Introduction

On Friday, September 4, 1964, Donald Shrum and two friends from his job at Aerojet made camp in a remote section of wilderness near the Loch Leven Lakes in an area called Cisco Grove, roughly 60 miles northeast of Sacramento, CA. The three men had planned a relaxing weekend of bow hunting for deer, but those plans would change later that evening as Shrum experienced an exhausting and terrifying UFO close encounter of the worst kind. As night approached, Shrum got lost and separated from his hunting buddies and found himself isolated on a bluff almost a mile from camp. An experienced woodsman, Shrum decided it would be wiser to spend the night in a tree safe from predators rather than trying to find his way back over rough terrain in the dark. Seeing an unusual moving light on the horizon, Shrum built three signal fires to attract what he thought were his rescuers. The fires did seem to attract this object’s attention, but not the kind anyone wants. Beyond his wildest imagination and expectations, he would soon find himself in an all-night battle to save his life or at least his freedom. As Shrum perched in his pine tree 12 feet off the ground and quietly observed this light, he realized it was something like a headlight on a massive cigar-shaped craft. A smaller ship emerged from one of this mothership’s large rectangular ports and took a position some distance to his north. Shortly after that, Shrum could hear rustling in the brush heading his direction. What emerged were a combination of beings he described as humanoid and wearing space suits and at least a couple of what appeared to him as clunky robots who seemed to be on a mission to study the flora. Once they had noticed Shrum in the tree, however, a few of these weird beings seemed intent on abducting him for reasons he feared to ponder. Until daybreak, Shrum would fight off these intruders with everything he had at his disposal. Shooting arrows and lobbing flaming personal items at them only seemed to delay their trying to climb his tree in between assaults with a mysterious white gaseous mist that would render him temporarily unconscious. Perhaps ironically, it was employing primitive means to counter advanced technology, but whatever the unfathomable cause, it worked. Donald Shrum lived to tell his tale but only after decades of PTSD and secrecy to protect his reputation. While this story may seem unbelievable to you, the United States Air Force certainly believed it and went so far as to rake away all the evidence, literally. What remains is one of the most bizarre and disturbing testimonies in UFO lore – one man’s battle against extraterrestrials at Cisco Grove.

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