The story of Jonathan Reed and the Alien Attacker is the premise for the second investigation.  This story also takes place in Washington where Reed was supposedly walking with his dog, Suzy.  The dog ended up having its jaws ripped apart and turned to ash by an alien.  Reed beat the creature with a stick, took footage, took the creature home, examined it on camera, and then had it stolen from him by agents in vans.

While Bill, Austin, and Chi-Lan are lost in Northern Washington, Ben, Larry, and Jael head to Snoqualmie Pass, WA, to tackle the case of the Alien Attacker.

The Witness Interview starts near the scene of the alleged incident.  Reed leads the FoF team down the forest path to where he says the incident took place and retells the event for them.

He tells how he saw his dog entangled with the creature and screaming.  He gives a rather graphic description of the dog being ripped in half.  Blood and tissue everywhere, but then he says the remains were nothing but white ash.  Some portion of the tale seems to be absent.

At this point Reed just wanted to kill the creature and he hit it as hard as he could with a branch.  After which, behind some trees he could see a black hovering shape three feet off the ground.

Reed describes circling the body with the camera and being sick.  Larry asks when he decided to take the creature with him and Reed replies that he kept thinking this couldn’t be true or happening so he picked it up and drove back home and put it on his floor and photographed it.  It is during that footage that an eyelid opens which is considered to be strong evidence that the footage is real.  Supposedly strong evidence.  By those who already are convinced.

Anyway, Reed departs and the FoF crew start to try to recreate the video.  This just annoys the heck out of me.  Recreating something doesn’t mean squat.  They should be looking for telltale signs in the video that the creature is a dummy…things like that rather than just “Oh, we can do this, too, therefore it’s fake.”

All throughout there is a tone of disbelief on the part of FoF. Is this because they’ve actually looked into some of this already and, as Learjet mentioned, not starting with a null hypothesis?  I believe that is the case, even from the beginning in the Situation Room.  While it is often difficult not to have a preconceived notion about some of these things, if you are to do the investigation properly, you should bury those feelings deep down inside you.  Blathering about them to the camera crew even before you start the tests isn’t the best thing to do if you are trying to maintain an air of objectivity.

Nevertheless, they continue going about their plan to recreate the video.  They first build an obelisk that they will try to make appear to hover in the clearing.  Jael mentions that the story sounds genuine and Ben says that he’s been telling it for 14 years.  Jael then concludes that he’s had enough time to rehearse his script if that’s the case.

We get a building-the-obelisk montage and they are ready.  Interestingly, they haul the obelisk out of the back of a truck when all their drilling and such seemed to take place outside.  Was this a pre-fab they had ready to go?

Larry then hauls out the alien creature that he says he made.  Larry hauls a shrink-wrapped form from the very back of the van and Jael makes some odd facial gestures in reaction so you know it has to be good.  Good enough for a commercial, in fact.

After the commercial, Larry removes the shrink-wrap from the head and we see a pretty nifty-looking alien face.  They haul the alien into the forest and lay it where it was in the original video.  Next they set up the obelisk and make it hover by coating a pipe with foliage and securing the pipe into the ground.  With the obelisk attached to the pipe, and the pipe hidden, it does appear to hover.

Ben takes the camera and next tries to replicate the video by staggering around the forest making weird sounds.  This was painful to watch.  Clarification…this was even more painful to watch.  The comparison of this to the original video is done and looks very similar, even the hovering obelisk.  This shows that they could recreate the original video, but so what?

Not satisfied, they want to recreate the interior footage with the eyelid scene.  Larry tells us that “One of the prime theories of Reed’s followers are that the eyes are opening in his video and this is proof to them that it is, in fact, a real alien.”  I know what to get these guys for Christmas now.  A Dictionary.  So they can look up the meaning of the word “Theory”

To recreate the eye-blinking, Larry hooks up some servos to the dummy’s eyes so that he can open the eyes by remote control.  In the interest of accuracy, Ben dons surgical gloves so as to recreate the footage exactly and begins to film the impromptu “autopsy” of the alien.  Partway through, the eyelids are triggered and the alien blinks.

And again the footage is pretty similar to that of the original.  And again, so what?

Jael’s concern is the time, capital, and skill to pull off something this elaborate.  Ben agrees that it is elaborate, but that the financial gain would be tremendous.

So, now Ben arranges to meet Reed at the Summit Lodge Hotel for a little interrogation.  The interview will be recorded and afterward “Layered-voice analysis” will be applied to his statements.  I think first they should do an investigation on the software to see how accurate IT is.  Is it admissible as evidence?

Ben asks for a frank and honest discussion and begins.  One interesting thing Reed says is “This is just my truth”.  Probably an honest statement!  Ben says that nobody has been able to verify his credentials and Reed launches into a “if we kill the messenger” statement.  Ben starts playing bad cop “There are so many things about this that just don’t add up.”  Unfortunately he doesn’t elaborate on any of those things.  So far all we have from FoF is that they could recreate the footage, so what else has Ben found that has gotten him riled up?  We aren’t told.  Oh we can guess and there are sites rife with information, but why doesn’t Ben give any details?

He concludes by asking Reed if he’s going to stick to his story and Reed, of course, says that he is.  Why wouldn’t he.  And can you imagine if he changed his mind and said it was a hoax?  What a way to go, admitting it all to FoF?  Oh the shame of that!

We jump back to the Situation Room where it is STILL 11:34am.  This place must be in a time warp of some kind!

We get the usual recap of what they did, and they agree on how good the footage is.  Ben explains that he kept having more and more questions (and again doesn’t elaborate) and gets into the Layered-voice results.  The word False pops up several times on Reed’s statements.  Ben finishes with “Jonathan Reed is not who he says he is, and this did not happen to him.”

Okay, I’m not going to disagree with the conclusion; it’s the same conclusion many others have come to.  I am, however, going to disagree with the path they took to arrive at that conclusion.  As I’ve said repeatedly, replicating a video doesn’t “debunk” it.  I do have to say that I’m quite pleased that FoF didn’t turn this into a night time UFO/Alien hunt.  I suspect that the Reed case was a strawman case to try to show that they can be hard-hitting and after the “truth”.

Further discussion of the episode is here.