Readers of Whitley Strieber's book Breakthrough (1995) will know that it prominently features one Dora Ruffner of Boulder, Colorado, a close friend of Strieber's, whose house he apparently visited in company with the visitors in 1987. Running a Google image search on "Dora Ruffner" doesn't turn up any photos of her, and the main purpose of this post is to rectify that. By a strange coincidence, she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1987, the same year as Strieber's experience with her. This is what she looked like at that time:
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| Whitley Strieber's friend Dora Ruffner on Oprah in 1987 |
Ruffner is (or was) into witchcraft, and the character Amanda Walker in Strieber's witchcraft-themed novel Catmagic (1986) is based on her. She appeared on Oprah, together with her much less sane-looking coreligionist Laurie Cabot, in order to explain to their poor bigoted viewers that "actual witches aren't like the Hollywood stereotypes." (I remember "clearing up misconceptions about witchcraft" was a thing back in the late 1980s.) The Oprah clip has basically no merit at all, except that you get to see what Ruffner looked like. She appears, billed as a "White Witch," at the 2:02 mark.
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