Aliens in the Forest
The Cisco Grove UFO Encounter

Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte 2011 183 pages

Zeke Borenbroek is renovating the private campground at Cisco Grove. We met with him to talk DSHS, Gould Park (at Cisco), campground plans, and storing 20 Mile Museum signs at the campground in winter to prevent their destruction by snow removal machines. During our conversation Zeke mentioned Aliens in the Forest. We’ve reviewed almost two hundred books at least tangentially related to Donner Summit in the pages of the Heirloom. All the reviews are on our website. In those two hundred or so books we’ve never come across a book about Donner Summit like that and so the search was on for a copy.

At 186 pages it’s a short book, shorter even if the unneeded index, notes and repetitions are left out. There are a number of maps and many illustrations in the book to help the reader.

In 1964 Donald Shrum went for a weekend in the wood near Cisco Grove. His experience would haunt him for the rest of his life. That September day Donald and two of his friends went up Highway 40 (there was no I-80 yet) to Big Bend. Just east of Big Bend is the Loch Loch Levin trailhead where they headed into the mountains, set up camp, and went hunting with their bows and arrows. The area south of the lakes is pretty rugged and even though the book says the three men were experienced woodsmen, they all got separated having to spend the night away from their camp, “It was pitched black.”

To avoid bears Donald decided to spend the night in a tree. About 9 P.M. he saw a peculiar light in the east and so he lit three signal fires. The light approached Donald and he noticed that it was dark, cigar shaped and completely silent. Besides the light it had three lighted panels. It “was clearly not an Earth vessel. That this huge ship was not of human manufacture was absolutely clear to him.” Amazingly the object expelled another UFO out of one of the panels.

There follows a completely unexpected digression to explain the state of the U.S. space program in 1964.

The expelled UFO, perhaps a scout ship, let out some humanoids, “A few minutes later, Shrum saw a short, stocky being, which he later referred to as a ‘humanoid,’ approaching his tree… standing approximately five feet tall, the creature was dressed in tight-fitting, light-colored uniform…They were human in form and… they seemed awfully short, you know, short, stocky, Shrum said.”

First there was just one humanoid and then there were two followed by a couple of robots. The humanoids made sounds like owls hooting. Looking at one of the robots, “Shrum saw two huge eyes coming towards him ‘just like two flashlights hooked together.’ These glowing, luminous eyes were reddish-orange (‘the color of fire’), and they illuminated the face and the jaw of a horrific robot-like creature that rapidly approaches Shrum’s position. Below the glowing face, from the neck down, he could not see much detail.

“The eerie, incandescent eyes had a frightening quality that greatly trouble and unsettled Shrum.”

There followed an hours long contest between the aliens and Shrum. The aliens gassed him rendering him unconscious a few times and Shrum fired three arrows at the aliens. The night ended and Shrum found his way back to camp and first one friend and then another. The first friend also saw the light but didn’t have the adventure.

The second half or so of the book talks about Shrum’s time telling his story and trying to get the Air Force involved. The Air Force took one of Shrum’s arrows which had the best deposit of metal from the alien and was bent. Someone or something cleaned up and raked the site of the encounter but even so Shrum was able to find his third arrow.

Shrum was deeply affected by the encounter with aliens near Cisco Grove and had what we’d call P.T.S.D.