Jonathan Reed

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Jonathan Reed

Jonathan Reed
Reed during a lecture
Born (1953-06-03) 3 June 1953 (age 73)Seattle, Washington
Other names John Bradley Rutter (legal name)
Occupation Developmental psychologist (former)
Known for Jonathan Reed forest incident
Experience date(s) 15 October 1996
Experience location(s) Cascade Mountains, near Snoqualmie Pass, Washington
Experience type(s) In-person encounter; incapacitation of being; evidence collection
Beings encountered Freddie
Technology encountered Obelisk; Link bracelet
Recognition
Alleged retaliation Shooting of Jonathan Reed; home ransacked; evidence confiscated; records expunged

Jonathan Reed (legal name John Bradley Rutter; born 3 June 1953, Seattle) is an American contactee who claimed that on 15 October 1996, while hiking with his dog Suzy in the Cascade Mountains near Snoqualmie Pass, he encountered and incapacitated a small non-human intelligent being — later named "Freddie" — alongside a levitating obelisk in the forest, and recovered a metallic bracelet-form device he called the "Link artifact." Before the incident, Reed allegedly worked as a developmental psychologist at the University of Washington from approximately 1983 to 1996. He co-authored LINK An Extraterrestrial Odyssey (2000) with Robert Raith and appeared extensively on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM and the international UFO lecture circuit. The Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group concluded in 2001 that the case was a fabricated hoax; Reed maintained his account was true and that his records had been systematically erased.

Name

Reed used the name "Jonathan Reed" as a pseudonym; his legal name is John Bradley Rutter. He stated he changed his name "to be cautious." A pro-Reed YouTube compilation claimed the name was not newly invented but a family name engraved on his PhD graduation ring in 1980. The Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group found Rutter used more than 15 credit card name variations and was associated with multiple Social Security numbers. His co-author Robert Raith (real name Robert Aria) and associate Harold Chacon also operated under pseudonyms.

Early life and education

Reed described his career to Art Bell as "developmental psychiatric child development; I was a research counselor for kids" at the University of Washington from approximately 1983 to 1996. Bell separately described him as "a practicing clinical psychologist for children." The UW directory listed a "Jonathan Reed" on staff as of 21 August 1996 — approximately eight weeks before the incident. A pro-Reed YouTube compilation cited the full employment record: "University of Washington, Seattle — U of W Medical Center, Psychology Department, Clinical Research at Neural Imaging, Cognitive Factor and Learning Disorder, 1983 to 1996," with a photograph of Reed wearing a UW Medical Center badge at his desk with a picture of Suzy visible on the wall and a December 1995 calendar.

The Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group investigation found Rutter had no verifiable college degree of any kind. Reed's response was that all his educational records had been "expunged from everywhere" by the same forces that ransacked his home. Independent investigator Daniel McEvoy verified Reed's educational background through interviews with a retired UCLA professor who produced a grade ledger with Reed's name and a 3.0 grade — the professor stated he had taught Reed beginning in fall 1978, attended his 1980 graduation, and met Reed and his attorney in 1997 as they attempted to restore the records: "They went to a hell of a lot of trouble to kill Jonathan's educational past." McEvoy additionally interviewed four other faculty members and five fellow students at both San Diego State University and UCLA, as well as Reed's aunt and uncle — his closest surviving relatives — who confirmed his attendance at SDSU (bachelor's in education) and UCLA (PhD in psychology, 1980) and showed McEvoy childhood photographs of Reed, graduation photographs, and pictures of the dog. The aunt and uncle also reported that their own home had been broken into during this period, with nothing taken.

Forest encounter

Main article:

Jonathan Reed forest incident

On 15 October 1996, Reed allegedly encountered a small non-human intelligent being in the Cascade Mountains that killed his dog, was incapacitated by Reed, and was transported to his home in Seattle where Reed put it in a chest freezer. There, after gathering himself, Reed allegedly invited someone over and they saw it. At some point the being, which was eventually named Freddie, allegedly revived and began to interact with Reed and stayed in the chest freezer for some or all of the nine days before unidentified, supposed deep state agents allegedly ransacked the house, removed the freezer, and stole the majority of Reed's evidence.

Flight to Canada

On approximately the tenth day after the encounter, Reed left the United States for Canada, not wanting his family and friends to continue to be harassed — some had already been physically beaten. He described being homeless for approximately a year, claiming to have lost over a hundred pounds and at times stealing food to survive. In a later interview with Cole Larson, he described this period in detail: two months eating from restaurant garbage, no money, physically and cognitively deteriorating, pursued by what he described as a governmental force — "I would literally every three or four days be put in a position where I have to escape this type of harassment." He considered suicide, spent time living in libraries reading about survival, and eventually concluded there was "a reason to continue." Reed claimed that, sitting in a basement with a gun in one hand and a phone number in the other, he made a call and was connected to people he called "the Alliance," who he said nursed him back to health and later introduced him to writer Robert Raith.

Reed stated he took a polygraph approximately three months after the incident and passed; by 2013, he had undergone two polygraph examinations — one arranged through the UCLA criminology department and one in Seattle — and passed both. As a consequence of going public, he stated: "My career is in the toilet. I am no longer able to work as I was in developmental psychology. I have no credibility as in licensing, my entire life, as in credentials. As in Erase." He claimed his bank accounts, accreditation, passport, and birth certificate were systematically eliminated; only a threatened lawsuit — "we were going to plant a story in every major newspaper in the United States that the US government had refused to give me my passport back because I had had an extraterrestrial experience" — forced the return of his passport four days later. Reed stated that after coming forward he was declared persona non grata at the University of Washington Medical Center and removed from his office, and that employees were instructed the matter was "no longer to be talked about." McEvoy corroborated Reed's employment independently: on one late-night visit to the UW seventh-floor psychology department, a security guard recognized Reed on sight — "Reid, you know you're not supposed to be here and I'll have to escort you out" — which McEvoy described as impossible to stage.

First public disclosure (1998)

Reed and Robert Raith co-authored LINK An Extraterrestrial Odyssey (2000). Reed's first Coast to Coast AM appearance came on 11 November 1998, introduced by Raith with a segment titled "Wanna Take a Ride." In a fuller broadcast on 28 December 1998 he revealed the Link bracelet — describing it as "a controller device, something that links the Alien to the obelisk," with three engraved symbols and three needle-like protrusions — and stated the artifact had been "examined and safely stored" outside the United States. He also declined a reported $1.5 million offer from a Japanese businessman for the video footage — "this is information that belongs to the world."

Approximately four to five days after his first public presentation in San Diego in March 1999, Reed was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia by an unidentified assailant in what he described as an intimidation attempt. Further broadcasts followed on 9 December 1999 — during which his landlord Larry testified live on air about the ransacking — and 16 March 2001, when Daniel McEvoy presented his investigation to the Art Bell audience. Reed presented at the International UFO Congress in March 2000; at a subsequent congress (approximately 2001), he, McEvoy, Jaime Maussan, and Harold Chacon jointly presented the case, recorded and released as the "ODISEALINK WORLDWIDE – Global Witness Series." In the summer of 2000, the University of Washington pathologist Rodger Haggitt and research chemist Michael Wessels — whom McEvoy identified as members of the tissue analysis team working on samples from Freddie — died within approximately two months of each other (Haggitt on 28 June 2000 in what Seattle police termed a murder–suicide in his university office; Wessels on 28 August 2000 in a hiking accident in the same mountainous area of Washington where the 1996 encounter occurred) before publishing any results. Reed additionally stated that the head pathologist at the UW Pathology Department "was killed in his office when they were ready to release" DNA results "within a week."

Mexico and international attention (2001)

In 2001, Jaime Maussan invited Reed to Mexico, where his appearance on Maussan's Tercer Milenio programme achieved a reported 60-point ratings share — "watched almost by the whole country." The case also aired on Otro Rollo (26 June 2001), reportedly rebroadcast 14 times across 21 countries. Reed had intended to demonstrate the Link bracelet live but could not transport the artifact across international borders due to "security issues." During a subsequent live television appearance, Reed purportedly demonstrated the Link bracelet's teleportation capabilities in front of a studio audience, briefly disappearing and reappearing on camera. Maussan later acknowledged Reed had told him lies — specifically regarding the circumstances of a friend's death and the ransacking of his home — but maintained the core video evidence and radioactivity measurements were genuine, and confirmed he had personally seen Reed's gunshot wound. He stated he paid Reed less than $10,000 total across all conferences, contradicting allegations of $50,000.

In May 2001, the Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group published findings concluding the case was a fabricated hoax, establishing among other things that Rutter, Robert Raith (Robert Aria), and Harold Chacon had all been working together at a West Seattle Chevron gas station mini-mart from 1997 onward, and that the UW had no record of Chacon in any PhD program. UFO Watchdog investigator Royce Myers III separately reported two documentary discrepancies in the physical evidence: the Kodak slide film Reed said he used in October 1996 had not been manufactured until after that date — confirmed, Myers wrote, by a specialist in Kodak's product-information department — and the Jeep Reed said he had used to haul the being from the forest was not purchased (by his former girlfriend Barb, at a Lynnwood, Washington dealership) until 17 April 1997, roughly a year and a half after the alleged encounter. In May 2002, Reed's personal friend Bill Werner and acquaintance Denise Charvet publicly identified him as "John Rutter" on Jeff Rense's radio program. Werner told investigators Rutter "does not hike in the woods as he is allergic to everything that is found in a yard, let alone a forest. A hike for him was walking out of his old Volvo wagon." Reed's long-term girlfriend Barb (with whom he lived from 1983 to 1998) stated he was allergic to animals and had never owned a dog; she ended the relationship after discovering he was not actually a doctor and had been in contact with another woman named Valerie. The pro-Reed YouTube compilation countered the allergy claim with photographs showing Reed at a desk with a UW badge and a picture of Suzy on the wall.

Later career (2004–2013)

By approximately 2004, Reed relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia and ceased public speaking in the United States because "too many people were dead," instead directing presentations to scientific and governmental audiences internationally, including "heads of state." By 2013, Reed named nine people he said had died helping him — including Wendell Stevens, Donald Ware, John Mack, Zecharia Sitchin, Daniel McEvoy, Dave Thomas, and Zachariah Enoch — stating: "Some of these people were murdered in my opinion to keep this from coming out to the public."

In a 2008 video update, Reed discussed the relationship between extraterrestrial contact, quantum physics, and string theory; a concept of "universal compression of dimension"; the significance of 2012 as predicted by Maya, Inca, Aztec, and Hopi traditions; and the possibility that the beings were coming from Earth's own future to protect a natural evolutionary process that nuclear energy threatened to disrupt. At a 2009 conference, he cited the presence of two US government vans with "exempt" license plates in the parking lot: "Somebody is out to take that option away from all of us." For the ODISEALINK documentary series, Reed returned to the original incident site in the Cascade Mountains, filming on location and narrating the original approach route.

In 2010, Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files (Syfy) dedicated an episode to recreating Reed's footage; the production team concluded the footage could be duplicated and voice stress analysis found Reed "extremely deceptive."

On the September 2013 Dark Matter broadcast with Art Bell, Reed stated he had suffered two heart attacks and described a clinical near-death experience — "dead for 19 minutes" — while hospitalized in Mexico, during which he encountered Pope Benedict XVI, who asked: "How can we help the alien?" Approximately one month before the broadcast, he said he had spent four days at the Vatican meeting with Pope Francis, who told him: "Jonathan, you are a messenger for all of us." He described working with a "Russian Space Communication Group" to build a database of imagery-based alien communication from hundreds of contactees' experiences, and stated the Link bracelet was held in "non-communist Russia."

Ongoing contact

Reed claimed ongoing contact with Freddie from 1996 to the present. During the initial nine days after the forest incident, Reed described Freddie progressing from hostility (screaming, throwing objects) to apparent trust — exiting the freezer voluntarily, making eye contact, and initiating telepathic communication that Reed experienced as a "fire hose" of imagery and geometry causing intense migraines. In an April 2000 Art Bell broadcast, Reed described Freddie's character: "I was in his presence for hours and hours while he was alive. He never attacked me. In fact, he almost playfully gestured to me... he probably could have torn me apart just with his muscles, but he was extremely gentle. This was an intelligent creature." Reed came to believe Freddie was a "genetically engineered worker" — a biological probe designed for planetary survey, analogous to a Mars rover but composed of living tissue — whose mission in the forest related to geological monitoring, and whose civilization originated in the vicinity of Orion or Andromeda based on star maps communicated through telepathic imagery. He stated he had apologized to Freddie for striking him, believing the attack on Suzy was a defensive reflex of the suit rather than an intentional act.

After the being's disappearance on day nine, Reed claimed Freddie began appearing to him sporadically and without warning, continuing to the present day. Robert Raith separately claimed to have seen Freddie on multiple occasions — "he's popped in and popped out and I've seen him a number of times." Several other witnesses associated with the case also reported sporadic appearances of the being in their own lives since the original incident. By the time of the ODISEALINK documentary, Reed estimated "over a hundred" additional physical encounters — "not spiritual contact, not just empirical contact, but physical contact, just like you're sitting next to me now" — with as many as 30–40 other people present as witnesses on some occasions. Reed also claimed to have used the Link bracelet to teleport his friend Gary Withington — who he said had been left for dead with severe brain injuries — to "that round room," where he witnessed "his spirit, his energy, his life force given back to him."

Across all recorded interviews, Reed was never directly confronted with the specific Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group findings — the film dating, Jeep registration, or Chevron gas station employment. No interviewer named the investigators (LeFevre, Lipson, Andersen) or referenced the Seattle Weekly article to Reed on air. Despite MUFON commissioning the investigation, MUFON never officially published Andersen's report. Royce Myers III documented the case in his multi-part "Reed Files" series on UFO Watchdog. In a 2011 candid interview, Reed addressed the credential attacks as "blatant lies" propagated by people "being paid by government sources to attack people like me," stating: "I do have credentials... there are people who have stood up, presented written testimony and confirmation that I did in fact go to these universities."

YouTube commenters purportedly connected to Reed's former circle alleged that the bracelet artifact was "made out of soda can and contact plastic," that "Freddie masks" were made by a neighborhood artist, and that "Valerie Golds and her Microsoft team did the videos."

See also

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