Fragments | Jonathan Reed: The Man Who Says He Brought an Alien Home — Ep. 07

Welcome To Fragments

I'm Robert Barber. Welcome to Fragments. Just me, a microphone, and an interesting story that I couldn't stop thinking about. Some of these are forgotten newspaper accounts, and some are just old legends. Some are bits of folklore that have survived for generations. They're not full documentaries, they're just stories that deserve another telling. So let's hear one.

A Hike Turns Unexplainable

How far would you go to prove you'd seen something impossible? Back in 1996, a man named Jonathan Reed says he went hiking in the Cascade Mountains in Washington with his dog Susie. Susie was a golden retriever, and from the way Reed told it, there wasn't anything unusual about the day. It was just the two of them out walking in the woods. Then Susie took off. Reed could hear her barking somewhere ahead of him, and at first it sounded like she'd probably just found a little animal or something. But then the barking changed. She sounded like she was in trouble. So Reed went after her, and when he caught up, he saw Susie struggling with something. At first he thought it was a child. It was small, maybe four or five feet tall, and looked enough like a person that I can understand why his brain went there first. But then he got a better look. The head was too large, the eyes were big and dark. The body was thin, and Reed said it looked like it was wearing some kind of dark, seamless clothing. Whatever it was, it wasn't a child. And Susie was right there with it. Reed said Susie attacked the creature. The creature's body was vibrating violently, apparently trying to shake her off. And then Reed said something happened to Susie that he could barely make sense of. Her body seemed to collapse inward, almost like it was imploding. Within seconds, he said, Susie was gone. All that was left was this whitish material on the ground, almost like ash or powder. And I know exactly where my head would be at this point. I have a yellow lab named Rosie, and I love that dog more than anything that I can explain. And if I watched something like that happen to her, I would lose my mind. I wouldn't care if it was a bear, a person, or something from another planet. I wouldn't be standing there trying to understand what I was looking at. I'd be going after it. Reed did too. He grabbed a heavy tree branch off the ground, ran at the creature, and swung. He hit it in the head hard. Reed said it let out this horrible scream, unlike anything he'd ever heard before, and then it dropped to the ground. So think about what's happened to this guy in the space of maybe a few minutes. He's walking through the woods with his dog. She runs ahead, he follows her, and now he says he's just watched her body collapse into this whitish residue. There's some kind of humanoid creature lying on the ground in front of him, and he's standing there holding the branch he just hit it

The Hovering Black Object

with. And somehow, Reed didn't leave. He stayed there. And while he was still trying to process all of this, he noticed something else nearby. A large black object. He described it as kind of like an obelisk or maybe a long black diamond standing on one end. Reed estimated it was about nine feet long, completely black, with no windows, doors, or seams that he could see. But it wasn't actually sitting on the ground. It was hovering a few feet above it and making this low, steady sound. Not really like an engine. Reed described it more like a harmonic tone. And Reed believed this thing was connected to the creature. Whatever it was in his version of the story, these weren't two unrelated things he happened to find in the woods. He eventually got close enough to touch it. He said the surface was extremely cold, almost like polished stone, but touching it somehow left his hand feeling burned. At one point he leaned against it, and Reed said the tone changed. So now he's got this thing lying unconscious or dead on the ground, in this huge black object hovering nearby, making this strange sound. And Reed had a camera with him, so he started taking pictures. He photographed the creature lying there. He got closer and took pictures of its face and its eyes. Then he photographed the black object. He also had a video camera and he filmed what he was seeing. And that matters because this isn't one of those stories where someone says, I saw the strangest thing 20 years ago, but unfortunately, I didn't have a camera. Reed says he did. There are photographs and there is video. And these weren't pictures of some little dot in the sky. The photograph showed the creature up close, lying on the ground. You could see its head, its face, those huge dark eyes. Reed even photographed the eye at close range. The video showed the creature too, and Reed would claim there were signs of movement, that this wasn't just a body lying there. Whether they show what Reed says they show is a completely different question. We'll get there, but they exist. And

Photos, Video, And A Wild Choice

while Reed was doing all this, he said he was getting really sick, dizzy, nauseated, having trouble thinking clearly. Eventually he knew he needed to get out of there. So we looked at this creature lying on the ground, the thing he believed had just killed his dog, the thing he had just hit in the head with a tree branch, and made a decision I still can't quite wrap my head around. He decided to take it with him. He had one of those thermal blankets with him, you know, the shiny foil kind, and Reed said he wrapped the creature in it. So just picture what he's telling us here. He's wrapping this four-foot-something humanoid creature in a space blanket, picking it up and carrying it out of the woods. Then he put it in his vehicle and drove home with it. I mean, taking pictures? Sure. Video? Absolutely. I'd probably want proof too. But putting it in your vehicle? That's where Jonathan Reed and I apparently make very different life choices. Because he took this thing home. And then he had to figure out what to do with it. So he did what any rational person in this situation would do. He put it in the freezer. Seriously. He had a large freezer in his garage, and that's where he put the creature. Now, Reed thought it was dead. It hadn't moved after he hit it. It didn't move while he photographed it or when he wrapped it up and carried it out of the woods. So as far as he knew, he'd brought home a body. So he put it in the freezer and left it there. Then, about three and a half days later, Reed said the thing he thought he'd killed began showing signs of life. And Reed didn't get rid of it. He would later say he tried to communicate with it, recorded some of what was happening, and took more photographs. Later, he also said there'd been a small device connected somehow to the encounter. It had strange symbols on it and these needle-like projections. And Reed and the people who became involved with the case came to believe it had something to do with the black object he'd seen in the woods. So we've gone from a guy walking his golden retriever to an apparently living humanoid creature in his garage freezer.

The Freezer And The Awakening

And almost nobody knew about it. For roughly two years, this was basically Reed's story and the story of the small group of people around him. Then in 1998, a man named Robert Wraith got involved. And Wraith contacted Art Bell. If you don't know who Art Bell was, he hosted Coast to Coast AM, this huge late-night radio show that became a home for exactly this kind of thing. UFOs, ghosts, strange creatures, conspiracies, near-death experiences. If somebody had an incredible story that didn't really fit anywhere else, there was a good chance they wanted to tell it to Art Bell. And people listened. A lot of people. So in the late 1990s, if you were trying to get the world to pay attention to a guy who said he had photographs of an alien he brought home from the woods, getting that story on Art Bell's show was a pretty big deal. In November of 1998, Wraith went on the program and started talking about Reed's case. And he had pictures. Pictures of the creature and the black object. Then Reed himself went on the air. And suddenly a lot more people knew about Jonathan Reed. He told them about Susie, the creature, hitting it with a branch, the black object, the photographs, taking the body home, the freezer, and the thing waking up. And Reed kept coming back. By December, he was on with Bell again, this time for more than two hours. He went into much more detail about what he had said had happened after he brought the creature home. He even played Bell what he claimed was recording connected to it. Now, obviously, playing a strange sound on the radio doesn't tell you what made it. But Reed kept bringing things forward. Pictures, video, recordings, later, physical objects. There always seemed to be something else that could supposedly move this beyond just you have to believe me. And that continued. When Reed returned to Bell's program in December of 1999, the photographs came up again. This time, Bell scanned what were presented as the original 35 millimeter negatives while the program was underway. That doesn't mean Art Bell authenticated an alien or that the photographs couldn't have been staged. It just means Reed and the people around him were presenting what they said were the original negatives, not just copies of some pictures. But Reed was also saying that by this point, people were trying to stop him from telling the story. He said his home had been ransacked and evidence had disappeared. He talked about people connected to the case being threatened. He made claims about people disappearing or dying under circumstances he found suspicious. And over time, Reed added more to the story. There

Art Bell Fame And A Growing File

were claims about tissue samples and blood samples, people who supposedly examined material from the creature, strange devices, and people following Reed and trying to silence him. And the more attention Reed got, the more people started checking. Not just the pictures or the creature, they started checking him. Because this wasn't just Jonathan Reed. He was presenting himself as Dr. Jonathan Reed. He claimed an extensive academic background and said he'd worked professionally in developmental psychology and psychiatry. So people tried to verify it. And they started finding problems. Investigators contact schools Reed said he had attended. They looked for records of the degrees he said he'd earned and tried to verify his professional history. According to those investigators, they couldn't find what they were looking for. And some of the problems they raised were pretty specific. One investigation said UCLA could find no record of the doctorate attributed to Reed. Another involved a period Reed reportedly said he had spent working with Dr. Frank Oski at Johns Hopkins in 1979. According to the people investigating him, OSCE didn't arrive at Johns Hopkins until years later. There were also questions about professional organizations Reed was said to belong to and whether some of them even existed under the names being given. So people weren't just asking whether the pictures were real anymore. They were asking whether Reed was who he said he was. One of the loudest groups challenging him was a site called UFO Watchdog. And despite the name, this wasn't a site trying to prove UFOs weren't real. UFO Watchdog investigated people and claims inside the UFO community, especially when they thought something didn't add up. And they thought a lot didn't add up with Jonathan Reed. In fact, they said Jonathan Reed wasn't even his real name. According to UFO Watchdog, they'd identified him as a Seattle area man named John Bradley Rudder. Now, using another name by itself doesn't prove anything. There are plenty of reasons that someone might not want their real name attached to a story like this. But Reed wasn't just giving people a name. He was presenting himself as Dr. Jonathan Reed and giving them an academic and professional history to go with it. So if the identity itself wasn't real, suddenly people had another explanation for why they couldn't find the degrees in professional records they were looking for. And that's a pretty big problem. They said they couldn't verify the doctorate or the academic history Reed had described, and they questioned his professional background. So now, after everything else, there was another question. Who's Jonathan Reed? People also started going after the evidence, too. The photographs and video were questioned. People argued that the creature could have been fabricated. Parts of Reed's timeline was challenged, and people he said had examined evidence from the encounter came under scrutiny too. Years later, a television program even tried recreating some of Reed's imagery using props and practical effects. They were able to make something they thought looked similar, but that doesn't prove Reed did the same thing. But if somebody can make something that looks reasonably close to your evidence without an alien being involved, it does give people another reason to question it. And Reed's critics weren't saying maybe he was confused about a few things. They believed he'd made it all up. But Reed never said, okay, you got me. He said the investigators were wrong. And as far as he was concerned, the fact that people couldn't find his records didn't disprove his story. It supported it. Reed said those records had been erased. Remember, he was already saying people were trying to stop him from going public. He said his home had been entered, evidence had disappeared, and people around him had been intimidated. So when investigators said they couldn't find the academic and professional history he was talking about, Reed's answer was basically, of course you can't. Someone removed it. And you can probably see the problem. If you already think Reed made the whole thing up, saying somebody erased the records probably isn't going to convince you. But if you believe people were following him, taking evidence and trying to silence him, then missing records wouldn't seem all that strange. And people who supported Reed pushed back against some of what his critics were saying. They claimed they found people who remembered him, former classmates, professors, relatives, and others who said they could back up at least pieces of the history his critics said didn't exist. Some of Reed's supporters also claimed they had found evidence connecting him to the educational and professional history he described. They said the case against him had been exaggerated or was incomplete. The problem is a lot of those claims came from people who were already defending Reed, and some of them are pretty hard to independently verify. So both sides ended up saying the other one wasn't telling the whole story. And

Credentials Challenged And The Final Question

Reed never really went away. Years passed and he continued to say the encounter happened. In 2013, 17 years after the date he gave for the encounter, he went back on with Art Bell and told the story again. He never came forward and said the creature was a prop or the pictures were staged. He kept saying he went into those woods with Susie in 1996, encountered something he couldn't explain, lost his dog, hit the thing with a tree branch, photographed it, found this huge black object hovering nearby, and then took the creature home and put it in his freezer. His critics kept saying his background didn't check out. Jonathan Reed wasn't even Jonathan Reed, and the photographs, video, credentials, and people around the case couldn't be trusted. To them, it was an elaborate hoax. Reed said the problems they found were actually evidence of what happened to him after he told people about the encounter. So what do you do with that? Did Jonathan Reed really walk into the Washington Woods in 1996 and come home with something that wasn't supposed to exist? Or did he create one of the strangest and most elaborate UFO stories of the 1990s? I don't know. If you're listening on Spotify, leave me a comment because I really want to know where people land on this one. Do you believe Reed? Do you think something happened but the story became more elaborate over time? Or do you think none of it happened at all?