Lotts Lake

My second significant UFO encounter occurred in the mid-seventies. My buddy Dave and I decided to take a break from our Bay Area city jobs and go camping up near the place we went to High School (Paradise, CA). He lived in Sacramento and I lived in Oakland so we merged into one vehicle and drove up to a small lake called Lotts.

Neither one of us had been there before, it just seemed like a good place to unwind, so we drove up early, left our vehicle out on the main road, and hiked into the area. The thing that struck me most as we approached the lake was that the large rock formation that hugged the west side of it was almost solid quartz. I know about quartz, I grew up with a gold-mining grandfather and I’d seen my share. This formation was huge!

We set up camp in a grassy area next to a trail that led to the lake (just below the red X). We explored the area until nightfall and then retired to our sleeping bags. We were still awake and chatting softly when we heard the sound. Our feet were pointed towards the lake and from that direction on our right came a whooshing sound. There were no lights, just the sound of some aerial vehicle flying slowly. It sounded like a helicopter with no engine and it stopped at the point marked below.

I should note that Dave and I were adventurous souls and to this day I don’t know why we didn’t jump up in the dark and go check it out, but we didn’t. We just calmly talked about the fact that we could hear the sound of machinery, doing something there for about fifteen minutes, before flying off in the direction it came. Then we went to sleep.

The next morning we walked down there and discovered a large circular flattened section of grass that wasn’t there before, with fresh digging at the base of the rock formation. They were mining quartz in the dead of night, in the middle of nowhere!