Daniel McEvoy

Daniel McEvoy (also rendered Dan McEvoy, and misheard as "Dan McAvoy" in several broadcast transcriptions) is an independent investigator and Purdue University-trained mechanical engineer who conducted a multi-year private investigation into the Jonathan Reed case and the Jonathan Reed forest incident. He presented his findings on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM on 16 March 2001, addressing the obelisk, the Link bracelet, the biological evidence concerning the non-human intelligent being Reed called Freddie, and the deaths of Rodger Haggitt and Michael Wessels. The supporting evidence was published to the case website aliendestiny.com, and McEvoy's investigation has more recently been re-presented by the pro-Reed Polarity video series, which has been associated with a reported 2024 re-test of the biological samples. Because McEvoy granted his sources anonymity and says the supporting transcripts are held in an undisclosed location, his corroborating interviews cannot be independently checked; skeptical investigators such as UFO Watchdog's Royce Myers III group his work with the pro-Reed accounts that they say failed to verify the case before Reed was identified in the documentary record as John Bradley Rutter.

Background

McEvoy has described his background as being in mechanical engineering, stating that he graduated from Purdue University with a bachelor's degree in 1986, started his own engineering company a couple of years later, ran it for about eight years, and then sold it to a publicly held company.

Before entering private investigation, McEvoy said he spent several years in the military as a paratrooper in an airborne reconnaissance unit, qualified in arctic and jungle warfare, small arms, and small unit tactics. Reed has separately described him as a UFO researcher of more than 20 years' standing, an expatriate, and an Army Ranger and paratrooper. Art Bell, welcoming him to the same broadcast, characterized him as an ex-Army Ranger and "close combat weapons specialist" decorated for valor. In his ODISEALINK lecture on the case, he gave his service more specifically as the 82nd Airborne Division and an airborne reconnaissance unit, followed by an assignment as a military advisor to the JFK Center for Special Warfare at Fort Bragg. By his own account he had spent about 15 years in ufology before the Reed case, holding membership in MUFON and the Center for UFO Studies and in Budd Hopkins' Intruder Foundation, and had reviewed hundreds of cases.

Investigation of the Jonathan Reed case

McEvoy has said he became involved about a year before his 2001 broadcast, after hearing Reed's story on Art Bell's program and then attending the Laughlin UFO Congress, where he met Reed and Robert Raith for the first time. He stated he had no prior connection to Reed and was not a relative, having met him only at Laughlin. Reed has said McEvoy ultimately devoted about two years to the investigation, traveling with him to document the case.

McEvoy reported interviewing more than 30 witnesses in total, including four UCLA and San Diego State University professors, five fellow students, three hospital employees, a security guard, three co-workers, two family members, a biologist, a professor of pathology, an environmental scientist, Reed's landlords, special effects professionals, videographers, and photographers. On the broadcast he described locating a UCLA professor who had taught Reed and who produced a grade book recording Reed's name and a 3.0 grade, remembering him as a student interested in the study of child psychology and development; McEvoy added that four other professors, five fellow students from the same universities, and several employees of the University of Washington Medical Center corroborated Reed's background, and that all of Reed's written academic records had been "expunged from everywhere." He further reported that Reed had been declared persona non grata at the University of Washington Medical Center and quietly removed from his office. Critics have noted that, because McEvoy declined to name these witnesses, none of the corroboration could be independently confirmed.

In April 2000, McEvoy said he met and interviewed Rodger Haggitt and Michael Wessels, two University of Washington researchers he identified, alongside Harold Chacon and Reed, as the four-person team examining biological samples from Freddie; Chacon's credentials were later found to be fraudulent by the Seattle UFO/Paranormal Group. Haggitt died on 28 June 2000 and Wessels about two months later, both before any results were published, and McEvoy said he documented the deaths with press clippings from school and local papers. He also visited Reed's closest living relatives — an aunt and uncle in the Seattle area — who showed him childhood photographs, graduation pictures, and photographs of the dog.

McEvoy has said that, unbeknownst to Reed, he subjected him to a covert voice stress analysis by telephone and in person, the resulting profile of which "does not show an attempt to deceive." On air he said he would sign a notarized statement confirming his findings and that some of his interviews had been tape recorded and transcribed, with copies kept in a secure location.

Later involvement

In a later Dreamland interview, Art Bell noted that McEvoy had by then suffered a series of strokes, which curtailed his public involvement with the case. The pro-Reed Polarity video series has since re-presented McEvoy's investigation, and later pro-Reed material reports that McEvoy returned to the case in 2024 and arranged a re-test of the preserved biological samples, said to have shown "non-terrestrial protein markers," though laboratories reportedly declined to publish the result.

Among supporters of the case, McEvoy's multi-year inquiry has been regarded as the most methodical of the pro-Reed efforts, though it did not displace the skeptical reading of the case. Royce Myers III's "The Reed Files" on UFO Watchdog grouped McEvoy among the investigators — alongside figures such as Jaime Maussan — whose endorsements, it argued, did not survive scrutiny once the documentary record indicated that "Jonathan Reed" was a pseudonym for John Bradley Rutter, who had not practiced medicine. The supporting material remained centered on the website aliendestiny.com, which served as the public repository for the photographs and documentation.

See also

• Jonathan Reed
• Robert Raith
• LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey
• Shooting of Jonathan Reed
• Hobart (The School)
• Jonathan Reed home video of Freddie
• Jonathan Reed forest video

Notes

References

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