Donald Burleson, Special to the Daily Record — The year 1964 seems to have been a busy time for UFO activity. Not only did we have the Socorro, New Mexico, UFO landing in April of that year and the Holloman Air Force Base UFO landing the same month, but another memorable event, this one a reported alien encounter, on September 4, 1964, in Cisco Grove, a wooded region several miles east of Emigrant Gap in California’s Placer County.
On that afternoon and evening, a young man named Donald Shrum was out hunting in the Cisco Grove forest with his friends. They were using not rifles but bows and arrows. During the early evening the group tended to scatter apart in their search for wild game, and as night came on, Shrum found himself alone in the woods, with no clear idea where his friends were. He was apparently worried about the possibility of being attacked by wild animals, so he climbed a large tree, intending to take a little nap up there before deciding what to do. He probably figured that his friends out in the woods had one by one decided to go home.
Soon after his ascent into the tree, Shrum saw a strange white light that moved erratically among the treetops and stopped some fifty yards away. Thinking at first it was a hovering helicopter, he climbed down out of the tree. He quickly figured out that the object wasn’t a helicopter but rather seemed to be a much larger cigar-shaped craft emitting a smaller craft that came to rest on the ground. This was all it took to persuade Shrum to climb back up into his tree and try to observe whatever was going on.
Three beings soon approached the base of the tree. Two were human-shaped and roughly of normal height, while the third, incredibly enough, appeared to be a robot with glowing orange eyes and a kind of metal mouth that flapped open from time to time. While the humanoid beings shook the tree in an apparent effort to bring the observer down, the robot’s mouth discharged a mist-like cloud of gas or smoke that made Shrum momentarily pass out.
When he came to, the beings were still trying to dislodge him from the tree and, unwilling just to be passive about all this, he unlimbered his bow and arrow gear and shot an arrow at the robot, hitting it with a metallic clang. All these things went on for some time, with Shrum shooting more arrows at them and with the robot from time to time emitting more of that strange gas, before the invaders finally departed around dawn. Later it would be disclosed that one of Shrum’s friends had seen the hovering object too, from a distance.
Assuming these events were accurately reflected by the witness account, they paint a rather ponderous picture of how traumatic a close encounter with alien beings could be. If one thinks such an encounter might be fun, one could do well to reconsider it.
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