Obelisk (Jonathan Reed)

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Obelisk (Jonathan Reed)

File:Reed forest obelisk close.pngClose-up photograph of the obelisk taken by Reed at the encounter site, showing its marquis diamond shape levitating above the forest floor.

The obelisk is, according to contactee Jonathan Reed and his co-author Robert Raith, an alleged piece of non-human technology — a black, marquise-diamond–shaped exotic device said to be a communication device linking the non-human intelligent being Reed called "Freddie" to some external source — that Reed reported finding hovering roughly 150–250 ft from the site of the forest encounter of 15 October 1996, near Snoqualmie Pass, Washington. Reed stated it emitted a low-frequency hum that caused disorientation and nausea in both himself and Raith. Recovered at the same scene as the Link bracelet — a companion artifact described as the controller linking Freddie to the obelisk — it is the central piece of alleged recovered hardware in the case and is documented in Reed and Raith's book LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey (2000); were it genuine, it would amount to recovered exotic technology.

No independent party is documented to have examined the obelisk. Reed reported that he could not move it — it "would not budge" a fraction of an inch — and that he left it hovering in the forest when he departed, never witnessing it leave; the recovered evidence, he said, was taken when his home was broken into after the ninth day of the ordeal. Investigators who treat the encounter as fabricated — among them the Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group, which regarded the wider case as a hoax[citation needed] — take this inaccessibility as the case's central weakness, the surviving evidence amounting to Reed's own photographs and self-published account. Against that reading, the photographic record was presented as authentic, the original negatives reported on examination to be unaltered.

Form and properties

Robert Raith tracked the hum to its source, describing a directional low-frequency sound that disoriented him whenever he moved toward it, before reaching the object in the brush. Reed described the surface as cold "like dry ice" — when he fell against it, the cold tore the skin from the palm of his hand — and hard "like granite, like polished marble." The outer surface bore four engraved symbols; Raith noted that one closely resembled the shape of the object itself, and that no earthly meaning had been identified for any of them. The electromagnetic disturbance the object generated caused Reed's camera to malfunction at close range, so that he had to move far enough away before it would function reliably. Reed filmed and photographed the obelisk, shooting approximately three rolls of 35mm film together with some ten to fifteen minutes of videotape (see Forest obelisk video and Photographs of the obelisk). He reported that contact with the obelisk affected his hand for years afterward, and that proximity to it induced a "strange invasion of thoughts" he also associated with the entity's apparent telepathic communication.

Link bracelet

Main article:

Link bracelet

The Link bracelet was recovered at the same scene and is described in LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey as a bio-electric receiver/transmitter and a possible controller or link between the entity and the obelisk — a composite cuff measuring 4 inches by 3½ inches and 170.30 grams, composed of silicon-polymer, beryllium-aluminum, manganese, copper, zinc, bismuth, gold, and unrecognized elements, with three gold needles penetrating through the suit into the forearm nerves; when placed against the entity's suit it molecularly shifted to conform and matched the suit's color. An earlier broadcast described it as "a contact device with the obelisk" bearing three symbols believed to serve as control-function keys.

Photographs and authenticity

Main article:

Photographs of the obelisk

Art Bell received the original 35mm negatives and reported on-air that a cursory examination had found nothing tampered with and that they appeared genuine. On a later broadcast Bell read aloud a letter sent with the negatives, written on Reed's behalf, stating that the obelisk film comprised only ordinary, unaltered 35mm color negatives and that a previous analysis by Eastman Kodak in New York had shown the images were "not processed, not manufactured, nor manipulated in any kind of shadow box illusion or trick." Some of the original obelisk photographs were reportedly stolen or confiscated along with other evidence from Reed's home. Because the negatives were supplied by Reed himself and the object could never be re-photographed by another party, those who consider the case fabricated hold that this authentication does not establish that anything stood in the forest; no independent examination of the obelisk itself has been documented.

See also

References

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