this point, what kind of invincible beings are we dealing with!? And how is our family going to help!? Well, do you remember Morgana, the talented, smart, super cool UFO abductee from earlier? She asked her husband for help in fighting the aliens and here’s the story of how that turned out:
He turned on the hall lights before they went to bed! Can you imagine being the poor fuckers warping into our star sector and having to deal with the ceiling fan of Morgana and the thoughtfulness of her supportive husband? It’s a suicide mission!
You’ve now learned how to react to any alien threat, but what if you could prevent them all entirely? Chapter six, Intuition, is about nurturing your imagination and trusting your instincts when they tell you to shoot the window next to your mother or shoot the shadows on your lawn or how your gallbladder disease means outer space thought you were the most special Earth man of all.
A lot of people claim these alien encounters are delusions caused by overactive imaginations, but if that were true, why would the aliens stop visiting after the “deluded” people convinced themselves their psychic powers were keeping aliens away? Checkmate, reality. Except wait, if you can prevent aliens, wouldn’t that simply prove aliens not only exist but are smart enough to know they are being prevented? Oh, those devious bastards. Those assholes! THEY BETTER NOT FUCKING TRY ANY OF THAT SHIT WITH MY FAMILY.
The key to Intuition is knowing something is wrong even after you discover nothing is wrong. Ann tells the story of a United States Marine who woke up with a headache and could tell they placed an implant in his skull. “He even went to the extent of looking at the top of his head,” but found nothing. He and Ann knew what this meant– whatever they wanted because they’re nuts as shit.
You might think I’m cherry picking the craziest lines, and of course I am, but the entire book is like this. Ann Druffel and her friends blame every inconvenience, no matter how minor, on space aliens and then figure out how it must be true with no evidence. So let’s move on to the next technique: magic.
Look, you tried every kind of anger and asked your husband to turn on the hallway light. Isn’t it time you used sorcery to stop this? It’s -literally insane- that you’ve waited this long to use the metaphysical powers you’ve had this entire time.
For new wizards, Ann doesn’t give a lot of details on how to harness the power of White Light, but if you control it, go ahead and make a force field. Here’s an illustration that might help:
Think how powerful Lori Briggs’s Righteous Anger will become after she reads this: Lori, you draw like aliens came here on a mission to hit our planet’s worst artist in the hands and head with a shovel. This looks like something that would make a scientist say, “Trial Number 239: another failure. This below average horse still can’t draw.” How is this sketch any more useful than saying, “LORI SAW A SHAPE, MY SKULL IS THIRSTY, GOOD BYE LET’S WRESTLE.”
You’re not going to believe this, but technique #8, Appeal to Spiritual Personages, is exactly what it sounds like. You ask Jesus for help in fighting the aliens. Jesus Christ, as shown here:
This isn’t the exact Jesus Christ a woman named Janet used during her childhood to ward off intergalactic kidnappers, but it’s similar. Any Jesus you have around the house should work. It’s not an exact science. But it is a science:
Ann’s logic is sound: since miracles exist and are proven, it stands to reason God is standing by to answer any urgent space emergencies. But what if I told you it gets sadder? What if I told you this group of people convinced they are victims of alien kidnappings consider screaming for Jesus to be the equivalent to self-esteem. What if I had a quote saying exactly that word-for-word. Would you cry? Let’s find out.
Melissa told Ann about how she minimizes her kidnappings by asking St. Michael to send aliens away and they both agreed “self-esteem” was what she had. In its own way, this was Ann’s most effective defensive technique yet because it’s what finally made me feel bad for making fun of this book and these people.
You know how you can keep vampires away with garlic? Ann thought, what if, I don’t know, stuff like that worked on beings from other planets?
None of this can be tested for obvious reasons, so it’s best to surround yourself with all the food, toxic materials, and magnets you can spare. Because why not? Maybe aliens can’t step over iron for some reason? Maybe a sudden pennyroyal-induced abortion decloaks a starship? Ann Druffel did not expect finishing a book to be this hard, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Ann goes off on a few tangents about ancient supernatural tales from around the world and how some are pretty similar to UFO abduction stories. But instead of concluding that superstitious people have simply been blaming strange events on the supernatural for generations, she went the other way. She decided genies and Bible miracles were aliens, and thus more proof of aliens. And she’s not crazy. I mean, take a look at this sketch a Muslim man made of two genies he saw:
How can you explain how every person who encounters aliens draws like Steven Hawking trying to unhook a bra? If my three-year-old handed me this and said, “Daddy. Here’s you eating a pizza,” I would throw it straight in the trash. I would put on a terrifying mask and chase her out of the house screaming about how she’ll never amount to anyth– oh fuck, I think I figured out what happened with all these people.
Salt? Maybe something with salt is worth a try? I don’t know. This is just what happens when you let a room full of lunatics, through trial-and-error, figure out which techniques prevent them from getting taken to space. You can tell when something works because you are still here, miserable and alone the next day!
So to recap: if you find yourself being abducted by aliens it goes anger, wild gunfire, anger, anger, scream for help, imagination, magic, Jesus, magic. You’re finally safe! You’re welcome!
…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Matt Reiley: whose broad, unfocused anger made him Beehive Holler’s Least Probed Man (August, 2017)