UFO Festival

At noon on the Saturday of the festival, the UFO Costume Parade sets off through downtown McMinnville. The festival’s own page says it “careens and cartwheels through town.” It is free and open to all ages, and anyone in costume may apply to march. In 2026 the McMenamins company posted that it would be “perched at the Rooftop Bar” of its Hotel Oregon, 310 NE Evans Street, “waiting for the Alien Parade,” with drinks from an Alien Invasion cocktail menu poured through the weekend. Below, the vendor fair ran along Third Street from 3 to 8 p.m. on Friday and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday. A free shuttle ran every 15 minutes from the Evergreen Aviation Museum to the Downtown Depot.

The McMinnville Downtown Association describes the town as “a quiet Willamette Valley town located an hour southwest of Portland.” It bills the event as “The World’s Largest UFO Festival” and says thousands of visitors come for the three days. McMenamins runs the festival, and Hotel Oregon is its base. The festival has been held each May since 2000.

Speakers, wine, and an alien costume ball

The festival’s information page offers two sides. “On the serious side, skeptics and believers alike are invited to hear from experts and experiencers as they make their cases at speaker events throughout the weekend.” The other side is parties, live music, costume contests for pets and humans, a street fair, a fun run, and food and drink.

The 26th annual festival, in 2026, opened on Thursday evening, May 14, with “Close Encounters of the 3rd Vine.” Six wineries poured samples in the Hotel Oregon tent from 5:30 to 7:30, with live music and a raffle, and costumes were encouraged. The speaker presentations ran Friday and Saturday at the McMinnville Community Center. They included Kelly Chase, Jason Martell, Rebecca Charbonneau, and a session billed as “The Interview They Tried to Stop,” in which Jeremy Corbell and the Nevada journalist George Knapp questioned an undisclosed whistleblower. A speaker Q&A followed on Saturday. A UAP Pass covered every presentation, the Q&A, and two drink tokens. McMenamins warned that the talks “sell out every year.” The podcast Into the Parabnormal recorded live at Hotel Oregon on Friday. UFO trivia was played there on Saturday. That morning, McMinnville’s parks department held a Kid’s Adventure Run, Carrera de aventura para niños, at Joe Dancer Park. Visit McMinnville listed a Landing Party and an Alien Costume Ball that “keep the festivities going well into the night.”

Buchanan Cellars ran its 12th annual “Take Me to Your Feed” Alien Pet Costume Contest in 2026. The winery reported its biggest crowd yet and all 40 contest spots filled. The judges included the school superintendent, Kourtney Ferrua, and the chiefs of Visit McMinnville and the chamber of commerce.

Past speakers have included Kathleen Marden on “UFO Abduction” in 2022 and Yvonne Smith in 2019. George Knapp presented “Hunt for the Skinwalker” in 2018, and Dr. Lynne Kitei and Peter Davenport have both spoken on the Phoenix Lights. In 2025 the 20-minute documentary “The Trent Photos” was shown at noon in Mattie’s Room at Hotel Oregon. The 27th annual festival is announced for May 14–15, 2027.

A historian in the county archives

The festival began with McMenamins buying Hotel Oregon. According to The Oregonian, Tim Hills, a historian for the hotel and restaurant chain, was researching the building and the town when he found a news story about the Trent photographs at the Yamhill County Historical Society. He saw a chance for the hotel to host an event.

The hotel reopened in 1999, and McMenamins hung paintings and articles about the 1950 sighting on its walls. A 2003 painting by Lyle Hehn shows the hotel’s old ground-floor beauty shop with the cupola hovering above it like a saucer. The first festival was held at Hotel Oregon on May 11, 2000, fifty years to the day after the sighting. The ufologist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, whom McMenamins calls the expert on the Trent case, gave the talk. The Oregonian reports that the event was meant to happen only once. It drew well enough that the downtown association added a parade the following year. No festival was held in 2020.

Two frames on a farm southwest of town

McMenamins’ history department has compiled an account from the Trents’ statements, which it says varied surprisingly little over the years. It was about 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 11, 1950, a gray, overcast day. The Trent farmhouse stood about 11 miles southwest of McMinnville. Evelyn Trent went out back to feed the rabbits. The festival’s history page says chickens and rabbits, and The Oregonian says chickens. The animals showed no sign of disturbance. To the northeast she saw a large, metallic-looking, disc-shaped object hanging in the sky. She shouted for her husband, Paul, and the two searched the house for their camera, a basic folding Kodak Roamer.

When they came back outside, the disc was moving slowly west. They guessed it was about 30 feet across and came within a quarter mile of them. It made no sound and showed no light, flame, or occupant. Evelyn noticed “something oval-shaped on top of the object in the center.” Years later she said that was where they thought “the man” would sit. Paul took one picture and wound the film as fast as he could. As the object turned northwest, he stepped quickly to his right for a second frame. He took both within 30 seconds. Evelyn ran in to telephone her mother-in-law on the neighboring place. There was no answer, and by the time she came back out the object was “dimly vanishing toward the west.”

The banker, the davenport, and Saucerville

The Trents told no one for nearly a month. On June 7, Paul mentioned the incident to his banker and showed him the pictures. The Oregonian says he showed them to a friend. “I was kinda scared of it,” Paul Trent said later. “You know, you hear so much talk about those things—and the government…I didn’t believe all that talk about flying saucers before, but now I have an idea the army knows what they are.”

The banker, Frank Wortman, and his brother Ralph borrowed the snapshots and took them to the editor of the weekly Telephone Register, now the News-Register. Reporter Bill Powell drove out and interviewed Paul and Evelyn separately, and he heard the same story from each. When he asked for the negatives, the Trents could not find them at first. They turned up under the davenport, where the two Trent children had been playing with them.

The paper printed both negatives full-frame on its front page on Thursday, June 8. That day, Joyce Widness later recalled, the women at the Beauty Maid Shoppe in Hotel Oregon talked of nothing else. She and her sister Iva had run the hair parlor there since the mid-1930s. Most of her customers, she said, held that the Trents were honest, hard-working people who would not, or could not, fake such pictures. Portland and Los Angeles papers ran the photos on June 9 and 10, and national broadcasts from Washington carried the story on June 12 and 13. LIFE reprinted them on June 26. On July 7 the Trents were flown east to tell the story on the New York program “We, The People.” For a short time McMinnville was known as “Saucerville, USA.”

Investigators followed. In 1967 Evelyn Trent recalled that “two detectives” had gone over the house and furnishings in the summer of 1950, for reasons she never understood. The Oregonian reports that a U.S. Air Force study published in 1967 found the photos “difficult to explain in a conventional way.” The McMenamins history quotes the conclusion on Case No. 46 in the 1969 Condon Report, the U.S. Air Force/University of Colorado study. It called the case “one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses.” Maccabee’s own study concluded that the object in the negatives was no trickery. The festival’s page says the photos “are said to be some of the most credible images of a UFO to date.”

Paul Trent had bought the roll of film the winter before, for snow scenes around the farm. After the snow come the two frames of the disc. The rest of the roll shows the family at a Mother’s Day picnic on Sunday, May 14, three days later.

The line of cars on Three Mile Lane

In 1999 a longtime resident walked through the newly reopened Hotel Oregon, saw the Trent paintings, and remembered something. In an interview at the hotel in April 2000, the 68-year-old woman, who asked not to be named, said that on the afternoon of May 11, 1950, word had gone around town that a UFO was visiting. She was 18 and a student at Linfield College. She jumped in a car with three friends and drove southeast of town on Three Mile Lane. A line of cars had pulled onto the shoulder near where Evergreen Aviation stands today, and dozens of people sat staring toward a grove of trees by the present airport. Above the treetops hung a “steel gray, metal saucer,” “huge,” silent, and without flame. It stayed so long that the four friends grew bored. Then it shot upward and was gone. The newspaper never reported it.

“I’m sure it was a spaceship,” she said, “yes, from Mars or somewhere.”