Barely Disputed

The Cisco Grove Bow-and-Arrow Encounter

Near Cisco Grove, Loch Leven Lakes area, Tahoe National Forest, Placer County, California · 4 September 1964 · Close encounter / occupant case · United States

The scanned Project Blue Book case file for the 4 September 1964 Cisco Grove encounter, including the PRIORITY teletype narrative and the Project 10073 record card whose official conclusion reads "Other (PSYCHOLOGICAL)." This is the primary Air Force document, not an artist's recreation. (United States Air Force, Project Blue Book; scanned and hosted by NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena))

In 4 September 1964, near Near Cisco Grove, Loch Leven Lakes area, Tahoe National Forest, Placer County, California, on the night of Friday 4 September 1964, Donald Shrum, a welder of about 27 from the Sacramento area, was bow-and-arrow deer hunting in the Loch Leven Lakes country near Cisco Grove, roughly eight miles north of Emigrant Gap off old Highway 40 in the Tahoe National Forest. This case file covers what witnesses reported, the official narrative, and a two-pass assessment with its evidence tier.

What did witnesses see at Near Cisco Grove?

On the night of Friday 4 September 1964, Donald Shrum, a welder of about 27 from the Sacramento area, was bow-and-arrow deer hunting in the Loch Leven Lakes country near Cisco Grove, roughly eight miles north of Emigrant Gap off old Highway 40 in the Tahoe National Forest. He had become separated from his two companions, Vincent Alvarez and Tim Trueblood, on rough ground roughly a mile from camp. With darkness down and bears a worry, the experienced woodsman climbed about twelve feet up a pine, strapped himself to the trunk with his belt, and settled in for the night.

Around 9 to 10 in the evening Shrum saw a moving light low on the horizon. Thinking it might be a helicopter searching for him, he climbed down and lit three signal fires on the ridge overlooking Granite Creek Valley, then went back up the tree. The light did not behave like a helicopter. In the Air Force's own words from the teletype, "the light appeared to be three silvery objects that were attracted to the locality" of his fires, "dropping two unknown objects in their descent and circling his position." Within minutes he heard loud crashing in the underbrush below, moving toward him.

Two human-like figures came out of the brush. The teletype records that they "were garbed in a silver-like suit but vifually had the complete absence of a neck," and that "these strange indivs had unusual facial features especially in the region of the eyes that protruded extensively." They made a sound Shrum likened to the hooting of an owl and tried to shake him out of the tree. Then a third figure of a different kind appeared, which "is referred to by Mr Shrum as a 'robot' (for lack of a better description)." It had two large luminous reddish-orange eyes, which he described as looking like two flashlights hooked together. He said the robot emitted a white vapor from a hinged opening like an oven door; when it reached him he blacked out, more than once through the night, and felt nausea.

Shrum fought back all night with what he had. He fired arrows at the robot. The Air Force summary says he "fired some arrows at the robot but failed to distract or divert any of the unidentified indivs." He tore off pieces of clothing, set them alight, and threw them down. "He tried fire by lighting parts of his clothing and throwing it at the indivs, to which they had violent reactions," and at one point the craft and figures "reacted also to the fire by ascending upwards." When he blacked out, "his bow wedged into a crotch of the limb of the tree, which prevented his falling," and later he climbed higher and re-strapped himself with his belt. He reported that the beings communicated in an "unintelligible 'cooing noise'" and that a movable light on the craft seemed to direct them. At first light, "regaining consciousness at the early dawn, Mr Shrum discovered the UFOB and occupants had disappeared." He climbed down and found his companions, who joked it probably had to do with the meteorite they had been looking for.

What is the official explanation?

This is one of the rare Project Blue Book occupant cases with a substantial documentary trail, because Shrum reported it through channels. He told a local instructor, who notified Mather AFB, which notified McClellan AFB, and intelligence officers of the 552nd Airborne Early Warning and Control Wing conducted a recorded interview on 21 September 1964. The investigating officers were Captain McCloud and Senior Master Sergeant R. Barnes, working under citation 5200P-I 9-271.

The initial PRIORITY teletype out of McClellan, dated 25 September 1964 and addressed to Air Force intelligence offices, runs through the standard AFR 200-2 reporting format and then gives a long narrative summary of the encounter, the same text quoted above. It logs the object as "round, flat, with extended glowing light," "silver with glowing light," "three in formation," with a "whirring sound," and notes the witness "appears stable and consistent in telling his story and believes that the above occurred as described." The case file notes that a taped interview and a physical specimen, an arrowhead, were held in separate folders. One bent arrow, the one carrying the best metal deposit from the robot, was taken by the Air Force as evidence and, by Shrum's account, never returned.

On 2 October 1964 the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson wrote back to McClellan asking the investigators a pointed set of leading questions. The FTD letter asks directly whether "this occurance could have been attributed to an owl or other such birds or animals, coupled with an overactive imagination on the part of the witness," and asks for detail on the closest approach of the figures, the "violent reaction" to thrown fire, and the "moveable UFO figure with a light." McClellan's reply of 8 October 1964, signed by Captain Douglas W. Hawkins, forwarded the tape recording and the arrowhead, named the astronomer Victor W. Killick of Sacramento City College who had also interviewed the witness, and answered the questions point by point. To the owl question the reply did not assert an owl; it answered the surrounding factual questions and confirmed the witness believed the events as described.

The Project 10073 record card that closes the file lists the date as "4 September 64 Night," the location as "Sacto Area, California," the source as "Civilian," and the conclusion as "Other (PSYCHOLOGICAL)," with the brief summary "All night encounter with strange beings" and the note "Arrow Head and Taped Interview in Specimen File." That single word, psychological, is the entire official explanation. The file contains no shown mechanism, no identified animal, no named hoaxer, and no analysis of the arrow metal beyond holding it as a specimen. Later researcher Paul Cerny filed a Freedom of Information request that pried the file loose, and the documents have since been scanned and hosted by NICAP and the Project Blue Book Archive.

What did the witnesses think it was?

Donald Shrum maintained for the rest of his life that the encounter happened exactly as he described it. For decades he told the story only under a pseudonym because he feared losing his job in rocket propulsion work, and he reportedly turned down offers of money to attach his real name, which is not the behavior of a man selling a hoax. He allowed his real name to be used only in his later years, and the case was set out at length in the 2012 book "Aliens in the Forest: The Cisco Grove UFO Encounter" by Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte, with contributions from Donald and Judi Shrum. Family accounts describe him suffering severe and lasting effects, including nightmares and panic when he heard owl-like hooting, consistent with what we would now call post-traumatic stress.

There is partial independent corroboration. Shrum's companion Vincent Alvarez signed an affidavit stating that he saw a craft descending toward Shrum's area at the time of the event, which is preserved with the case material. Alvarez did not experience the all-night siege, only the light, but his statement places an unexplained aerial object over the right spot at the right time. When the three men returned to the site during rifle season, they reported it had been cleaned and raked, and Shrum recovered one of his arrows there.

The case drew unusually strong endorsements from civilian investigators. Coral Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization called it among the most spectacular reports the group had examined, and Paul Cerny, the Bay Area investigator who later worked the case for NICAP and MUFON, said there was no doubt in his mind that the incident was factual and authentic. These are investigators' opinions rather than physical proof, but they come from people who interviewed the witness directly and weighed his consistency over years.

The dispute

The Air Force's filed conclusion is "Other (PSYCHOLOGICAL)," and the Foreign Technology Division floated an owl-and-overactive-imagination idea in its October 1964 questions. That is the official counter-explanation, and it is weak. It is an assertion without a shown method. No specific owl, animal, aircraft, or person was ever identified; no mechanism was offered for the silver-suited figures, the vapor that knocked Shrum out, the metal-depositing impact on his arrow, or the formation of silvery objects that the Air Force itself logged as "three in formation." An official label of "psychological" applied to a witness the same file calls "stable and consistent" is a way of closing a case, not a demonstration that nothing physical happened. Under our rules, an official-apparatus debunk without a shown method counts as evidence the case was taken seriously, not as proof it was ordinary.

During the recorded interview, SMSgt Barnes reportedly tried out several mundane theories on Shrum in person, first that the figures were Japanese soldiers still hiding in the woods, then mischievous teenagers pulling a prank, then airmen on a training exercise. Shrum rejected all three, and none of them survive contact with the details, since none accounts for silent silvery craft in formation, a vapor that repeatedly rendered him unconscious, glowing eyes, or the cooing communication. These were guesses offered and dropped in the same conversation, not findings.

The genuinely skeptical civilian position is simpler and also unproven. It rests on the fact that this is essentially a single-witness account of an extraordinary event, with only Alvarez's light to corroborate it, and that the imagery, silver suits, glowing-eyed robots, hooting humanoids, reads to some like 1960s science fiction. That is a reason for caution, but it is not a method-shown debunk. No one has produced a confession, a recantation, recovered props, or a positive identification of a specific real-world cause. On the contrary, Shrum never wavered, declined money to keep his anonymity rather than to sell the tale, and a physical arrow specimen and a taped interview went into the Air Force file. With the official explanation an unsupported assertion and the civilian doubt resting on the story's strangeness rather than on demonstrated fabrication, the case sits in Barely Disputed: a counter-explanation exists on paper, but it is partial and unproven, and the account largely stands.

Is the Cisco Grove Bow-and-Arrow Encounter real? The two-pass assessment

Pass one, how this could be entirely ordinary. Shrum was lost, exhausted, cold, and frightened, alone in the dark woods overnight, which is a textbook setting for misperception and even waking dream states. An owl, the explanation the Foreign Technology Division reached for, hoots, has large forward eyes that catch firelight, and moves through brush, and Shrum himself said the figures made owl-like sounds and that owl hooting later triggered his panic. A bow hunter dozing strapped to a tree could in principle weave nocturnal animals, the glow of his own three signal fires, and a genuine but ordinary light in the sky into a single terrifying narrative, then keep refining it for decades. The robot with two flashlight-like eyes and a vapor-belching mouth is strikingly close to period science-fiction imagery, which is consistent either with a real exotic object or with a mind filling gaps from culture. Because there is essentially one close witness and no surviving analyzable physical evidence, an ordinary explanation built on misperception and a single dramatic night cannot be ruled out, and that is the honest weak point of the case.

Pass two, if it was real. Then what Shrum described is a landing-and-occupant event with a structured craft that disgorged smaller objects, two suited bipedal beings and at least one machine-like entity, a directed incapacitating vapor, and coordinated behavior over many hours, which is far past anything any nation was flying or testing in 1964. The Air Force did not treat it as nothing. It ran a recorded interview, escalated through Mather, McClellan, and Wright-Patterson, took a physical arrow specimen, and the FTD asked detailed operational questions about how the figures moved and reacted, all of which is the apparatus reacting to a case real enough to need closing. The corroborating affidavit from Vincent Alvarez puts an unexplained descending craft over the location, and the investigators who interviewed Shrum, Coral Lorenzen and Paul Cerny among them, came away convinced of his sincerity.

Weighing both passes, the official "psychological" verdict is an assertion with no shown mechanism, the in-room theories of Japanese soldiers, teenagers, and training troops were guessed and abandoned, and the skeptical civilian case rests on the story's strangeness and its single primary witness rather than on any demonstrated fabrication. There is no confession, no recantation, no recovered prop, and no positive identification of a real object or cause. A weak, unproven counter-explanation exists on paper while the account, a consistent witness who refused money to protect his name, a corroborated light, and a documented Air Force investigation, largely stands. That places it at Barely Disputed.