What happened
On the evening of May 11, 1950, Evelyn Trent was feeding rabbits on the farm near McMinnville when she saw a slowly gliding, metallic, saucer-shaped object with a turret in the sky. She called her husband, and Paul Trent managed to take two pictures before the object flew off to the west. The couple were in no hurry to reveal the photographs – they showed them to friends only after the rest of the roll had been developed. When the pictures reached the local newspaper, they were reprinted by the press across the country, and on June 26, 1950, by “Life” magazine. The negatives were later considered lost, but they were found in the 1960s and analyzed.
Witnesses
Evelyn and Paul Trent, a farming couple from near McMinnville.
Explanations and hypotheses
In 1969 the Condon Committee judged the photographs to be among the few in which all the factors investigated are consistent with the witnesses’ account. Skeptics, including Robert Sheaffer and Joel Carpenter, argue that the object was a small model hung from a wire beneath a power line and that the shadows on the buildings indicate the pictures were taken in the morning rather than the evening. The dispute over their authenticity continues.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
More: Wikipedia (en)