The History of the 1950 Trent UFO Sighting in McMinnville, Oregon

The very first McMenamins UFO Festival took place on May 11^th, 2000 at Hotel Oregon in McMinnville, Oregon. Ufologist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, the expert on the Trent case, was invited as a guest speaker and presented on the famous UFO sighting by Paul and Evelyn Trent in 1950, in commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of that event. (And this year is the 23^rd annual UFO Fest!)

You may have seen the original Trent photo, but do you know the whole story? This article from the McMenamins newsletter, Resonance from the Festival, originally published in May 2000, describes in detail one of the most famous UFO sightings ever documented…

1950 Flying Saucer Photos Still Offer Best Proof of UFOs

By Tim Hills

“[The 1950 McMinnville Case] 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, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses.” – Conclusions for Case No. 46 in the U.S. Airforce/University of Colorado’s Condon Report, 1969

You could always count on good conversation at Joyce and Iva Widness’ Beauty Maid Shoppe. The sisters had been twisting hair and chatting it up with customers in their hairdressing parlor in McMinnville’s Hotel Oregon since the mid-1930s. By 1950, the Beauty Maid was well established as the latest scoop on most any subject, especially local bits.

In the spring of 1950, talk at the Beauty Maid likely covered a sweeping range of topics, not unlike those discussed in many other small towns of that era: dreams of cruising in one of the new Nash Airflyte Rambler convertibles now at Bennette Motors; whether Mother’s Day had really been a break or just more work than a normal day; the continuing lack of rain; Linfield College’s graduation ceremony; a daughter’s second-place finish in the Miss McMinnville contest; what to expect at the new Buster Brown Shoe Store; the incessant gloating by the “Hotelmen” (the Hotel Oregon-sponsored bowling team) after their recent victory in the city league; a young son’s unfortunate accident at the VFW marble tournament; the best candidate for mayor (and who will actually win); opinions about the recently arrived Wedgewood dinnerware patterns at Bernice Cuffel’s gift shop around the corner; plans for the biggest-ever “Shodeo” parade; and whether parking should be restored on Baker Street.

On June 8, however, the overriding subject for the day at the Hotel Oregon beauty parlor was UFOs. All other news suddenly seemed irrelevant, for June 8 was the day McMinnville’s weekly, the Telephone Register, printed on its front page photographs of a flying saucer taken by a local man and his wife at their nearby farm. Joyce, one of the shop’s two sibling proprietors, recalls that time well. She said most of the women who came into the Beauty Maid that day (and days immediately following) voiced opinions that the photos and the accompanying story were no hoax. The couple at the center of the incident, Paul and Evelyn Trent, were well known as hard-working, honest people. No one believed the Trents would—or could—fake something as sophisticated as the truly remarkable images in the photos. Future intensive investigations would come to that same conclusion.

The Trent photos were immediately heralded as the “best [flying saucer photos] yet in existence” and were reprinted in newspapers and magazines around the country. In the years and decades since, the photos and accounts of farmer Trent and his wife Evelyn have only escalated in significance, for the very fact that, unlike so much other UFO documentation, nobody has been able to disprove the veracity of the Trent materials. Today they hold the lofty status of being among a very select group of records that stands as the best proof of UFOs’ existence.

The Trent sighting in 1950 was far from a solitary incident. Since 1947, reports of flying saucers had been accumulating around the country. A significant number of the earliest reports came from the Pacific Northwest, including a barrage of sightings in Portland on July 4, 1947.

Reports continued to stream in nationwide through 1948 and ’49. Then, early in 1950, a flurry of new sightings prompted no less than The New York Times and President Harry S. Truman to address the issue. Prior to the McMinnville encounter of May 1950, the most recent Oregon sighting of note had occurred in mid-1949. American Airlines pilots flying over the Cascade Mountains during a regularly scheduled commercial flight encountered a flying saucer. They were able to provide details about the UFO, a description which would later fit hand in glove with the saucer captured in the Trent photos.

The Trents themselves had even witnessed UFOs before May 11, 1950, according to Evelyn Trent. She told an interviewer that she and her husband had seen similar flying objects while visiting the Oregon Coast on three previous occasions. The point is, the Trent sighting was not an aberration, but rather a continuation of an existing pattern. The great significance that their encounter had over previous ones is that the Trents recorded it on film.

Though both Mr. and Mrs. Trent have passed away, their story survives in many written accounts compiled since 1950. Considering the great amount of time that passed between some accounts, their details vary surprisingly little. Here is a synopsis of their statements: It was approximately 7:30pm, Thursday May 11, a gray, overcast day. Evelyn went out behind their farmhouse—situated about 11 miles southwest of McMinnville—to feed her rabbits. The rabbits gave no indication of disturbance, but Mrs. Trent was startled to see a large, metallic-looking, disc-shaped object hovering in the sky a little to the northeast of their farm. Evelyn yelled at Paul to come look and then ran toward the house to fetch him. For a short time, they scrambled around looking for their camera, a very basic model known as a folding Roamer. Once the camera was found, they both came back outside and spotted the disc again, moving slowly toward the west.

The Trents estimated that the object was maybe 30 feet in diameter and came within a quarter mile of where they were standing. It made no noise. No life-form nor light nor flame was detected. Evelyn noticed “something oval-shaped on top of the object in the center.” Years later, she would say this was where they thought “the man [whomever—or whatever—was piloting the craft] would sit.” While hovering, the strange craft shifted both its position and orientation. After a long period, it tipped, slowly accelerated then moved away rapidly toward the west. The saucer did not rotate. It just sort of glided and crated a breeze as it flew.

Paul clicked off a picture, advanced the film as fast as he could and then, as the object gathered speed and turned toward the northwest, he had to move rapidly to his right to get the second picture. Both were snapped within 30 seconds.

Evelyn then ran into the house and called her mother-in-law, who lived on a neighboring property. When she didn’t get an answer, Evelyn dashed back outside to see the object “dimly vanishing toward the west.”

In 1999, a longtime McMinnville resident strolled through the newly reopened Hotel Oregon and saw paintings and articles commemorating the 1950 Trent UFO sighting. The experience shook loose a long-dormant memory that adds a whole other dimension to McMinnville’s famous encounter.

“I’m sure it was a spaceship…yes, from Mars or somewhere,” the 68-year-old woman recalled in an interview at Hotel Oregon in April of 2000. Her opinion is worthy of note because she saw the thing herself. As a matter of fact, she exclaimed, dozens of people saw it! Now this is a revelation. To this point, it was widely held that Paul and Evelyn Trent were the only ones to spy a flying saucer on that May day in McMinnville.

The woman, who prefers to remain anonymous, explained that on the afternoon of May 11, 1950, word was buzzing around town that a UFO had come to visit. She was 18 and a Linfield College student at the time and remembers upon hearing those words, dropping what she was doing and jumping in a car with three friends. They sped out to the specified spot—southeast of town on Three Mile Lane—where it quickly became apparent that the sight had piqued the curiosity of many other people. When the four teenagers approached the area where Evergreen Aviation stands today, they saw a line of cars pulled off on the shoulder of Three Mile Lane. Dozens of people, mostly still in their cars, were staring in a southeasterly direction toward a grove of trees, near the present site of the McMinnville Airport. Their collective gaze was fixed at above treetop level, where there hovered a “steel gray, metal saucer.”

It was “huge,” the woman exclaimed. There was no flame and no noise. It just seemed to be floating. In fact, the oversize disc remained suspended in air for so long, the woman and here friends were getting bored. Finally, the thing took off upwards, moving fast, and quickly disappeared.

The encounter went unreported in the McMinnville newspaper, something the woman can’t explain. Maybe, she offers, yet another flying saucer report just wasn’t considered newsworthy in 1950. McMinnville’s mass sighting might have been overlooked and entirely forgotten had it not been for the fact that a few hours later and a few miles to the west, Paul and Evelyn Trent found their camera in time.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Trents’ story is the aftermath. If you saw something as unusual as a flying saucer—and took photographs of it—wouldn’t you run the film out to be developed and then have show-and-tells with everyone you knew (and even those you didn’t)? Well, the Trents did the opposite. They did not show the photos or tell the story to anyone until June 7, when Paul finally mentioned the incident and flashed the pictures to his banker. This was nearly a month after the sighting.

The Trents’ delay seems to demonstrate a reluctance to expose what they believed was a secret government project. Asked why he took so long to bring the story and photos to light, Paul replied, “I was kinda scared of it. You know, you hear so much talk about those things [flying saucers]—and the government…I didn’t believe all that talk about flying saucers before, but now I have an idea the army knows what they are.” He also stated that he wasn’t eager for the publicity that publication of his story and photos would likely, and eventually did, bring.

As it happened, the Trents weren’t the ones responsible for printing the photos. Their banker, Frank Wortman, and his brother, Ralph, borrowed the snapshots and brought them directly to the editor of the local newspaper, the Telephone Register (now the News-Register). The editor quickly dispatched reporter Bill Powell to the Trent home where he became the first to interview the couple about the encounter. He spoke to Paul and Evelyn separately and heard the same story from both. When the reporter asked to borrow the negatives, the Trents couldn’t find them at first. Finally, the strips were discovered under the davenport. The two Trent children were playing with them.

The next day, Thursday, June 8, the Telephone Register printed both negatives full-frame on the front page above the details gathered by Powell. America jumped all over the story. Portland and Los Angeles papers were the first to pick up on it, running photos and articles on June 9 and 10. On June 12 and 13, the story aired on national news broadcasts originating from Washington, D.C. LIFE magazine reprinted the photos in its June 26 issue, and on July 7, the Trents themselves told the story, after being flown to the East Coast to appear on the New York-based radio and television program, We, The People. Meanwhile, the Telephone Register was flooded with requests from all over the country for copies of its June 8 issue. For a short time, McMinnville was known appropriately as “Saucerville, USA.”

In the weeks and years following the May 1950 incident, the Trents and their photographs came under the scrutiny of many investigators and scientists (when interviewed in 1967, Mrs. Trent even recalled that back in the summer of 1950, “two detectives” examined their house and furnishings for reasons she never understood—perhaps a visit from the storied Men in Black?). A focal point of all investigations was the Trents’ pair of original negatives. It was determined quickly (and consistently reaffirmed) that the negatives themselves had never been doctored. As far as the scenes they depicted, every shadow, reflection, and distance within the two frames were analyzed for inconsistencies that might indicate a hoax. Nothing conclusive was found. In the most comprehensive study of the case, conducted by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, find that the unidentified flying object visible in both negatives is not the result of some form of trickery. Instead, he concludes, the object corroborates the Trents’ statements about the incident. In other words, it’s not a hubcap the Trents tossed up for a snapshot.

Questioned today about the authenticity of the Trent flying saucer, Joyce, the retired Beauty Maid Shoppe hairdresser, states emphatically that she’s still a believer. She has to be. You see, back in 1962, she saw one herself. She and her husband were walking to their McMinnville home when, up along the tops of the trees lining the street, a UFO whizzed by. It was disc-shaped, about 15 feet in diameter, with lights the size of grapefruits on the bottom…

The roll of film that Paul Trent used to photograph the flying saucer hovering near his farm in May 1950 itself provides interesting information about the case and bolsters the legitimacy of the Trents’ claims. Paul Trent bought the roll of Kodak film the previous winter to shoot some snow scenes around the farm. These winter views were followed on the roll by the two images of the flying saucer. The rest of the frames on the roll showed the Trent family gathered for a picnic on Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 14 (three days later). This sequence not only confirms the Trents’ statement that they took just two shots of the UFO, it also demonstrates that they weren’t experimenting with ways to make a fabricated scene look as real as possible. If that were the case, you’d expect to find many frames or even many rolls of shots the public was never intended to see: various inferior angles of the “UFO” and shots that inadvertently revealed the hoax. There were none of these.

The roll of film and its sequence of photos imply another important point. The Trents weren’t in a hurry to broadcast the images. Paul didn’t have the film developed immediately after taking the UFO shots. Instead, he finished the roll on Mother’s Day. Then, he waited a while longer to develop the roll, and when he did, he didn’t choose a specialty lab, but rather a photo finishing service through a McMinnville drug store—undoubtedly the most convenient and cheapest option. In addition, as noted earlier, the Trents didn’t mention the flying saucer or their photos to anyone for a month, and then, it was only by another person’s urging that the incident and shots were made public. Finally, it seems obvious, the Trents didn’t place a high value on the negatives since their young children were found playing with them under the couch. Not really the expected actions of people trying to pass off a hoax for personal gain, huh?