The Triangle

Issue date: 5/5/06 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: www.ufocasebook.com

As I look through the heaps of drawings made by witnesses to UFO incidents that I've gathered on my computer, everything is pretty much the same. Drawings from the early days of the alien abduction phenomenon either look like normal human beings or short, bullet-shaped monsters with beady eyes. As time progresses, the aliens get thinner, their necks longer, and their eyes and heads larger until they're the quintessential little gray men we were all so frightened of for the first few seasons of The X-Files.

Yet, every once in a while, one of the pictures doesn't fit the mold. For instance, there are the Pascagoula creatures, which supposedly abducted two men while they were fishing in Mississippi. The drawings of them resemble mitten-wearing, elephant-skinned snowmen with carrot ears. Since I wrote about that case some years ago, today I'm going to write about the next odd-looking alien drawing I happened to come across: The Cisco Grove Robot.

September 4, 1964, was apparently a more primitive time in California than I'd imagined. Donald Schrum, then 28, was out hunting with some of his friends, armed with bows and arrows. He became separated from his group, and as night fell and for some reason, he decided to climb a tree to sleep. Maybe that's a normal thing hunters do. I don't know.

Anyway, after a while in his leafy new habitat, he saw lights in the sky. Some versions say three; others say just one. However many there really were, Schrum suspected that they were helicopters that had been sent to locate and rescue him, so he hopped down from the tree and lit some signal fires to attract the pilot's attention. Little did he know he would be attracting the attention - of terror.

The light swooped down and moved slowly over the trees. At this point, Schrum realized that the light was not, in fact, a helicopter. What it really looked like is reported in at least a half-dozen different ways, so I'll just repeat the official report of the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena, a civilian UFO research group: "[The object] had a strange appearance which frightened Schrum."

The light stopped a few dozen yards away, and after hearing a rustling in the brush, Schrum wisely decided to retreat upwards, back into the comforting branches of the tree in which he had planned to sleep.

Moments probably passed as Schrum stayed up there, trying to figure out what the strange, hovering light really was. Then, three shapes emerged from the darkness below. The first two resembled ordinary people, except that they wore tight-fitting, military-style uniforms of a shiny silver material.

Continued...

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