Paul Trent
Paul Trent was a farmer in McMinnville, Oregon, and one of the two witnesses who photographed an unidentified flying object on May 11, 1950, producing what became known as the McMinnville UFO Photographs — among the most famous and rigorously analyzed UFO photographs ever taken.
| Role | Farmer; UFO witness and photographer |
|---|
The Sighting
On the evening of May 11, 1950, Trent's wife Evelyn Trent noticed a slow-moving metallic disc-shaped object approaching from the northeast while she was walking back to their farmhouse. She called for Paul, who came outside and observed the object. He retrieved his camera and photographed the disc twice before it accelerated away to the northwest. The two images show the object at slightly different positions relative to the farmhouse and power lines, consistent with the account of a moving craft.
Significance to UFO Research
The photographs were analyzed by William H. Hartman for the Condon Committee in 1967. Hartman's photometric analysis concluded the object's underside brightness was consistent with a genuinely distant craft — not a small suspended model — and that atmospheric extinction effects placed it much farther from the camera than a hoax object would be. The committee's formal report described the object as consistent with "an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial."
Trent's photographs, taken with a standard consumer camera, remain significant partly because neither he nor his wife had any apparent motive for fabrication and because the technical analysis by an astronomer endorsed their credibility.