The McMinnville (Trent) UFO Photographs

Spring 1950. America was still watching the sky, three years after the flying disc craze of 1947. Paul and Evelyn Trent farmed rolling land southwest of McMinnville, Oregon.

Thursday, May 11, 1950. About 7:30 in the evening. Evelyn was behind the farmhouse, feeding the caged rabbits. She looked up. Something was coming over the fields, slow, tilted at a slight angle. She compared it to "a good-sized parachute canopy without the strings, only silver-bright mixed with bronze." On top, off centre, sat something oval-shaped, where she thought a pilot would sit.

She ran into the house for Paul. The Kodak was already loaded with film bought the winter before. Paul took one picture. The object drifted left, so he stepped to his right and took a second, about 30 seconds later. It was not rotating, just "sort of gliding." It tipped and turned. Then it accelerated slowly and moved away rapidly toward the west. No noise. No smoke. The witnesses felt a breeze as it went overhead. Paul's father reportedly saw it too.

Paul was in no hurry. "I was kinda scared of it," he said. "You know, you hear so much talk about those things." The roll stayed in the camera until Mother's Day family pictures finished it. A local banker put the prints in his bank window. Reporter Bill Powell of the Telephone Register found the negatives under a davenport, where the Trent children had been playing.

June 8, 1950. The photographs ran on the front page of the Telephone-Register. The wire services took the story national. On June 26, Life ran "Farmer Trent's Flying Saucer."

Air Force and FBI investigators reportedly interviewed the couple. Years later, astronomer William K. Hartmann took up the case for the University of Colorado's Condon Committee. Working from the original negatives, he measured haze against distant landmarks and matched the object's outline in both frames. His conclusion: "This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses." He added that the evidence did not positively rule out a fabrication.

Robert Sheaffer argued that shadows on the garage eaves meant the photos were taken in the morning, not the evening. Hartmann was persuaded. "I think Sheaffer's work removes the McMinnville case from consideration as evidence of disklike artificial craft," he wrote. Philip J. Klass pointed to shifting accounts of who saw it first and who else was watching. Joel Carpenter proposed an old truck mirror hanging under the overhead wires. In 2013, the IPACO team reported a suspension thread, detected statistically, above the object in both frames.

Bruce Maccabee held the negatives from 1974 to 1999. His analysis found a large, distant object, roughly a mile away and 100 feet across, with no thread visible. With Brad Sparks, he answered IPACO directly. The study used a print, not the negatives, and its thread could be statistical noise.

Evelyn died in 1997. Paul died in 1998. Both said to the end that the sighting was genuine. On May 11, 2000, the 50th anniversary, McMenamins Hotel Oregon held its first UFO Festival. It now draws upwards of 7,000 people. Skeptics file the photos as a hoax. Many ufologists still count them among the strongest UFO photographs.