LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey

LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey is a 2000 self-published book by Jonathan Reed (a pseudonym) and his co-author Robert Raith, presenting Reed's first-person account of the alleged 15 October 1996 encounter with a non-human intelligent being in a forested area near Snoqualmie Pass, Washington, and the events that followed. Written from the perspective of Raith as investigative narrator and witness, the book follows Reed keeping the being he named "Freddie" in a home freezer, attempting to communicate with it, and trying to go public before being subjected to harassment by agents of a covert organization he called "The School." Reed said the book drew on some 1,500 pages of documentation accumulated in the aftermath of the incident. Within the case it is the central written source, drawing the encounter, the nine days the being spent in the freezer, and Reed's later claims into a single narrative.[citation needed]

Skeptical investigators have concluded that the events the book recounts were fabricated, faulting it on specific physical and biographical grounds. The Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group reported in 2001 that "Reed" — legal name John Bradley Rutter — Raith, whose real name it gave as Robert "Bobby" Aria, and fellow promoter Harold Chacon had worked together at a West Seattle gas station, while Royce Myers III's UFO Watchdog found that the film stock and the vehicle Reed said he used in October 1996 both postdated the encounter. Promoters of the case — most prominently Jaime Maussan in Latin America, where the book was widely circulated — continued to defend its photographs, video, and physical traces.

Background

The book grew out of Raith's contact with broadcaster Art Bell: a fax reading "Wanna take a ride?" that the Postscript credits as the message that "kicked this whole thing off" and that led to Raith's first appearance on Coast to Coast AM on 6 November 1998. Reed and Raith then called in together on 11 and 18 November 1998 and again on 9 December 1999 alongside Larry Arthur and Harold Chacon, publicizing the case in the years before the book appeared. In a December 1998 appearance Reed indicated that the book's final chapter would set out direct claims of extraterrestrial involvement in Earth affairs, ranging across Mars, the Moon, Egypt, the Middle East, weather control, the AIDS virus, Earth evolution, DNA, star communications, time shifting, dimensional travel, and MJ-12. The manuscript was completed in 1999.

Synopsis

Main article:

Jonathan Reed forest incident

The book is structured as an extended interview-narrative: Raith records Reed's description of nine days from 15 October 1996 interspersed with their dialogue, then transitions in the Epilogue to a 1999 question-and-answer session covering the years Reed reportedly spent living underground within a network he called "The Alliance." The 174 pages are divided into eleven numbered chapters, an Epilogue, a Postscript, and a photo gallery:

The Alliance and held artifacts

The book's Epilogue describes "The Alliance," a covert international network Reed claimed had sheltered him after the incident and held a collection of extraterrestrial artifacts ranging in scale from palm-sized objects to a sixty-foot power-plant-like structure. The large device, allegedly discovered in 1980 in a mine shaft approximately two miles below the surface in northern Idaho, was described as constructed of glass-like ceramic composite with almost no weight and bore hieroglyphic-like symbols on its surface; when energised, it created a focused magnetic anomaly extending ten miles in each direction, and a screen within it displayed a three-dimensional star map with coordinates linking to solar systems in the vicinity of the Orion Nebula, Upsilon Andromedae, and the Pleiades — coordinates sharing symbols with those found on the Link bracelet.

Publication history

Reed and Raith report in the Postscript that four publishers signed and then cancelled contracts, each reportedly visited by unidentified men asking about Reed — a campaign of intimidation that, in at least one case, the authors say left a publisher "physically burned out of their business." Unable to secure commercial publication, Reed and Raith self-published through Spectrum Infinity Press; the first printing appeared in January 2000. The book was offered during Reed's 2000 radio appearances at US$19.95 plus shipping and handling, with ordering details — a telephone number and the Seattle post-office box — read out on air. A later reprint's contact page listed an order price of US$25.00 in the USA or $34.00 in Canada, including shipping and handling, payable by mail to the Spectrum Infinity Press post-office box. An e-book edition was later made available (Amazon Kindle ASIN B00GBHR3GA). A 1.5-million-dollar offer from an anonymous Asian collector to purchase all video rights was declined by Reed, who feared the footage would be permanently shelved.

Promotion and adaptations

On the 16 March 2001 Coast to Coast AM broadcast, the book's ordering information was read on air during a multi-hour interview. The case was further internationally disseminated through the ODISEALINK WORLDWIDE Global Witness Series, produced in collaboration with Jaime Maussan, Harold Chacon, and Daniel McEvoy. The book's narrative was adapted into the ODISEALINK documentary series: LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey (9 May 2009) and ODISEALINK II: Requiem — The Chronicles of Jonathan Reed (15 October 2009, the thirteenth anniversary of the encounter). Reed's 26 June 2001 appearance on the Mexican television programme Otro Rollo was reportedly replayed fourteen times across twenty-one countries. Reed and Raith also presented the case at the International UFO Congress in September 2000 and again in 2002.

Reception

In parts of the UFO research community, and especially in Latin America, where Jaime Maussan promoted it heavily, the book was received as compelling firsthand testimony.[citation needed] Art Bell, who had hosted the authors' early interviews, publicly described Reed's photographs and video as "some of the most amazing alien-extraterrestrial photos that He'd ever seen."

Skeptical investigators reached the opposite conclusion. The Seattle UFO-Paranormal Group (Seattle Chat Club; later the Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore) investigated the case in 2001 and concluded it was a fabricated hoax, reporting that Reed (legal name John Bradley Rutter), Raith (real name Robert "Bobby" Aria), and Harold Chacon had all worked together at a West Seattle Chevron gas-station mini-mart from 1997 onward, and that Chacon — presented on air as the microbiologist who had performed DNA analysis on the being — held no such credentials. The group's findings were carried in a May 2001 Seattle Weekly article by Leah Kohlenberg. In a parallel investigation, Royce Myers III's UFO Watchdog reported that the film stock Reed said he used in October 1996 was not manufactured until 1997 and that the Jeep he claimed to have driven to carry the body was not in Rutter's possession until 17 April 1997. Reed attributed such discrepancies to the same suppression he said the book documents, maintaining that his records and possessions had been tampered with after he went public.[citation needed]

The television programme Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files (Syfy, 2010) concluded that the photographic and video evidence cited by the book could be reproduced with practical effects. Defenders of the book countered that a successful reproduction did not establish how the original footage had been made, and that Reed — who said he had walked away from a medical career and turned down a large sum for the footage — had no evident motive to invent the events.[citation needed] Investigative coverage of the case continued in Royce Myers III's multi-part "Reed Files" series on UFO Watchdog.

See also

• Jonathan Reed home video of Freddie
• Rodger Haggitt
• Michael Wessels
• Daniel McEvoy
• Shooting of Jonathan Reed

References

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