Cisco Grove 1964 — the Sierra Nevada tree-perch encounter of Donald Shrum

On the night of September 4, 1964, a bow-hunter named Donald Shrum became separated from his hunting party in the Cisco Grove area of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California and, by his subsequent account, climbed a tree for safety after observing a luminous object descend in the nearby forest. The Cisco Grove case — sometimes called the Donald Shrum incident — is one of the most unusual close-encounter cases in the American record because of the extended duration of the reported event, the specific defensive behaviour Shrum described, and the fact that the witness was an experienced outdoorsman with no prior connection to UAP claims.

What Shrum reported

Shrum's account, given to investigators including Air Force personnel and later civilian researchers, is that after losing his bearings in the forest in the late afternoon, he saw a luminous object descend at a distance and concluded that the safest course was to climb a nearby pine tree and wait out the night. Once aloft, he reported that two humanoid figures and a third figure he described as robotic approached the base of the tree. Over the course of several hours, Shrum said, the figures attempted to dislodge him from the tree by means he could not fully reconstruct, and that he defended himself by lighting matches and setting fire to articles of clothing and pieces of equipment, which appeared to deter the approach each time.

By his account, the encounter continued until dawn, when the figures withdrew. He climbed down from the tree, found his hunting party, and reported what had happened. Members of the party reported finding spent matches and burned equipment debris at the base of the tree consistent with his account of the defensive actions he had taken.

The institutional record

Project Blue Book opened a file on the case. The Air Force concluded that Shrum had most likely experienced a stress-induced misperception triggered by exposure, fatigue, and the disorientation of being lost overnight in unfamiliar terrain. This explanation is the one cited in the official Blue Book file. It does not, however, account for the physical debris at the tree base, the consistency of Shrum's account across multiple separate interviews over subsequent decades, or his stable subsequent life and absence of any psychiatric or social-functional impairment that would support a stress-misperception model of the event.

How the case sits in the record

Cisco Grove is one of the few cases in the American close-encounter literature in which the witness's defensive actions left physical traces that other people observed and reported on independently within hours of the event. The traces themselves are mundane — burned matches and clothing — and prove only that someone took those actions, not what motivated them. The case therefore offers a partial physical-evidence record without resolving the interpretive question.

Shrum himself spoke publicly about the experience only intermittently in subsequent decades and consistently declined commercial opportunities. The Cisco Grove case remains in the small set of historical American UAP encounters where a single witness produced an account of unusual specificity and behavioural detail, with limited corroborating physical traces and no sensor data. For comparable single-witness encounter cases, see the SkyLens UAP files page.

Editorial note: Independent SkyLens analysis of a publicly documented historical UAP case from the United States. The case index linking related releases and primary sources is on the SkyLens UAP files page.