McMinnville UFO photographs

McMinnville UFO photographs

Type	Case (photographs)
Also known as	Trent photos
Date	Claimed 7:30–7:45 p.m., 11 May 1950
Place	Trent farm near Sheridan, Oregon, about 13 miles (21 km) southwest of McMinnville
Photographers	Paul Trent (with his wife Evelyn as co-witness)
Camera	Roamer 1 folding camera, 120/620 film (6 × 9 cm), 100 mm lens, 1/50 s
Published	Telephone-Register, 8 June 1950; Life, 26 June 1950
Investigations	Condon Committee (Hartmann, case 46); Maccabee (1975); Klass and Sheaffer; IPACO (2013)

The McMinnville UFO photographs are two pictures of a disc-shaped object taken by the farmer Paul Trent at his farm near Sheridan, Oregon, about 13 miles southwest of McMinnville, which he and his wife Evelyn said were taken on the evening of 11 May 1950. Reprinted in Life magazine and newspapers across the United States, they are often considered among the most famous UFO photographs ever taken, and for years were regarded as one of the strongest photographic cases.^[1][2]

The Condon Committee's investigator William K. Hartmann and the ufologist Bruce Maccabee both argued that the images' aerial perspective suggested a large, distant object. The skeptics Philip J. Klass and Robert Sheaffer concluded they were a hoax, pointing to lighting that suggested morning rather than evening and to the object's position directly under overhead wires, and suggested it resembled a car mirror. A 2013 study by the French group IPACO concluded that it was a small model hanging from a thread.^[1][6][7]

The Trents' account

According to Hartmann's account, at about 7:30 p.m. on 11 May 1950 Evelyn Trent was walking back to the house after feeding caged rabbits when she saw a slow-moving, metallic, disc-shaped object approaching from the northeast. She shouted for her husband, who came out and saw it too. He went back into the house for a camera, already loaded with film, and took two photographs before the object sped away to the west. Paul Trent's father said he also glimpsed it briefly. The Trents later said that they first thought it was a secret military aircraft and feared the photos might get them into trouble.^[1][3]

Hartmann's version came from an interview the Trents gave to Lou Gillette of the McMinnville radio station KMCM, quoted in The Oregonian on 10 June 1950. Two days earlier, however, the local Telephone-Register had published a slightly different account, in which Evelyn said they had both been in the back yard and seen the object at the same time, and that Paul thought the camera was in the car while she was sure it was in the house.^[1]

Publicity

A few exposures remained on the roll, so it was not developed until the Trents had used them for family photographs on Mother's Day. When Paul Trent mentioned the pictures to his banker, Frank Wortmann, Wortmann displayed them in his bank window in McMinnville. A local reporter, Bill Powell, persuaded Trent to lend him the negatives, found no sign of tampering, and on 8 June 1950 published them on the front page of the McMinnville Telephone-Register under the headline "At Long Last—Authentic Photographs Of Flying Saucer[?]". The paper wrote that expert photographers had found no tampering and that there appeared to be "no possibility of hoax or hallucination".^[1][5]

The International News Service distributed the story and photos nationally, and on 26 June 1950 Life published cropped versions with a picture of Trent and his camera. The Trents had been promised the negatives would be returned, but Life told them it had lost them.^[1][4]

The Condon Committee

In 1967 the negatives were found in the files of United Press International, which had merged with INS, and were lent to William K. Hartmann, an astronomer investigating for the University of Colorado's government-funded UFO study led by Edward Condon. The Trents were not told at first that their negatives had been found. Hartmann interviewed them and was impressed by their apparent sincerity; they had reportedly never been paid for the photos and he found no sign that they had tried to profit from them.^[1]

Hartmann wrote that this was "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". Part of his reasoning was photometric: measuring the original negatives, he found the underside of the object lighter than the underside of a nearby oil tank, which could be due to aerial perspective — the haze that makes distant mountains look pale — implying the object was farther away than the tank.^[1][5]

Hartmann also noted the alternatives. The object appeared beneath a pair of wires, and "beneath roughly the same point in the two photos, in spite of their having been taken from two positions", so it might be a model suspended from a wire; his tests did "not rule out the possibility that the object was a small model suspended from the nearby wire by an unresolved thread". He also saw a possible discrepancy in the lighting: the object, a telephone pole, possibly the garage and especially distant house gables were lit from the right, or east, and the house showed a shadow under its roof suggesting daylight, so "one could argue that the photos were taken on a dull, sunlit day at, say, 10 a.m.". After his study he returned the negatives to UPI, which then told the Trents. In 1970 the Trents asked Philip Bladine, editor of the News-Register, to recover them; UPI returned them to Bladine, but he never told the Trents.^[1][5]

Maccabee's analysis

In 1975 the ufologist and physicist Bruce Maccabee studied the negatives in the News-Register files and concluded that they were not hoaxed and showed a "real, physical" object. Using densitometric measurements like Hartmann's, he argued that the object's brightness and its position relative to the power lines indicated a large object some distance away, and he said he found no trace of a suspending thread. He also produced a detailed map of the scene from measurements made on site.^[1][7]

The hoax explanation

In the 1980s Philip J. Klass and Robert Sheaffer concluded that the photos were faked. Their main argument was that the shadows on the garage at the left of the pictures indicated morning light, not early evening, so the Trents had not been honest about the time and their whole story was suspect; Sheaffer added that the U.S. Weather Bureau reported no clouds at all over McMinnville that evening, ruling out the suggestion that bright clouds had lit the scene from the east. They noted that the Trents had shown an interest in UFOs before the sighting, and Klass reported contradictions in their account, which had changed over the years. Sheaffer said his unpublished 1969 paper on the case caused the Condon Committee's investigator to reconsider his conclusion.^[1][6]

Klass and Sheaffer argued the object was small and hanging from the power lines at the top of the pictures, and suggested it might be a detached vehicle side-view mirror, noting its similarity to the round mirrors used on Ford vehicles for decades. The researcher Joel Carpenter's detailed work also suggested it was a mirror from an old truck. Sheaffer, pointing out that Maccabee had also endorsed the widely rejected Gulf Breeze photographs, argued that his photo analysis could not be relied on, and published what he described as a "tangle of threads" visible on top of the wire.^[1][6]

The IPACO study

In April 2013 three researchers with the French group IPACO — Antoine Cousyn, François Louange and Geoff Quick — published "Back to McMinnville pictures", followed in June by "Evidence of a suspension thread". Using Maccabee's site map and high-resolution scans of first-generation prints, they found that the object's position along the line between the two wires was almost identical in both photographs (83.1% and 82.8%), which they said could only be explained if it was hanging from the wire or had moved exactly along the line of sight. If it hung from the lower wire, about 11.5 feet up and some 15 feet from the camera, the object would be roughly 4 to 6 inches across, hanging about 2 feet below the wire, with small changes between the pictures consistent with swaying in a light wind. With a new detection tool they reported finding a thread above the object in both pictures, concluding that "the McMinnville UFO was a model hanging from a thread". The French researcher Claude Poher had also concluded it was a hoax.^[1][7]

Legacy

The photographs remain among the best-publicised in UFO history, with skeptics calling them a hoax and ufologists citing them as credible evidence. The Trents were consistently described by the media as unassuming farm folk who never tried to profit from the photos or the publicity. Evelyn Trent died in 1997 and Paul Trent in 1998, both insisting to the end that the sighting and photographs were genuine. The photos inspired an annual UFO Festival in McMinnville, held at McMenamins Hotel Oregon, now the largest such gathering in the Pacific Northwest and the second-largest UFO festival in the United States after Roswell's.^[1][3][8]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “McMinnville UFO photographs”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.