The Trent Photos

Background

Paul and Evelyn Trent farmed a small property between McMinnville and Sheridan in Oregon’s Yamhill County, keeping chickens and rabbits. The family owned a simple folding roll-film camera, a Universal Roamer, which was already partly loaded when the sighting took place.

The Trents later said that their first instinct was to keep quiet, partly because they assumed the object might be a secret military craft and did not want to get into trouble. The pictures only came to light weeks later, after the rest of the roll had been used up and the film developed.

What was reported

According to the couple, Evelyn was finishing the evening chores at around 7:30 or 7:45 p.m. on May 11 when she saw the object to the northeast, moving slowly westward. She called Paul, who fetched the camera, took one picture, wound on the film and took a second from a few feet away, within about thirty seconds. After the second shot, they said, the object picked up speed and disappeared to the west.

A friend, Frank Wortman, encouraged Paul to show the prints to the press. Bill Powell, a reporter for the McMinnville Telephone-Register, visited the farm and, according to the Condon report, found the negatives ‘on the floor under a davenport’, where the Trent children had been playing with them. The paper ran both photos on its front page on June 8, 1950. Within days they were in newspapers in Portland and Los Angeles, and Life magazine published them later that month. The Trents traveled to New York to appear on the television program We the People, and national reporters briefly nicknamed the town ‘Saucerville’.

Investigations and official findings

There is no record of a detailed military investigation in 1950. The serious examination came in 1967, when astronomer William K. Hartmann, then working for the Air Force-funded University of Colorado UFO study led by physicist Edward Condon, located the original negatives, which had passed from the International News Photo Service to United Press International. He visited the farm, compared the photos with the surrounding landmarks and measured how much haze lightened the object compared with nearby features.

Hartmann estimated that the object was roughly a kilometer away and therefore large, and he wrote that all the factors he had examined appeared consistent with the witnesses’ claim that an ‘evidently artificial’ disc tens of meters across had flown past, while adding that the evidence did not ‘positively rule out a fabrication’. He also tested whether a small model hanging from the overhead wires in the photos could produce the same result, and found he could not rule it out. His report, published in 1969, left the case among the small group the study could not explain.

Explanations and debate

Skeptics have focused on the lighting. Investigator Robert Sheaffer, who first studied the photos in 1969, argues that the shadows on the garage show the pictures were taken in the morning, not the evening as the Trents said, and he cites Weather Bureau records reporting no clouds that evening to reflect light onto the scene. He has also promoted a stereoscopic analysis suggesting the object is small and close and did not move between the two frames. Others have suggested a model, a trash-can lid or a vehicle side mirror; researcher Joel Carpenter proposed a mirror from an old truck. In 2013 and 2014 a French group, IPACO, published an image analysis arguing that the object was small, close to the camera and probably hanging from a thread.

Defenders, led by optical physicist Bruce Maccabee, who studied the negatives in detail from the 1970s, argued that the haze measurements point to a large, distant object and that the shadows can be explained by light scattered from bright clouds near the setting sun. Supporters also stress that the Trents never sought money, repeated a consistent account for nearly half a century and, by family accounts, maintained until their deaths in the 1990s that they had photographed something real.

Why it still matters

The two pictures are among the most reproduced UFO images ever taken, and they are often used as a test case for photo analysis methods. The negatives themselves became the subject of a dispute: Maccabee borrowed them in the 1970s and in 2001 sent them back to the News-Register, the successor to the original paper, which then kept them despite requests from the Trents’ daughters. McMinnville now holds an annual UFO festival each May, built around the photographs that put the town on the map.