Jonathan Reed forest incident

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Jonathan Reed forest incident

Date October 15–24, 1996
Location Near Snoqualmie Pass, Washington, United States; Reed's home, Seattle
Type In-person interaction

The Jonathan Reed forest incident is an alleged encounter beginning on 15 October 1996 in which Jonathan Reed (legal name John Bradley Rutter) claimed to have struck and incapacitated a small non-human intelligent being — later named "Freddie" — in a forested area approximately 60 miles east of Seattle along Interstate 90, past North Bend, near Snoqualmie Pass, at approximately 5,000 feet elevation. Reed claimed the being killed his golden retriever Suzy, that he transported the incapacitated being home and kept it in a chest freezer for nine days, that the being revived on approximately the third day, and that on the ninth day his home was ransacked by unidentified agents who removed the being, the freezer, and the majority of his evidence. He also filmed a levitating black obelisk at the scene and recovered a metallic artifact he called the "Link bracelet." Investigators from the Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group concluded by April 2001 that the case was a fabricated hoax; the debunking site UFO Watchdog separately reported that the film type Reed claimed to have used in October 1996 was not manufactured until 1997 and that the Jeep he claimed to have driven was not in his possession until 17 April 1997.

October 15, 1996

Annotated diagram overlaid on Reed's 1996 forest footage, showing the positions of Reed, his dog, and the alleged entity.

File:Reed forest video 1996.mp4Forest encounter footage filmed by Reed at the site.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, 15 October 1996, Reed drove approximately 50 minutes from Seattle to a familiar trailhead off Interstate 90 near North Bend and began hiking with Suzy, his seven-year-old, hundred-pound golden retriever. Approximately an hour and a half to two hours into the hike, at approximately 3:00 p.m., Suzy bolted ahead and began barking — the sound escalating from excited to frantic. Reed grabbed a fallen branch — "a little bit larger than a baseball bat" — and ran toward the sound. Cresting a rise, he saw Suzy fighting with a small humanoid being approximately four feet tall wearing a seamless black one-piece suit with no visible seams, buttons, or zippers — "totally rounded" with a turtleneck-style collar. The suit extended a pseudopod-like appendage around Suzy's head, and the dog's body began to collapse inward — "a hole opened up beneath her neck, and her skin, her fur started to move in a circular motion, as if it was going into a drain" — until Suzy was entirely reduced to a white powder with no solid remains. Reed swung the branch and struck the being in the skull, fracturing it — leaving an opening approximately one by one and a half inches and cracking the intracranial sac — with dark red blood visible at the wound site. He collapsed almost immediately with violent nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and an inability to stand — a condition he compared to radiation poisoning — and could barely crawl for approximately thirty minutes. The surrounding atmosphere was anomalous: no ambient sound — "no sound of any animals, there was no sound of any wind" — and the ground felt "spongy like wet cement" while the air felt denser than normal.

Approximately an hour after the strike, Reed heard a low harmonic humming sound and followed it through the brush to find a black obelisk-shaped object hovering completely stationary in mid-air approximately 75 to 100 feet from the being — a six-sided marquis-diamond shape roughly nine and a half feet long, two to three feet high, and three to four feet wide, "anchored to the air" and cold to the touch "like dry ice." He found a silver metallic object approximately three feet from the being's body, partially buried under ferns — the Link bracelet — and threw it inside the thermal blanket with the being without examining it.

Reed shot approximately four rolls of 35mm film (both slides and prints) and ten to fifteen minutes of 8mm video on a Nikon camera, documenting the scene while still hyperventilating and vomiting — the video camera's electromagnetic disturbance near the obelisk forced him to back away before capturing a stable image. The film type Reed claimed to have used was reportedly not manufactured until 1997. He wrapped the incapacitated being in a thermal Mylar blanket, strapped it to his back, and carried it approximately an hour back to his vehicle — the being weighing only an estimated 40 to 50 pounds despite its size. He stopped at the North Bend ranger station but found it closed and unstaffed — "the doors were locked and there was nobody in there." The Jeep he described driving was reportedly not in his possession until 17 April 1997, more than eighteen months after the alleged incident.

Reed arrived home and tried to call his girlfriend (she was not home) and left a message for his friend Gary Withington; Gary called back within minutes and came immediately — but did not believe Reed until Reed took him to the garage, opened the freezer, and laid the body on the floor: "tell me that you don't see this." Gary helped place the body into a chest freezer in the garage, set to its lowest temperature. Reed spent hours pacing, vomiting, and drinking water. Late that night — approximately eight hours after bringing the body home — Reed returned to the garage, unwrapped the body, confirmed it was not his dog, carried it inside, and filmed it with his camcorder duct-taped to a ladder in the corner of the room (see Jonathan Reed home video of Freddie). Because his viewfinder was a one-inch black-and-white display, he did not notice the being's eyes blinking during filming — a detail later identified by third-party viewers. The body emitted a persistent pungent odor resembling rotting fruit that did not diminish even after days in the freezer.

Days 2–3

The following morning, Gary arrived and viewed the body face-to-face — he was "the first one to say... this isn't human." Reed's girlfriend also visited during these first days and saw the being. (The Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group investigation later established through Reed's long-term girlfriend "Barb" that Reed was allergic to animals and had never owned a dog.) Reed and Gary drove back to the forest with a trailer and chains intending to retrieve the obelisk, but the site was completely clean — "there was not one thing out of place in the entire area" and the obelisk was gone. Gary meanwhile began contacting MUFON and other agencies seeking help. Reed remained severely ill — "I was so sick I really couldn't do anything for about two days" — with nausea, headaches, dizziness, weakness, and dehydration persisting through five or six days after the encounter.

On the third day, Reed had arranged for a professor he knew personally from the University of Washington to come examine the body — he had set up a table and lights in the garage — but the meeting "was canceled abruptly." (This professor is not named in any recorded source; it is unclear whether this is the same person as Harry Cooper, who was called on day one, or a separate individual.) In LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey, Reed described being told to seek out a hospitalized senior medical professor at a Seattle hospital — referred to in the book only as "Professor X" — who confirmed he believed Reed and provided a file of names of trusted contacts who could help him, including Reed's later co-author Robert Raith. While putting the examination equipment away, Reed heard scratching and scraping sounds from inside the freezer — he thought it was rats or a compressor malfunction. He opened the lid to check the temperature and the being sat up out of the thermal blanket and screamed — "it like forced my chest back against the wall." Reed slammed the lid and ran to the house; he called Gary, who came over, and they opened the freezer together — the being screamed again. Reed recorded the screaming on audio (see audio recording).

Days 3–9

Over the following days, the being's behavior progressed through distinct phases. After the initial screaming, it stopped screaming when Reed opened the lid, began making "little squeaky chirpy sounds," and eventually began exiting the freezer on its own — sitting in front of the unit, rocking back and forth in a fluid motion, and making eye contact with Reed. It curled up inside the freezer to a diameter of approximately two feet despite standing four feet tall when upright and was "strong like an orangutan." When Reed attempted to give it water and food, it once threw the empty bowl at his head. Reed described intense telepathic bombardment whenever he was near the being — "I felt like I was being bombarded by information inside my head. I could only spend about ten or 15 minutes in the presence of this thing without having a massive headache" — communication in imagery and geometry rather than language.

During these days, approximately ten people — Gary, Reed's girlfriend, family members, and colleagues — visited the home and saw the being in person. Reed and Gary performed a closer examination in the garage, photographing every part of the being and collecting blood and tissue samples from the head wound — samples that were delivered to a university laboratory and a hospital laboratory, both of which subsequently reported the samples and the courier "were never found." Separately, an unnamed orthopedic surgeon whom Reed described as a colleague from the University of Washington Medical Center called to cancel a planned visit to view the body — "I can't do it. I can't come. I can't be involved" — Reed later attributed this to intimidation by agents who had tapped his phone.

Reed distributed evidence to different friends and locations as insurance, "knowing that people were watching us." Individuals who presented themselves as MUFON representatives met Reed in a public place and collected photographs and videotape, but gave a dead phone number and were subsequently determined never to have been MUFON members — Art Bell characterized them as "men in black or the equivalent." By 19 October — day five — word of the incident had reached San Diego, where a MUFON hypnotherapist reported hearing "that somebody had some alien photos and alien video." Within two days of the initial encounter, three individuals dressed in black arrived at Reed's home in a large black car — one told him: "Reed, we know what you have. We know what you found. And if you don't give it to us, your life is going to change." When Reed threatened to call the police, the man replied "the police are with us" — and a Seattle Police car was parked behind their vehicle. Reed later described these agents as belonging to a covert organization he called "The School."

Day 9

On approximately the ninth day — around 23 or 24 October 1996 — Reed drove home one evening and saw men and vans at his house, with hand trucks moving items out. He kept driving, went to his friend Dolly's house, and returned a few hours later to find the home destroyed: holes probed through walls and ceiling, boards pulled from the floor, the sofa shredded, electrical outlet covers and the telephone junction box removed, the toilet lifted off its mounts with water flowing freely, and two 800-pound fireproof filing cabinets gone entirely. In the garage, the entire door frame — not just the door — had been pried from the wall to extract the chest freezer. The freezer — and the being with it — was gone. On the garage floor, Reed found small frosty footprints crossing to the far wall and stopping "like it walked through the wall." LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey adds that the footprints "were melted onto the floor" and faded gradually until they vanished entirely. His landlord Larry, testifying on the 9 December 1999 Art Bell broadcast, confirmed seeing the damage firsthand and reported that neighbors had observed "very large vans pull up and go in and out of the house." In the days following, quarter-inch holes were found in the yard. Reed estimated that 75% of his evidence was gone by the end of the ninth day. The last time he saw Gary was the ninth day.

A couple of months later, Reed called his friend Dolly — who had been storing a portion of the distributed evidence — to retrieve the package; she said "fine, no problem," and three hours later he found her dead in her kitchen. Reed implied the death was suspicious; Jaime Maussan later stated she had in fact died of AIDS. The Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group investigation separately established that Gary was an early victim of HIV. The evidence package was gone.

Subsequent investigation

Reed steadying himself on a branch during an October 2009 return visit to the encounter site, filmed for the ODISEALINK documentary.

The Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group (later the Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore), directed by Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson and working with MUFON Washington State Director Kathleen Andersen, investigated the case and concluded by April 2001 that it was a fabricated hoax. Beyond the film-type and Jeep discrepancies noted above — neither of which Reed was ever directly confronted with in any recorded interview — the investigation found that Reed (legal name John Bradley Rutter) had no verifiable college degree, and that Rutter, Robert Raith (real name Robert Aria), and Harold Chacon were all working together at a West Seattle Chevron gas station mini-mart from 1997 onward, identified independently by both the store manager and Andersen. Reed's response to the degree claim was that all his educational records had been "expunged" by the same forces that ransacked his home; independent investigator Daniel McEvoy later interviewed a retired UCLA professor who produced a grade ledger with Reed's name and a 3.0 grade, confirmed attending his 1980 graduation, and stated: "They went to a hell of a lot of trouble to kill Jonathan's educational past."

Personal friend Bill Werner confirmed to investigators that Rutter "does not hike in the woods as he is allergic to everything that is found in a yard, let alone a forest." Reed's long-term girlfriend "Barb" separately stated that he was allergic to animals and had never owned a dog. A pro-Reed YouTube compilation countered with photographs showing Reed at a desk wearing a University of Washington Medical Center badge with a picture of Suzy on the wall and a December 1995 calendar visible in the frame. No recorded interview of Werner himself exists in the public record. Results were published in the Seattle Weekly in May 2001.

Jaime Maussan dispatched associate Daniel Muñoz to Seattle to collect soil samples from the encounter site; these were analyzed by Dr. José Gutiérrez, a Mexican nuclear physicist, who reportedly found elevated radioactivity. (Reed's 2013 account similarly noted persistent elevated radiation and compass disruption at the site.) Maussan later confronted Reed directly, identifying specific lies: Reed had claimed a friend was killed by police, which was demonstrated to be false (she died of AIDS); Reed could not prove the house ransacking as described; and he had made an unauthorized promise to demonstrate the Link bracelet on live Mexican television. Maussan's overall assessment was that Reed "was really a fraud and he deceived us," but that "certain things suggest part of the story could be real" — particularly the video evidence and the radioactivity measurements.

Attorney Daniel Sheehan — counsel to the Disclosure Project — described a case matching Reed's in a 2024 interview, though without naming him and with several details wrong (describing a "crashed craft" that "shot out a ray and froze his dog," neither of which matches Reed's testimony): "There was some one guy... he had this whole cockamamie story in the woods... he picked up a big branch and clubbed this little alien guy and put him in his freezer... It was just total lying." Sheehan recounted that one of his professional investigators "followed this guy around and finally caught him reporting to some friends of his how he was bullshitting everybody," and that he informed John Mack, who then "issued a statement discrediting the guy." No details about the investigator's identity or methodology, nor John Mack's alleged statement, have surfaced in the public record. Sheehan's Disclosure Project colleague Steven Greer has not publicly commented on the Reed case.

The television program Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files (Syfy, 2010) spent over 80 man-hours and $8,000 creating a replica alien body with professional Hollywood makeup and remote-controlled eye actuators; the episode concluded that the footage could be reproduced and that voice stress analysis indicated Reed was "extremely deceptive." A pro-Reed YouTube video argued the replica could not account for 360-degree video of the obelisk with no visible supports, the apparent red-eye reflex in photographs of the being's open eyes — "which takes real retinas to reflect the camera's flash" — and questioned why anyone "would give up a doctor's salary, collection of cars, girlfriend, dog, and life to get hospitalized, threatened, friends murdered, and have people ridicule you as a hoax for over 14 years."

In October 2009, Reed returned to the forest site with a camera crew filming for the ODISEALINK documentary series, identifying the encounter location within a 300-to-500-foot area and noting that storm damage had felled trees that had been standing in 1996: "This is exactly the amount of light there was. This is exactly the kind of day."

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