COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • JULY 18, 2018
•
9A
Off beat Oregon: McMinnville debate
over UFO sighting continues even today
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velyn and Paul Trent
lived on a farm between
Sheridan and McMinn-
ville in the years just aft er the
Second World War. Th ey were,
by all accounts, just-plain
folks — good neighbors, solid
citizens — not at all the sort of
people one would suspect of
making up a UFO story.
Th at’s one of the factors
that lend an unusual amount
of credibility to their account
of having seen — and pho-
tographed — a UFO outside
their home.
Th eir story runs like this:
On the evening of May 11,
1950, Evelyn left the house
around 7:30 p.m. to do her
evening farm chores; she and
Paul kept chickens and rab-
bits, and the animals needed
to be fed.
Outside the house, it was a
nice quiet overcast late-spring
evening. Th e animals showed
no sign of any disturbance,
other than the customary
mealtime eagerness. Every-
thing seemed completely ordi-
nary and typical ... everything,
that is, except for the fl ying
saucer hovering close over the
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farm a little to the northeast.
Evelyn ran back into the
house to get Paul to come
out and look at it. Paul took a
moment to hunt up his cam-
era — a compact folding-bel-
lows-type camera, Universal
Roamer brand, a model that
took 60-mm roll fi lm (Kodak
120 or 620). He soon found it,
and followed Evelyn out of the
house.
Th e UFO was still there. It
was of the classic fl ying-saucer
style — a metallic disc, fl at on
the bottom and with a post
sticking up in the center. It
was hovering in the sky, now
drift ing steadily toward the
northwest. Paul shot a picture,
then hurriedly advanced the
fi lm — which on one of those
old cameras involved turning
a small chrome knob three or
four full revolutions, a process
that took several seconds.
By the time he was done, the
UFO was accelerating toward
the northwest. Paul ran sever-
al paces to keep it in sight and
clicked off his second expo-
sure as it swept on, gathering
speed, and then it disappeared
over the horizon.
Th e Trents thought what
they’d seen had been some
sort of government experi-
ment, possibly a secret one; so
they didn’t tell anyone about
it. And fi lm was expensive, so
Paul wasn’t about to pay for
development of a half-shot
roll or waste the few exposures
he had remaining. Eventually,
though, the remaining expo-
sures were all taken — a few
snapshots at a Mothers’ Day
picnic fi nished it off — and
Paul took the fi lm in to get
prints made.
When he showed the two
UFO shots to his friend Frank
Wortman, Wortman talk-
ed him into telling the local
newspaper about it ... and so,
on the front page of the June
8, 1950, edition of the Mc-
Minnville Telephone-Register,
both photographs appeared.
(Th e
Telephone-Register
merged with the McMinn-
ville News-Reporter in 1953
to form today’s McMinnville
News-Register.)
Th e photos ignited a nation-
wide sensation: what appeared
to be the fi rst example of a fl y-
ing saucer in action, witnessed
by two people and captured on
fi lm. Th e national press brief-
ly rechristened McMinnville
“Saucerville,” and representa-
tives of national media started
courting the Trents. Th ey fl ew
to New York City to appear
on live television, on “We the
People.” Life Magazine ran a
story. Syndicated radio host
Frank Edwards, whose pop-
ular news-and-opinion show
aired nationwide on the Mu-
tual Broadcasting Network,
was particularly interested in
the sighting, and talked about
it a lot.
Th e media outlets all want-
ed to borrow the negatives,
of course, and they soon got
lost. (Th ey resurfaced sever-
al decades later, considerably
damaged.)
In a fi eld thickly crowded
with sketchy characters and
clever fakers, and with an
equal number of skeptics and
debunkers, the Trents’ story
and pictures have never quite
fi t in. Th e Trents themselves
were clearly solid citizens. Al-
though they seemed at fi rst
to enjoy their moment in the
sun, they never much seemed
to welcome it and soon be-
came obviously tired of the
attention.
Th e years ticked by. Th e
Trents got back to their lives,
and the hubbub settled down.
Th e topic of UFOs, though,
was just starting to heat up.
By the end of the decade,
thousands of people were
claiming to have sighted alien
spacecraft in the sky, and the
usual hordes of imaginative
charlatans were crowding the
fi eld with claims and hoaxes
of widely varying degrees of
believability.
During this time, the U.S.
Air Force had been trying to
get a handle on the issue. Th is
was proving hard to do. Near-
ly everyone had a strong opin-
ion on the subject and a high
degree of contempt for the op-
posite position.
Finally, in 1965, the Air
Force found a legitimate uni-
versity with a well-creden-
tialed physicist who would be
willing to undertake a thor-
ough study of the matter: Dr.
Edward Condon of the Uni-
versity of Colorado.
Condon’s report was re-
leased in 1968, and pret-
ty much fi rmly established
UFOlogy as a “border sci-
ence,” well outside the main-
stream. Of course, UFO
enthusiasts countered that
Condon had had strong con-
fi rmation bias to contend with
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— if he had ended up conclud-
ing that UFOs were real, they
claimed, his academic reputa-
tion would have been ruined.
So, he had a strong incentive
to minimize the evidence in
favor and maximize the evi-
dence against. Th ey professed
themselves unsurprised when
he concluded that there was
insuffi cient evidence to con-
sider UFOs as a reasonable
possibility.
Even so, Condon’s report
admitted that it was unable to
falsify the Trent photographs,
or fi nd damaging inconsisten-
cy in the story they’d told in
the countless interviews they’d
given in the year or two aft er
their sighting.
“Th is is one of the few UFO
reports in which all factors in-
vestigated, geometric, psycho-
logical, and physical, appear
to be consistent with the as-
sertion that an extraordinary
fl ying object, silvery, metallic,
disk-shaped, tens of meters in
diameter, and evidently artifi -
cial, fl ew within sight of two
witnesses,” the report noted.
However, it did leave open
the possibility that the object
had been a model suspended
from an overhead line one or
two dozen feet from the cam-
era — a theory that continues
to resonate with skeptics to-
day.
By giving grudging praise
to the Trent photographs, the
Condon Report brought them
to the attention of a new cadre
of amateur de-bunkers. Over
the decades that followed,
numerous theories emerged:
a trash-can lid on a string, a
side-view mirror from a 1947
Ford pickup, and so on.
Th e Trents both died in the
late 1990s, and both insisted
until the end that the photos
were legitimate. And, even to-
day, amateur analysts are dis-
agreeing about whether they
were lying. Th e conclusions
these analysts have reached,
so far, have been very pre-
dictable: confi rmed skeptics
conclude defi nitively that the
whole thing was a hoax, and
confi rmed UFO believers as-
sert positively that the photos
were demonstrably real.
All the intense scrutiny
over the years has successful-
ly proven only one thing: that
the photos are extraordinarily
resistant to being defi nitively
debunked — or, for that mat-
ter, confi rmed.
But then, the McMinnville
UFO sighting is a bit like
the D.B. Cooper mystery: If
someone ever were able to
put the question to rest, the
whole thing would probably
stop being interesting. And
if that ever happened, the
annual McMinnville UFO
festival — held for the past
two decades or so on the
fi rst full weekend aft er May
11 — might dry up and blow
away, which would be a real
tragedy.
So really, the whole thing
is probably better left as a
tantalizing mystery.
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