The Trent UFO Photographs and the McMinnville UFO Festival
Near Mcminnville, Oregon
On the evening of the eleventh of May, nineteen fifty, a farm wife named Evelyn Trent was walking back toward her house southwest of McMinnville after feeding her rabbits when she looked up and saw a slow moving, metallic, disk shaped object drifting toward her out of the northeast. She shouted for her husband Paul, who ran outside, looked up, then dashed back in for a camera loaded with film. He snapped two photographs before the object tilted and sped away to the west.
Those two images, showing a shiny disk hanging over the Trent farm, were reprinted in the local paper, then in newspapers nationwide, and finally in Life magazine in June of that year. They remain among the most famous, and most argued over, images ever taken of an alleged flying saucer. Skeptics have called them a clever hoax, perhaps a small model hung from a wire, while some analysts insist they show a genuine unexplained object.
Both Paul and Evelyn Trent held to their story for the rest of their lives. Half a century later, in the year two thousand, McMenamins Hotel Oregon here in downtown McMinnville hosted the first UFO Festival to mark the anniversary of the sighting. It has grown into one of the largest gatherings of its kind in the country, drawing believers, skeptics, and costumed alien enthusiasts into these streets every spring.
