The McMinnville Photographs
A farming couple took two photographs of a disc over their yard, and people are still arguing about them more than seventy years later.
What was reported
On the evening of 11 May 1950, Evelyn Trent was feeding rabbits on the family farm in Oregon when she saw a metallic, disc-shaped object moving slowly across the sky. Her husband Paul fetched the camera and took two pictures before it drifted away.
The photos stayed in the house until a local newspaper heard about them and printed them that June; Life magazine followed. In the late 1960s the US government's Condon Committee studied them and called this one of the few reports in which everything examined seemed consistent with what the witnesses described.
Explanations offered
Sceptics argue the disc was a small model hanging from the overhead wires visible above it, and that the shadows suggest the photos were taken in the morning, not the evening as the Trents said. Others have analysed the same pictures and disagreed. The Trents never made money from them and never changed their story.
- When
- 11 May 1950
- Where
- Near Sheridan, Oregon, USA
- Witnesses
- Evelyn and Paul Trent
- Status
- Disputed
Famous cases are real, widely reported events. Each file sets out what witnesses said and the explanations that have been offered, without taking a side.