On Friday, September 4, 1964, three men from the Sacramento area went bow hunting in the Sierra Nevada near Cisco Grove, off US Highway 40, and became separated. According to the Air Force summary of the witness's taped interview, one man, alone at dusk, saw lights he took for a helicopter searching for him and lit signal fires on a ridge above Granite Creek. The lights, he said, turned out to be three silvery objects that circled his position and dropped two smaller objects.
Hearing loud crashing in the brush, he climbed into a tall pine. He said two human-like figures in silvery suits, with no visible neck and large protruding eyes, approached and tried to dislodge him, joined by a third figure he called a robot. He fired arrows at the robot and set pieces of his clothing alight and threw them down, which he said made the beings react violently. He said a vapour from the robots made him black out, and that he strapped himself to the tree with his belt. At dawn the craft and the beings were gone, and he rejoined his companions.
His father-in-law urged him to report it. He told an instructor at Sacramento City College's observatory, who notified Mather Air Force Base; intelligence officers from McClellan Air Force Base recorded an interview on September 21 and described him as stable and convinced of his account. The Foreign Technology Division asked whether owls or other animals and an overactive imagination might explain it. Project Blue Book filed the case under "Sacto Area, California" and concluded the encounter with "beings" was psychological. The file notes that the tape and the arrow he fired were kept as specimens.
The case is a staple of UFO literature and has been retold in books and podcasts, but no physical evidence beyond the arrow was ever reported.