McMinnville 1950: two photographs, one wire and a verdict that never ruled out a model

On 11 May 1950 Paul Trent took two photographs of a disk-shaped object over his farm near McMinnville, Oregon. The Air Force-funded Condon study found them consistent with what the witnesses described, but said it could not rule out a model hanging from an overhead wire.

45.1042° N · 123.3306° W · Trent farm, near McMinnville, Oregon · 11 May 1950

Source: Condon Report · DTIC

A disk over the farmyard

The Condon Report's case study puts the sighting on the witnesses' farm, about 10 miles southwest of McMinnville, Oregon, on 11 May 1950. The accounts it drew on give the time as 7:45 p.m. or 7:30 p.m. PST, and describe the weather as dull with an overcast at about 5,000 feet. The first witness, the farmer's wife, was feeding rabbits in the back yard, south of the house and east of the garage, when she saw the object ^[1].

According to the same study, the couple first looked for their camera in the car before she remembered it was in the house. It was already loaded, with two or three shots on a roll bought that winter. Her husband took one picture, wound the film on and moved to his right to take a second. He estimated that both were taken within thirty seconds. The object then moved off rapidly toward the west ^[2]. Paul Trent's camera was later identified as a Roamer 1 made by the Universal Camera Corporation, with a shutter fixed at about 1/50 second ^[8].

the object was coming in toward us and seemed to be tipped up a little bit.

— Witness account quoted in the Condon Report, Case 46 [2]

From a davenport to the front page

The Trents did not seek publicity. The Condon study records that they were afraid of getting into trouble with the government. Bill Powell, a reporter for the McMinnville Telephone Register, heard about the photographs from two local bankers, Ralph and Frank Wortman. He found the negatives on the floor under a davenport, where the Trents' children had been playing with them ^[3]. Bruce Maccabee, who later spoke with Evelyn Trent many times, gives a slightly different route: a relative's boyfriend suggested showing the photos to the banker Frank Wortmann, who then called the newspaper ^[8].

The Telephone Register ran the story and both pictures on its front page on Thursday, 8 June 1950. Portland and Los Angeles papers followed on 9 and 10 June, and Life magazine printed the pictures the following week. The couple then travelled to New York to appear on the television programme "We the People" ^[3].

The negatives were not returned to them. The Condon study says the Colorado project found that the negatives had gone to the International News Photo Service, later part of United Press International, and was allowed to examine them ^[4]. Maccabee writes that UPI sent them to the McMinnville paper's editor in 1970, and that he found them on the editor's desk in 1975 ^[8].

Expert photographers declared there has been no tampering with the negatives.

— Editor's note, McMinnville Telephone Register, 8 June 1950, quoted in the Condon Report [3]

Hartmann's tests in 1967

William Hartmann, the Colorado project's investigator, interviewed the Trents about 17 years after the sighting ^[1]. He found it hard to see any motive for a fabrication, though he noted that afterwards the witnesses did profit to the extent of a trip to New York. He also raised a possible problem himself: the object, the telephone pole and a distant house are lit from the east, and the shadows could suggest the photographs were taken on a dull but sunlit day at, say, 10 a.m. ^[4].

His tests made an optical fabrication seem remote, and a model thrown into the air by hand unlikely, because the object showed no sign of rotation. The test that mattered most pointed the other way. In both pictures the object hangs beneath roughly the same point on a pair of overhead wires, even though the camera had moved. Between the two shots the disk is about 8% farther away and the wires about 10% farther away ^[5].

Hartmann then measured brightness on the original negatives. To match the photographs, he found, a small model would have needed a very white surface on its shaded underside. As far as the photometry was reliable, it pointed to an object with a bright, shiny surface, at considerable distance and tens of metres across ^[6].

These tests do not rule out the possibility that the object was a small model suspended from the nearby wire by an unresolved thread.

— William K. Hartmann, Condon Report, Case 46 [5]

What the Condon verdict actually says

Hartmann's conclusion is often cited as an endorsement of the photographs. It does open by calling McMinnville one of the few reports in which all factors investigated appear consistent with an extraordinary flying object, but it goes straight on to the caveat quoted below. In the same passage Hartmann notes that the object's position under the same part of the wire in both photos can be used to argue for a suspended model ^[6].

Retellings often say the Air Force analysed the negatives in 1950 and that the Condon Report declared the photographs authentic. The documents show neither: the negatives sat with a news agency until the Colorado project tracked them down ^[4], Maccabee calls Hartmann's 1967 work the first scientific analysis of the sighting ^[8], and Hartmann wrote that a fabrication had not been ruled out ^[6].

It cannot be said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication

— Condon Report, Case 46, conclusion [6]

Shadows, weather and a thread

In an unpublished paper written in November 1969, Robert Sheaffer argued that the sharp shadows on the garage wall were cast directly by the sun, low in the east, at about 8:20 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. He also cited Weather Bureau records from McMinnville that show perfectly clear skies at 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. on 11 May, not the overcast the witnesses described ^[7]. Maccabee writes that Hartmann later said Sheaffer's work removed the case from consideration as evidence for disk-like craft ^[8].

Maccabee re-examined the original negatives from 1975 onwards. He argued that a cloud could have produced sharp shadows on the east wall, and concluded that the case could not be proven a hoax and that the evidence indicated it was not one ^[8].

In 2013 three researchers from the French group IPACO analysed scans of the negatives with image-analysis software. They judged a small object hanging below a power wire to be the most convincing explanation ^[9]. A follow-up study that June reported finding traces of a suspension thread in both pictures ^[10]. No official finding has settled the case.

the hypothesis of a small object hanging below a power wire is the most convincing.

— Cousyn, Louange and Quick, IPACO report, 2013 [9]

Last fact-checked: 2026-10-03. Every claim cites its source.