By morning, Donald Shrum said, he was hanging from his belt in a pine tree above a rocky California ridge. His bow was still with him. Much of the clothing he had worn the evening before had been burned. Whatever he believed had come up the slope during the night was gone.
Shrum had not gone to the mountains looking for anything mysterious. He and two companions were bow hunting near Cisco Grove, in the Sierra Nevada, when they became separated at dusk. He could not find his way back to camp and chose to wait for daylight in a tree. The extraordinary account he later gave begins with a distant white light that he mistook for a possible rescue helicopter. It ends with figures beneath the branches, arrows loosed into the dark and periods he said he could not remember.
The earliest paper trail is a September 9, 1964 letter forwarding his report to Mather Air Force Base. A military interview summary followed that month. The much fuller story comes from a taped civilian interview in 1965 and a 1968 investigation report. Those sources do not have the same distance from the night. Reading them in order is essential to understanding what Cisco Grove can establish.
A light below the ridge
The hunters had made camp near the Loch Leven lakes, south of the old Highway 40 route. According to the 1968 NICAP reconstruction, Shrum found himself on a ridge that ended in a steep drop. Going around it took him farther from his companions. When darkness closed in, he climbed a pine for the night.
Some time later, he reported seeing a white light moving near a ridge to the north. In his later account it bobbed and changed direction. He initially thought of a flashlight, then a helicopter from a ranger station. He climbed down, lit three small signal fires on rocks below the tree and waved his arms. The light moved closer and stopped. What unnerved him, he said, was the absence of a helicopter’s sound. He put his bow into the tree and climbed back after it.
The Air Force summary, based on a September 21 taped interview, also records his attempt to signal a presumed helicopter and his retreat into the branches. It describes several silvery aerial forms. The later NICAP interview gives a more particular visual sequence: a bright light, three shimmering rectangular areas, then a flash and a dark shape dropping toward the slope. Shrum said that afterward he could see a blinking light and part of a domed form near the ground. He could not see the whole object.
That difference in detail does not mean the accounts describe separate events. It does mean the detailed geometry and motion are mainly recoverable from the interview made months later. The first written referral, made within days, establishes that Shrum had already told an unusual story involving lights and a difficult night outdoors. It is a less complete record of what he said he saw.
Shapes among the manzanita
From the tree, Shrum said, he heard movement in the brush below. The 1965 interview, reproduced in NICAP’s case packet, describes two humanlike shapes in pale, silvery clothing. He could make out dark face areas and large, dark eyes but few facial features. They approached the base of the tree and looked up.
He also heard a low, repeated call. Shrum likened it to an owl and thought the figures and a distant light seemed to respond to it. He acknowledged another possibility in the interview: there might have been owls elsewhere in the woods, and he might have connected separate sounds. That admission is easy to lose in versions that present the noise as confirmed communication. It is one of the places where the witness himself marked the boundary between hearing something and deciding what it meant.
Then, he said, a third figure arrived. He described it as stiffer in its movements, with bright reddish eyes and a metallic appearance. He called it a “robot” because he had no better term for what he thought he saw. In the later narrative, it moved among the embers of one signal fire, approached the tree and emitted a pale vapor. Shrum reported gasping, briefly losing consciousness and waking sick across his bow.
No companion watched this sequence. The two other hunters were elsewhere. Their absence matters particularly here: the shapes, the vapor and its alleged effect are all part of Shrum’s account, rather than independent observations of a machine or occupants. The Air Force interviewer thought Shrum appeared stable and convinced that his experience had occurred, but that was an assessment of the man telling the story, not a measurement of the cause.
Fire, arrows and the hours before dawn
Shrum said he found that flames made the figures back away. He lit matches, then his hat, clothing and paper from his pockets, dropping the burning pieces beneath the tree. The NICAP account says the approach resumed as each blaze faded. Eventually he was left in jeans and a T-shirt, with little more to burn.
He reported firing three arrows toward the stiff, bright-eyed figure. He said each impact produced a flash and pushed it back slightly. The account becomes less certain at exactly the point where a physical test would have helped. An arrowhead was later handed to the Air Force; no contemporaneous photograph shows what it struck. In a 1968 Air Force letter preserved in the case packet, an official said the service had received a tip, not a complete arrow, and had not subjected it to laboratory analysis.
Shrum climbed higher and secured himself with his belt. He said the pale figures tried to reach the lower branches, and that he shook the tree and threw down sticks and small objects to deter them. He reported further intervals of vapor and blackout. In the 1968 narrative, a second stiff figure eventually appeared. Near dawn, he described flashes between the two, a thicker cloud and another loss of consciousness. When he woke, light was coming into the sky and he could see none of the figures.
The story has the rhythm of a siege, but that rhythm comes from Shrum’s account of repeated approaches and interruptions in awareness. The claim of vapor causing unconsciousness cannot be checked with a medical test taken that night. The belt, bow and burned clothing describe what he said was left at dawn. They do not, on their own, identify anything that had been below the tree.
What the others could tell
Shrum made his way back to camp and told his friends what had happened. One companion, identified as Vincent A. in the surviving redacted material, later wrote to NICAP that he found Shrum heading toward camp in thin clothing, weak and exhausted. Vincent also said he had seen a light while making his own way through the canyon. His letter is dated September 20, 1968, four years after the hunting trip.
That letter provides a separate account of Shrum’s condition the next morning and a report of a light. It does not describe figures, an aerial vehicle close to the tree, or an attack. Nor is it a statement written that weekend. The distinction matters because many later summaries compress the two men’s experiences into a single multiple-witness encounter. The surviving accounts give Vincent a narrower role.
Shrum told his family, and a Sacramento City College astronomy instructor, Victor W. Killick, passed the report to the Air Force in the September 9 letter. Air Force officers interviewed Shrum later that month. His wife wrote to the civilian National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in 1965; investigator Paul Cerny then recorded the longer interview on which much of the familiar narrative rests. The case packet’s introduction is candid that its 1968 account compiles that recording with subsequent contacts, rather than transcribing a statement made the morning after the event.
What the record establishes
The records show that Shrum reported an unusual and frightening experience within days of the trip. They show an Air Force inquiry, a civilian follow-up, an arrow tip supplied for examination, and a companion’s later statement about finding him exhausted and seeing a light. There is no surviving image of the reported figures or craft, no independent witness to what Shrum said happened beneath the tree, and no tested material that identifies an extraordinary device.
The arrows are a useful test of the story’s evidentiary limits. The Air Force said it did not analyze the tip it held. NICAP later submitted other arrowheads to a chemical company; its reply found no material to analyze beyond the steel of the tips. A damaged tip may be consistent with striking something hard, but without a documented target and a distinctive residue it cannot tell us what was struck.
The account also changed in small but relevant ways as it passed through interviews. The first written referral places the belt around a branch before the reported light appeared; the later NICAP narrative has Shrum tying himself higher in the tree after firing his arrows. The Air Force summary refers both to “some arrows” and, in its closing inventory, to the “only arrow” fired. The fuller civilian account says three. These differences do not prove the experience was invented. They do limit the precision with which its sequence can be reconstructed.
Project Blue Book’s record card classified the case as “Other,” attributing the apparent beings to owls or other ordinary woodland creatures combined with imagination or psychological factors. A subsequent Air Force letter specified “Other (Psychological).” The card gives a proposed reading of the account; it does not document an identified owl, a clinical finding, or a reconstruction that reproduces the whole night. Its classification should be reported as the Air Force’s assessment, with that limitation intact.
Even the date needs care. The Air Force summary says the party went hunting on Friday, September 4, while one form labels the encounter September 5. An earlier letter calls the night “Friday” but gives an inconsistent numeral; later NICAP correspondence briefly entertained September 11–12. The September 9 referral rules out a later September 11–12 encounter. The best-supported date is the night of September 4–5, with a clerical and memory trail that explains the alternatives.
The Bigger Picture
Cisco Grove is a reminder that abundant paperwork can still trace back to a very small number of observations. The Air Force summary, the NICAP transcript, later books and modern retellings all preserve versions of Shrum’s experience. They are not separate witnesses to the tree, the figures or the flashes. The companion’s letter is independent in a meaningful but limited way: he saw Shrum afterward and reported a light of his own.
The University of Colorado UFO Project’s discussion of field methods describes why older cases become difficult to settle even when investigators work hard: useful physical evidence fades, and later inquiry cannot recreate the moment of observation. NASA’s modern UAP study makes the related point that reliable identification needs good timing, context and calibrated observations. Cisco Grove had a prompt referral, but its central events occurred without an instrument record or another observer at the tree.
The reported night remains vivid because Shrum described an ordinary effort to stay safe that turned, in his telling, into hours of fear. The file preserves that account and a real dispute about how to interpret it. A dated independent observation of the same figures, or a securely collected material trace linked to them, would move the case beyond that dispute. The surviving evidence does not supply either one.
