Mount Shasta, in the state of California is a dormant volcano, which last erupted in 1786.
The mountain is considered by many to be a camper's paradise, but not by one family who
vacationed there in the summer of 2010.
Their small child disappeared there, for several hours.
When the child miraculously returned, he said he was with somebody... but the somebody,
was not human.
The Doe family, took a day trip to Fowlers Campground.
At six in the evening, Mrs. Doe was inside the camper, assembling potato salad.
Mr. Doe was outside, at the barbecue grill, cooking hamburgers.
He was watching his son Johnny play with the family dog.
Johnny Doe was three and a half years old.
After turning over a row of burgers, his father noticed that Johnny was out of sight.
Mr. Doe immediately called for his wife to watch the grill, and he looked around, yelling
his son's name.
The dog, who was still there, began to bark like the camper was on fire, and the parents
soon got scared.
After twenty minutes, Mrs. Doe called her sister, who lives nearby, and shortly the
search was joined by more family members.
The family believed that a child of Johnny's age was not likely to go exploring in the
woods.
They searched thoroughly all trails in the area, without seeing any sign of the boy.
The United States Forest Service was called in, as well as the sheriff.
The forest was combed by rescue personnel until late at night.
Of course the parents were sick with worry.
At 11:00 PM, five hours after his disappearance, a sheriff's deputy found him sitting cross-legged,
in the middle of a main trail, a trail which most of the searchers had been using all evening.
The family was ecstatic with relief.
The boy had not suffered a scratch, but they took him to the hospital anyway.
He received a clean bill of health.
They asked the doctor why Johnny was not talking.
The doctor said the child was probably frightened, by the agitation of his own parents.
Grandmother Kathy was babysitting Johnny the following week.
When he grew tired of playing with his train set, he looked up into her eyes and said,
"I don't like the other Grandma Kathy."
His grandmother asked him what he was talking about.
Johnny said, "Don't you remember, I was lost in the forest?
The other Grandma Kathy grabbed my arm.
She took me to a scary place.
But she's really a robot.
She has your hands and your feet and even your face.
She took me to a cave with spiders, and there were purses there too, and the purses were
all dusty.
I didn't touch a thing.
"Then when she climbed up the ladder, the lights made her look like a robot.
Other robots were there too, but they weren't moving.
She told me to lay down, then she looked at my belly button.
She told me I come from outer space, because they put me in mommy's tummy.
She wanted me to sit down on a piece of sticky paper, but I wouldn't do it, so she got mad.
Then she took me back to the trail, and told me to sit down, and wait for help."
This brought something to Grandmother Kathy's mind.
Six weeks before the boy went missing, Grandmother Kathy and her husband, had set up a tent in
Fowlers Campground.
She woke up in the middle of the night, face down.
Her shoulders felt stiff, and there was a pain at the nape of her neck.
The next morning, her husband woke up, she located another bite, on the back of his neck.
The bites were very small puncture wounds, which they blamed on mosquitoes.
The only other thing she could recall from that night, was seeing a pair of pale yellow
eyes among the trees, reflecting the beam of her flashlight.
The eyes vanished in a flash, and she thought she had seen a deer.
The "Robot Grandma" is one of the cases published by David Paulides, in his book series on wilderness
disappearances, entitled "Missing 411".
In a cluster of incidents at Mount Shasta, most of those victims who are lucky enough
to reappear, have no memory of their missing time...
Except for Johnny from, a boy who may have been too young, for his captor, to able to
erase his memory.