McMinnville

McMinnville and the Trent Photographs

On 11 May 1950 Evelyn Trent went out to feed the rabbits on a farm outside this Oregon town and saw a metallic disc drifting slowly over the field. She called her husband, who managed two photographs before the object went off to the west. The Trents did not try to profit: they finished the roll, left it at the local chemist, and the pictures reached a newspaper through a banker they knew. The frames have been argued over for decades — a 1969 analysis for the Condon Committee found no sign of a suspension or a montage, while later work points to a possible model hung on a wire under the power lines. They remain the two most famous photographs in the subject, and the argument has not closed.