The Cisco Grove Encounter

In August 1964, near Cisco Grove in the Sierra Nevada of California, a bow hunter named Don Shrum became separated from his party after dark and spent the night up a tree. By his account he was surrounded until dawn by luminous flat craft and three figures, two suited humanoids and a metallic robot that gave off a white smoke which stopped his breath. He fought them off with arrows and fire until they withdrew at first light.

What is on the record

The archive resolves three named claimants across a single reporting channel, and it holds three videos. The difficulty is that the three do not describe one event. Shrum's night in the tree is one account. Susan Crowley reported an oval object hovering and sliding above her house at midnight, gone before her husband could look, with a police report taken and nothing corroborated. The former airline pilot William Powell described a smooth discus with a raised porcelain-white dome and a bright day-glow red rim, seen from his own aircraft. These read as separate sightings collected under one canonical rather than a single connected episode.

The record's location field is also unreliable. It names Elk Grove Village, which is inconsistent with the Sierra Nevada setting of the Shrum account, so the case is better fixed by name than by that field. The dating spans 1964 to 1966, with August 1964 given as the best estimate. No documents accompany the entry. There is no government paperwork and no authenticated footage, only testimony carried on one channel.

Why it sits where it does

Cisco Grove grades L3, the tier for multiple independent claimants. That grade wants a caveat here. It reflects three separate witnesses on record, not three people describing the same object, and everything rests on retelling rather than on a document or a sensor trace. What any of them saw is not resolved here.