Robert Raith

Robert Raith (real name Robert "Bobby" Aria) was the co-author and principal public presenter of the Jonathan Reed case, the alleged 1996 forest encounter in which Reed said he incapacitated a small non-human intelligent being he called "Freddie," recovering a metallic "Link bracelet" beside a levitating obelisk. A West Seattle resident who presented himself as a freelance investigative writer from the Pacific Northwest, Raith co-authored LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey (2000) with Reed and brought the case to Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM audience in November 1998, becoming its principal spokesman across Reed's broadcasts of 1998–1999 and claiming to have visited the encounter site and seen Freddie himself.

In April 2001 the Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group identified "Raith" as Robert Aria, a West Seattle Chevron gas-station attendant who worked alongside Harold Chacon — the case's purported tissue analyst — and who, according to MUFON Washington State director Kathleen Andersen, was a longtime Art Bell listener already writing a UFO novel before the case surfaced, contradicting his on-air persona as an independent investigator who had come to Reed cold. On air Raith had cast the case's troubles as the work of a frightened establishment — a "new world order" he said was "inches from going up in flames" — and he and Reed maintained that the encounter was genuine.

Introduction to the case

By Raith's account, his name had appeared on a list of trusted contacts that Reed received from a hospitalized senior medical professor — referred to in LINK only as "Professor X" — who told Reed the listed individuals could be relied on to help him. Raith said he was working as a freelance investigative writer in the Pacific Northwest when Reed first contacted him approximately two years after the 1996 incident, in a call that asked for an immediate same-night meeting at a hotel bar in Seattle. Reed, he wrote, appeared at the meeting as a man of about 43, roughly 5 feet 10 inches tall, with blond hair graying at the temples and a full mustache, sharp and intelligent eyes, and an overall air of having "been through something terrible."

Recounting the meeting on Coast to Coast AM, Raith said he had been doing "investigative work involving other things" and was initially skeptical — "At first I wasn't sure if this guy was just nuts or what the story was, but I was intrigued" — but committed to the project after Reed showed him photographic and documentary evidence during a conversation that ran "long into the night." This self-presentation as an outsider who reached the case through unrelated investigative work was later disputed by the Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group, whose source Kathleen Andersen recalled Aria as a longtime Art Bell listener who had been writing his own UFO book since 1997. Asked by Art Bell what kind of man Reed was, Raith characterized him as "a pretty strong individual, a lot of intestinal fortitude," saying that only after working with Reed "for about a year" did Reed conclude that "it was just so important to get this out."

Promotion on Coast to Coast AM (1998–1999)

Raith made his first national appearance on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM on 10 November 1998, on an episode that also featured physicist Paul LaViolette in a separate segment. He described on air the death of Reed's dog, Suzy: "Susie encountered the alien... the alien had released somehow some of its own flesh on her face and mauled her face. When the flesh retracted, a hole appeared on her and basically she was just sucked from herself into that hole." He announced that the photographs had already been sent to Bell by FedEx, and that an earlier package had reportedly been stolen when the courier carrying it was attacked from behind — leaving her with seven stitches — with nothing taken but the package itself. He set the case within a broader political frame, telling listeners that hidden interests "know their whole new world order is inches from going up in flames, so they're afraid of the awakening and they know that their collapse is about to take place."

When Raith and Reed appeared together for a longer session on 28 December 1998 — the first to include live audience call-ins — Raith described the atmosphere at the scene after Reed struck the being, the air becoming dense and the creature's scream seeming almost to become visible: "The air became very dense... the creature let out a screech. You could see the air bubbling around it as it did this. It was almost like it was visual... like you see mirages of heat separating off a surface in the sun." Asked whether he had believed the story on first hearing it, he again described his gradual conversion: "When he first started, I thought, you know, I have a nutcase on my hand. But I gave him the chance... As the night progressed and it was a long night, I became convinced and he showed me the photographs and he showed me some other documentation."

Raith said he had visited the original encounter site in the Cascade Mountains near Snoqualmie Pass and found a one-directional tree — its branches all growing in a single direction — which he described as residual physical evidence of the event. He further claimed to have seen Freddie "pop in and pop out" on multiple occasions, appearing and vanishing in a manner he linked to the teleportation capabilities attributed to the Link bracelet.

Raith returned with Reed for the 9 December 1999 broadcast, promoted by Bell as "The Captured Alien Show," during which the being's revival in the freezer was described publicly for the first time. Raith corroborated Reed's account of repeatedly opening the freezer after the scream: "I opened the freezer so that I could know that I was not imagining this." He updated the audience on the condition of Gary, a friend of Reed's whom he said had been attacked: "I found him, and he is not dead, but he is one step away from it... he was beaten and abducted."

On the same broadcast Raith described a shooting he said had followed a San Diego UFO Society presentation. Returning to where he was staying in Canada, he said, a man in his early thirties wearing a jogging suit forced him against his car at gunpoint, said nothing, and — when Raith grabbed for the weapon — fired a round into his shoulder. He said he did not at first realize he had been hit; the round — a nine-millimeter whose shell he said was recovered — had passed through his trapezius muscle and out through his back. The assailant, by his account, looked surprised, then "stood back up very calmly," holstered the weapon under his jacket, and walked away without robbing him or saying a word.

Identification as Robert Aria (2001)

In April 2001, a man identifying himself as Raith's former room-mate told the Seattle UFO/Paranormal Group that "Raith" was a pseudonym for a West Seattle mini-mart attendant named Robert Aria. Investigators Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson confirmed with the store manager that both Aria and Harold Chacon worked at a West Seattle Chevron gas station; when the investigators visited, Raith reportedly ran out the back door before they entered. MUFON Washington State Director Kathleen Andersen, who lived in the same neighborhood, independently confirmed she knew both men socially: "You could have knocked me over with a feather. I knew both Harold Chacon and Robert — we had dinner together, and I know they both worked at the Chevron station."

The documented record ran against Raith's on-air self-presentation as a freelance investigative writer who had come to the case only through Reed. According to Andersen, Aria was "a long time listener and fan of the Art Bell show" who had told her as early as 1997 that he was writing a fiction book about UFOs — "always talking about writing a science fiction book about UFOs and people from other dimensions" — and had given the project the working title "Neco Dancing." Raith had also claimed on air that he had never met Chacon before the DNA analysis project; investigators established that Aria and Chacon had been co-workers at the same mini-mart for about five years — until April 2001 — and lived within roughly a block of each other. Raith's room-mate, Larry, stated in April 2001 that he had been in the same room as Chacon and had witnessed him being verbally coached on what to say. Within the framing Raith and Reed had voiced on air, such gaps in the public record were the predictable work of hostile interests rather than evidence of fabrication, and both continued to present the encounter as real.

See also

• ODISEALINK
• Jaime Maussan
• Daniel McEvoy
• Rodger Haggitt
• Michael Wessels
• Shooting of Jonathan Reed
• Men in black
• Hobart (The School)

References

Source ratings:

(Color-coding) (

[1 Wikipedia-grade]

·

[2 Questionable]

·

[3 Reporting/Analysis]

·

[4 Speculative/Hearsay]

·

[5 Ungrounded]

). (To change source ratings,

edit this page

.)