The Trent Photographs

A silent domed disc with a raised cupola hung low over the Trent farm at McMinnville, and Paul Trent photographed it twice before it accelerated away. The Condon Committee's astronomer Hartmann later found the images consistent with a genuine large artificial craft. The account is domestic in its detail. Evelyn Trent was outside feeding rabbits when she saw the disc and called for her husband, who came out with a camera. The tellings estimate its size at twenty to thirty feet in one account and thirty to thirty-five in another, roughly a mile off. Nothing in the record has the couple seeking anything from it at the time. By one account the photographs were later found stored under a couch, which is offered as evidence against a profit motive.

What is on the record

Three claimants come through three reporting channels and nine videos. The list carries Evelyn Trent twice, once by name and once as Mrs Trent. The tellings agree on the sequence and split on the aftermath. One says the photographs were sold widely and the family was mocked locally as the alien family. Another describes the negatives passing into the hands of researchers and a newspaper, and an ownership dispute with the Trent children that followed.

Claims of verification are made in the material and should be read as claims. Sources state that the negatives were examined and found unretouched and that many analysts, Maccabee among them, judged the images authentic. The sceptical side is in the file as well. Shermer calls the object a possible tossed hubcap, and Jesse Michels answers that the claim cannot be falsified. The archive holds one CIA record from the agency's FOIA UFO collection. Earlier versions of this page counted it as government corroboration, but it is classed as reporting. The archive's dating spans 1950 to 1952, which reflects sources discussing more than one Trent episode together rather than a settled second event.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3, testimony from more than one claimant describing one connected event, carried across three channels. It does not reach the document-corroborated tier because the one government record in the file counts as reporting rather than corroboration. Its substance is two negatives and two people who told the same story for the rest of their lives without profiting greatly from it. What the emulsion recorded is not resolved here.