The McMinnville Photos

On the evening of May 11, 1950, Evelyn Trent called her husband Paul to photograph a metallic disc she saw over their farm outside McMinnville, Oregon. Paul took two black-and-white photographs of a distinct disc-shaped object with a flat bottom and off-center structure. The images are among the most scrutinized UFO photographs in history and split analysts for 75 years.

The Trents finished the film roll before developing it, and the photos reached the local McMinnville Telephone-Register through a banker friend, then Life magazine. The couple never sought money, told the same modest story for four decades, and reportedly regarded the pictures as a nuisance. Both died in the 1990s maintaining their account.

The two negatives, which survive and have been examined repeatedly. The Condon Committee's photographic analyst, William Hartmann, concluded in 1969 that the photos' geometric and photometric factors were "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," while noting a fabrication could not be excluded. It was the report's most positive case finding.

Beyond Condon's analysis, none of consequence; the case predated organized Air Force interest in photographs of this type and was never a Blue Book centerpiece.

Skeptical analyses, principally by Philip Klass and Robert Sheaffer, argue the shadows on the Trents' garage suggest a morning exposure contradicting the told story, and that photogrammetry is consistent with a small model (a truck mirror or similar) suspended from visible overhead wires that cross the frame exactly above the object. Later independent analyses have gone both ways: some find suspension-thread evidence in enhanced scans, others find none and support a distant large object. Proponents emphasize the couple's lifelong consistency and absence of motive. The case remains the field's benchmark photographic standoff: the same negatives, read for decades, yielding opposite verdicts.