What happened
Evelyn Trent was feeding rabbits behind the family farmhouse outside Sheridan, Oregon, when she saw a silvery, metallic-looking disc gliding slowly toward the farm. She called her husband Paul, who fetched their already-loaded camera and took two photographs as the object tilted and drifted before speeding off to the west. The couple, who thought it might be a secret military craft, finished the roll on Mother's Day and showed the prints to a few friends. A banker displayed them in his window, and reporter Bill Powell of the McMinnville Telephone-Register found the negatives on the floor where the children had been playing. His front-page story of 8 June 1950 was picked up nationally, and Life printed the photos on 26 June. Life then lost the negatives. Rediscovered at UPI in 1967, they were analysed for the University of Colorado UFO study, whose investigator called the case one of the few in which every factor checked seemed consistent with the witnesses' account.
The original account
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. It cannot be said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication, although there are some physical factors such as the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives which argue against a fabrication.
William K. Hartmann, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (Condon Report), Case 46, 1969, a US Air Force-funded study (public domain)
The official explanation
In the 1980s skeptics Philip Klass and Robert Sheaffer argued that shadows on the garage show the photos were taken in the morning, not at dusk as the Trents said, undermining their account; they proposed a small model, possibly a vehicle mirror, hung from the overhead wires. Hartmann himself had noted the object sat under the same wire in both frames. After seeing Sheaffer's work he withdrew his positive assessment. In 2013 the French group IPACO reported evidence of a suspension thread.
The anomalous case
Hartmann's original Condon analysis found that the photometry of the negatives, in particular how washed-out the object's underside looked compared with nearby structures, suggested it was distant and large rather than a small model close by. Physicist Bruce Maccabee re-measured the negatives in the 1970s and concluded they showed a real object in the sky, finding no trace of a supporting thread; he has disputed the shadow-timing argument. The Trents never sought money, were described by everyone who met them as unassuming farm people, and insisted until their deaths in the late 1990s that the event was real. Paul Trent said at the time he thought it was a secret Army craft, not a spaceship. Even skeptics agree the photographs are among the clearest ever taken of a claimed UFO.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Condon Report, Case 46: McMinnville Photographs report, files.ncas.org
Sources
- Condon Report (1969), Case 46: McMinnville, Oregon National Capital Area Skeptics (online edition of the Condon Report)
- McMinnville UFO photographs Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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