McMinnville in 1950.

Greetings. UFOs over Oregon, allegedly.

The McMinnville UFO photographs were taken near McMinnville, Oregon, in the United States, on May 11th of 1950. The photos were reprinted in Life magazine and in newspapers all across the nation, and are often considered to be among the most famous, or infamous, ever taken of an unidentified flying object. Skeptics have concluded that the photos are a hoax, but many ufologists consistently argue that the photos are genuine, and show an unidentified object in the Oregon sky. Paul and Evelyn Trent, the couple who took the photographs, lived on their farm which was actually just outside of Sheridan, Oregon, approximately fourteen kilometers, or about nine miles southwest of McMinnville, which was the nearest larger town.

According to astronomer William K. Hartmann's account, on the 11th of May in 1950 at 7:30pm local time, Evelyn Trent was walking back to her farmhouse after feeding the rabbits she and her husband owned. Before reaching the house she claimed to have spotted a slow-moving, metallic disk-shaped object heading in her general direction from the northeast. She called out for her husband Paul, who was inside the house. Upon leaving the house he claimed that he also saw the unidentified object. After a short time he went back inside their home to get their camera, and claimed that he managed to take two photos of the unknown before it sped away to the west. Paul Trent's father claimed he briefly viewed the object before it was lost to visual sight. Hartmann's version of the alleged events traces back to an interview the Trents gave to Lou Gillette, host of the radio station KMCM and quoted in The Oregonian newspaper on June 10th of 1950. However, the Trents had given a slightly different version of the incident in question to the local McMinnville newspaper, the Telephone Register, just two days earlier on June 8th. In that particular version, Evelyn Trent stated, and I quote: "We'd been out in the back yard. Both of us saw the object at the same time. The camera! Paul thought it was in the car but I was sure it was in the house. I was right, and the Kodak was loaded with film."

The roll of film in Paul Trent's camera was not entirely used up, so he did not have the film developed immediately, not until the remaining frames were used in shooting family photographs for that year's Mother's Day celebrations. In a interview conducted in 1997, the Trents claimed that they initially thought the unidentified object they had photographed was a secret military aircraft, and feared the "photos might bring them trouble." When Paul Trent mentioned the sighting and photographs to his banker, Mr. Frank Wortmann, the banker was intrigued enough to display them from his bank window in downtown McMinnville. Shortly afterwards Bill Powell, a local reporter, convinced Mr. Trent to loan him the negatives. Powell subsequently examined the negatives and found no evidence that they were tampered with or faked in any manner. On June 8th, Powell's accounting of the incident, accompanied by the two photos, was published as a front-page story in the McMinnville Telephone-Register. The headline read: "At Long Last--Authentic Photographs Of Flying Saucer[?]"

The story and photos were subsequently picked up by the International News Service (INS) and sent out to other newspapers around the nation. By June 6th, Life magazine had published cropped versions of the photos, along with a photo of Mr. Trent and his camera. The Trents had been promised that the negatives would be returned to them, however, they were not returned, with Life magazine informing the Trents that it had misplaced the negatives. Finally, in 1967, the negatives were discovered in the archives of the United Press International (UPI,) a news service which had merged with INS a few years prior. The negatives were then loaned to Dr. William K. Hartmann, the astronomer who was working as an investigator for the Condon Committee, the infamous government-funded UFO research project based at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Interestingly, the Trents were not immediately informed that their negatives had been recovered, for reasons that remain unclear. Eventually, Dr. Hartmann interviewed the Trents at length, and was impressed by their sincerity. The Trents never received any money for their photos, and Hartmann could find no evidence that they had sought any fame or fortune from the photographs. 

In Hartmann's analysis, which he wrote to the Condon Committee, and I quote: "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." Dr. Hartmann's statement speaks volumes. 

The primary reason for Hartmann's conclusion was due to the photometric analysis of the images. Hartmann noted that the brightness of the underside of the unidentified object appeared to be lighter than the underside of the oil tank seen in the images. This could be due to the effects of atmospheric extinction and scattering, the same effects that make distant mountains appear to be washed out and blue tinted. This effect suggested that the objects were further from the camera than the aforementioned oil tank, not small, nearby objects. Hartmann also pointed out the possibility that the images were artificially manufactured, noting that, and I quote: "The object appears beneath a pair of wires, as is seen in Plates 23 and 24. We may question, therefore, whether it could have been a model suspended from one of the wires. This possibility is strengthened by the observation that the object appears beneath roughly the same point in the two photos, in spite of their having been taken from two positions." Hartmann concluding, and I quote: "These tests do not rule out the possibility that the object was a small model suspended from the nearby wire by an unresolved thread."

Hartmann also made note of a discrepancy that would later become the main point of objection for skeptics in later decades. He noticed that the overall lighting of the image was consistent with the lighting that would be expected around sunset, but noted that, and I quote: "There could be a possible discrepancy in view of the fact that the UFO, the telephone pole, possibly the garage at the left, and especially the distant house gables (left of the distant barn) are illuminated from the right, or east. The house, in particular, appears to have a shadow under its roof that would suggest a daylit photo, and combined with the eastward incidence, one could argue that the photos were taken on a dull, sunlit day at, say, 10 a.m." After Hartmann concluded his investigation he returned the negatives to UPI, which then informed the Trents about them. In 1970, the Trents asked Philip Bladine, the editor of the News-Register (the successor of the Telephone-Register,) for the negatives. The Trents said that they had never been paid for the negatives and thus wanted them back. Bladine asked UPI to return the negatives to the Trents, which it ultimately did.

In 1975, Bruce Maccabee, a ufologist and optical physicist for the United States Navy, completed his own study of the photographs, with Maccabee ensuring that the original photos were returned to the Trents. Maccabee analyzed the photos and concluded that the photographs were not hoaxed and showed a "real, physical" object in the sky above the Trent farm. Much of his analysis is based on densitometric measurements, similar to the photometric analysis done by Hartmann. Maccabee argued that the brightness of the object's underside suggested it was at some distance from the camera, not a smaller object close to it. Maccabee also analyzed the position of various objects in the image as well as an image prepared by Hartmann when he visited the site in June of 1967. Based on this, Maccabee argued that the line-of-sight of the two images intersected some distance behind the power lines seen in the photos, providing additional supportive evidence, in his opinion, that it was not a small model suspended from the lines. Maccabee stated that his analysis of the unidentified object did not uncover any evidence of a thread or string suspending it from the power lines. In response to the skeptical arguments that various shadows on objects in the photos proved that they were taken in the early morning rather than in the early evening, as the Trents had declared, Maccabee argued that cloud conditions in the area of McMinnville on the evening of the sighting could have caused the shadows on the garage. 

In the 1980s Philip J. Klass, a hardened debunker, and Robert Sheaffer, a reasonable skeptic, journalists both, concluded that the photos were faked, and that the alleged events were a well-planned hoax. Their primary argument was that shadows on a garage on the left-hand side of the photos proved that the photos were taken in the morning rather than in the early evening, as the Trents had claimed. Klass and Sheaffer declared that since the Trents had made erroneous statements about the specific time the photos were allegedly taken, their entire story was thus suspect and likely untrue. Klass and Sheaffer also noted that the Trents had shown a keen interest in the UFO subject prior to their claimed sighting. Additionally, their analysis of the photographs indicated that the object captured was quite small and likely a model hanging from the power lines visible at the top of both photos. They also believed the object may have been the detached side-view mirror of a vehicle. The object has a shape that is very similar to the round mirrors that were used on Ford vehicles for decades, or similar models on almost all vehicles of the time period. Klass found a number of contradictions in the Trents' story of the sighting, and noted that their version of the incident had changed through the years. Klass' conclusion was that the Trents had hoaxed the entire event. 

When Sheaffer sent his research and investigative conclusions to William Hartmann, Hartmann withdrew the positive assessment of the case he had sent to the Condon Committee.

Thank you for your time and consideration.