McMinnville UFO photographs

The Trents lived on a farm outside McMinnville. Around 7:30 p.m. on May 11, 1950, Evelyn Trent was feeding rabbits. She saw an object approaching from the northeast. Paul Trent fetched his camera and took two frames from the yard as the disc moved slowly westward, tilting slightly. The photos show a flat-bottomed disc with a dome or protrusion. Power lines run across the top of the frame.

The Trents did not develop the film for some days. A local banker saw the prints and passed them to the McMinnville Telephone-Register, which published them on June 8. Life magazine ran them on June 26, 1950.

William Hartmann analysed the photographs for the University of Colorado's Condon Report in 1968. He wrote that the photometric evidence was consistent with an object tens of metres across at a distance of over a kilometre. He also noted that a model hung from the wires could not be ruled out. Skeptics Philip Klass and Robert Sheaffer later argued that shadow angles suggested the photos were taken in the morning, not evening, and that the object's appearance matched a small model suspended from the wires. Later digital analyses by proponents disputed the shadow argument.

McMinnville remains one of the few classic-era UFO photographs never conclusively shown to be faked. The town holds an annual UFO festival in its honour.