McMinnville UFO photographs

The McMinnville UFO photographs were taken on a farm near McMinnville, Oregon, United States, in 1950. The photos were reprinted in Life magazine and in newspapers across the nation, and are often considered to be among the most famous ever taken of a UFO. Most UFO skeptics have concluded that the photos are a hoax, but many ufologists continue to argue that the photos are genuine, and show an unidentified object in the sky.

Paul and Evelyn Trent lived on a farm approximately nine miles (15 km) from McMinnville (the Trent farm was actually located just outside Sheridan, Oregon). According to her reports, on May 11, 1950 at 7:30 p.m., Evelyn Trent was walking back to her farmhouse after feeding rabbits on her farm. Before reaching the house she claimed to see a slow-moving, metallic disk-shaped object heading in her direction from the northeast. She yelled for her husband, who was inside the house; upon leaving the house he claimed he also saw the object. After a short time he went back inside their home to obtain a camera; he said he managed to take two photos of the object before it sped away to the west. Paul Trent's father claimed he briefly viewed the object before it flew away.

It took some time for Paul Trent to have the film developed. When he mentioned the incident to his banker, Frank Wortmann, the banker was intrigued enough to display the photos from his bank window in McMinnville. Shortly afterwards Bill Powell, a local reporter, convinced Mr. Trent to loan him the negatives. Powell examined the negatives and found no evidence that they were tampered with or faked. On June 8, 1950, Powell's story of the incident—accompanied by the two photos—was published as a front-page story in the local McMinnville newspaper, the Telephone-Register. The headline read: "At Long Last—Authentic Photographs Of Flying Saucer[?]" The story and photos were subsequently picked up by the International News Service (INS) and sent to other newspapers around the nation, thus giving them wide publicity. Life magazine published cropped versions of the photos on June 26, 1950, along with a photo of Trent and his camera. The Trents had been promised that the negatives would be returned to them; however, they were not returned—Life magazine told the Trents that it had misplaced the negatives. In 1967 the negatives were found in the files of the United Press International (UPI), a news service which had merged with INS years earlier. The negatives were then loaned to Dr. William K. Hartmann, an astronomer who was working as an investigator for the Condon Committee, a government-funded UFO research project based at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Trents were not immediately informed that their "lost" negatives had been found. Hartmann interviewed the Trents and was impressed by their sincerity; the Trents never received any money for their photos, and he could find no evidence that they had sought any fame or fortune from them. In Hartmann's analysis, he wrote to the Condon Committee that "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."

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