MCMINNVILLE

Opening

At about 7:30 p.m. on 11 May 1950, Evelyn Trent was walking back to the farmhouse after feeding the rabbits on the farm she and her husband Paul worked near Sheridan, Oregon. She said she saw a large, slow-moving metallic disc approaching from the northeast. She called Paul, who fetched a camera already loaded with film and took two photographs before the object moved off to the west.

The pictures took their name from McMinnville, the nearest larger town, and Life printed them that June. In 1969 the University of Colorado's Air Force-funded UFO study found nothing in them that ruled out the Trents' account, though its investigator later withdrew that view. Analysts still disagree about whether the two frames show a large craft or a small model hung from a wire.

Timeline

11 May 1950, about 7:30 p.mEvelyn Trent sees the object and calls Paul, who takes two photographs with the family camera before it leaves to the west.

The following weeksThe Trents do not rush the film off to be developed. Accounts differ on the details, but they finish the roll and show the prints to family and neighbours before going any further. Later analysts on both sides treat the delay as significant: ordinary farm life to one side, time to prepare a fake to the other.

7 June 1950Paul mentions the sighting to his banker, Frank Wortmann, who puts the prints on display in his bank window in McMinnville.

8 June 1950Bill Powell, a reporter for the McMinnville Telephone Register, borrows the negatives, finds no sign of tampering, and the paper runs the story. In it, Evelyn says she and Paul saw the object at the same time.

10 June 1950The Oregonian quotes an interview the Trents gave to Lou Gillette of radio station KMCM. In this version, the order of who saw the object first and who went in for the camera differs from the account given two days earlier.

26 June 1950Life prints the photographs. The magazine later tells the Trents it has misplaced the negatives, which they had been promised would be returned.

1967The negatives turn up in the files of United Press International, which had merged with INS years earlier. They are loaned to the astronomer William K. Hartmann, then investigating for the Condon study. The Trents are not told straight away.

1968 to 1969Hartmann examines the negatives as Case 46, visits the farm, and models the geometry of the two exposures against the terrain and the overhead wires. The Condon Report is released in 1969 with his finding that the case is consistent with the Trents' account, though it does not rule out a small model hung from a wire.

1969Robert Sheaffer argues that the shadows on the Trents' garage show the photographs were taken in the morning, not the evening, and proposes a small model suspended from the overhead wires, photographed at about 8:20 a.m. Hartmann later withdraws his positive assessment of the case after Sheaffer's research.

Following decadesPhilip Klass takes up the shadow argument. Bruce Maccabee answers that cloud over McMinnville that evening could have produced the diffuse light behind those shadows, that the brightness of the object's underside points to a distant object, and that he could find no thread in the negatives.

Late 1990sEvelyn and Paul Trent die. Apart from the early differences between the two newspaper versions, their account did not change.

April 2013Three researchers at the French firm IPACO, including the image analyst François Louange, post two studies. They conclude that the geometry fits a small model with a hollow underside hanging from a thread below the wires, and report evidence of the thread. Maccabee disputes their sight-line geometry.

Key figures

Evelyn and Paul Trent are the only witnesses. In a 1997 interview they said they had first taken the object for a secret military aircraft and worried that the photographs might bring them trouble. Frank Wortmann and Bill Powell brought the pictures to the public. William Hartmann was the case's formal investigator for the Condon study, and also analysed the Fort Belvoir ring photographs as Case 50. Robert Sheaffer and Philip Klass made the sceptical case, Bruce Maccabee the strongest defence, and François Louange's team at IPACO the most detailed modern analysis.

Physical and documentary trail

The two original negatives survive and have been examined by Hartmann, Maccabee and IPACO in turn. The Trents' accounts survive in the Telephone Register of 8 June and The Oregonian of 10 June 1950, and the case is Case 46 in the Condon Report. What the record lacks is a third witness and any object of known size in the frame, which is why the distance, and so the size, of the object can be argued either way.

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.

Things you might not know

• The negatives were lost for seventeen years. Life told the Trents it had misplaced them. They were found in UPI's files in 1967, and the Trents were not told at first.
• The first gallery was a bank window. Their banker, Frank Wortmann, displayed the prints in his bank in McMinnville before any newspaper had them.
• The Trents thought it was military. They said they first took the object for a secret aircraft and were afraid the photographs would get them into trouble.
• The study's own investigator changed his mind. Hartmann wrote the favourable Condon finding, then withdrew his positive assessment after Sheaffer's shadow research.
• It did not happen in McMinnville. The farm was outside Sheridan, southwest of McMinnville. Sources put it between about 9 and 13 miles away.
• The 2013 analyst had worked for space agencies. François Louange of IPACO had previously done image analysis for NASA, the European Space Agency and GEIPAN, the French government's UFO office.
• The town now has a UFO festival. McMinnville holds an annual UFO festival at the McMenamins Hotel Oregon.

Competing explanations

A small model on a wire. Sheaffer, Klass and IPACO argue that the object hangs below the overhead wires close to the camera, and that the garage shadows put the photographs in the morning, contradicting the Trents' timing. Without an object of known size in the frame, nothing in the two pictures fixes the distance, and the wires offer an obvious rigging point.

A large, distant object. Hartmann's original analysis and Maccabee's later work found the photographs consistent with a large object at a distance. Maccabee's points about the lighting, the brightness of the underside and the missing thread are the strongest form of this reading, and he disputes IPACO's geometry directly.

An honest account with ordinary memory drift. The differences between the 8 June and 10 June versions, about who saw the object first and who fetched the camera, are the kind of detail that shifts in the retelling of a startling event. Sheaffer cites them as a credibility problem. They are fair to examine, because the case rests so heavily on two witnesses.

Later life of the case

McMinnville is still one of the most cited UFO photograph cases, largely because of the Condon Report's favourable language in a study whose overall conclusion was sceptical. The record since has moved the other way: Sheaffer's shadow argument, Hartmann's withdrawal and the 2013 IPACO studies all favour a model. Maccabee's rebuttals keep the dispute open.

Finding

Two witnesses who held to their story for nearly fifty years produced two photographs that the Condon study could not dismiss. Since then the technical case has moved toward a small model hung from the wires: the shadow evidence on the timing, the withdrawal of the study's own favourable assessment, and IPACO's report of a thread. No model, thread or confession has ever been produced, and Maccabee's objections have not been answered to everyone's satisfaction. The strongest reading leans toward a model, but the case is not settled.

What still will not resolve: the true size and distance of the object, which two photographs with no reference object in frame cannot supply on their own.