THE UFO RENASCENCE

For the first time in what seemed like forever the temperature outside managed to break a sweat at a warm 88 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a Sunday, mother’s day to be exact and the day was beautiful and sunny in what is usually a gray and wet day in Portland. Just days before, my Fiancée’s son Liam had set out his tomato plants and as I observed the plants got nipped a bit by frost that still was making its last stand.

It’s not often that the weather is worth talking about , but as the azure blue skies are clouded by chemtrails, and the black helicopters make their so called routine buzzing like giant mosquitoes, I feel the need to once again prepare myself for what I like to think is the summer UFO renascence.
This summer is especially fulfilling for me because after 13 years of UFO festivals in McMinnville Oregon I have been given the opportunity to broadcast my show from the festival, a celebration of UFO’s that rivals the celebrations in Roswell New Mexico. Tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of people all show up in the small city of McMinnville and remember the sighting and the famous photos taken by Paul Trent.
The McMinnville Oregon/ Trent photos have always been a contentious case and for decades many debunkers have claimed that the photos are hoaxes. However there has been no concrete proof to show that Paul and Evelyn Trent, the farmers who snapped the photos in May of 1950 were perpetrating a hoax.
The photos sat in the Trent home before they garnered any notoriety. It is told in the annals of UFO lore that the Trents had waited until the roll of film was finished before they even said anything.
Funny how they waited.
Maybe they were not UFO nuts and actually waited until they were sure of what they caught on film. The other interesting thing to note is that the photos were in the middle of the roll of film. There were no practice shots of the UFO and no other evidence to show that they were trying to create a hoax. Just two photo negatives showing an anomalous object buried amongst the mundane pictures of family and friends.
The photos turned out to be some of the first that ended up in a newspaper. If the people wanted to see a disc this was the best one, it was the closest one anyone ever captured.
On June 8, 1950 the McMinnville, Oregon Telephone Register displayed on its front pages two photographs of what is now known as the McMinnville Oregon UFO.
On June 10th, 1950 the story broke everywhere else and a saucer hungry public saw the pictures. Stories ran in all the papers. It was reported that Evelyn Trent was outside working on the family farm near Dayton Oregon. Dayton is about 11 miles south of McMinnville Oregon. Evelyn then claims she looked up and noticed a strange metallic object in the sky. She yelled for her husband to grab a camera. He ran outside and snapped the two famous photos. The photos eventually landed in a Life magazine feature on June 26th, 1950.
The Trents were just simple farmers. They obviously werenundefinedt flying saucer seekers or UFO nuts out to make a fast buck. Paul Trent even said at one time that he believed that the picture that he captured was that of a secret Military aircraft.
There was no talk of alien beings or men from Mars at the time. There was also a lot more fascination and wonder. Many people would like to believe that back in the 1950’s there was cynicism and paid debunkers that wanted to destroy the credibility of the Trents. That came later in the 1960’s after it was great sport to attack witnesses and writers who would talk about saucer stories.
The truth is that the Flying Saucer or the UFO in the 1940’s and 1950’s had become a common mystery that was shared by many people. In fact many magazines like TIME and LOOK would devote page after page about saucers stories. The obsession of the Flying saucer was also mostly an American fear of the Cold war. The thing that needs to be emphasized is that the UFO was at first discussed without the alien context. It then became more of an Extra-terrestrial or alien topic in as much that while we were not doing well in the space race we were all dreaming of space flight, manned missions to the Moon and to Mars. It was theorized that perhaps with a little help from our alien friends we could someday make it to other worlds.
The alien context of the UFO phenomenon has unfortunately dogged any objective analysis of the sightings. Many objective investigators are well aware that there are military test aircraft that can also be seen and the new breed of UFO researchers are also using history and eyewitness accounts to perhaps make the hypothesis that the Saucer sightings were part of a post World War II experiment with secret saucer technology mothballed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
The media created the “Flying Saucer hysteria” and now in the 21st Century we need to see a renascence, because it is important to indicate why we are awaiting disclosure,
why we still celebrate the charming years when Flying saucers were pop culture chic and not labeled as “swamp gas,” undefinedVenusundefined or a undefinedweather balloon.undefined During the 1940’s and 1950’s, there could have been a number of significant events taking place that could very well have been glossed over or made to look like figments of an overactive imagination.
That is why witness testimonies are vital to cases that over the years have become embellished or thrust into the communal mythology. In Ufology we can also point a “dead spot” in the investigation process.
In the 1960s UFO material was actually difficult to get a hold of. Now we see it everywhere. In the 1960’s there were a few reference books collecting the most famous sightings and photographs. There were a few stories of people taking rides on Saucers or stories of celebrities being taken to military coolers where locked in deep freeze were aliens or body parts of these beings.
The term undefinedflying saucerundefined has evolved in the communal mythology to be UFO, a term that originally meant Unidentified Flying Object. But now it seems to be stuck as a marketing label on everything mysterious which includes, the Chupacabra, crop circles, mutilated cattle, Men in Black, government conspiracies, alien abductions, genetic manipulation, and everything else that seems to have no definitive answer.
I wish we had a looking glass where we could go back in time to 1950’s where Harry Truman admitted that there were flying saucers. Were flying saucers were seen buzzing over the nations’ capital. I would love to hear those stories of how president Eisenhower took a ride in a space craft and how Jackie Gleason was shown aliens in refrigerators on a military base.
These stories are seldom given the spotlight because they sound so outrageous. However many of them were even sealed in death bed confessions and those who know first hand th testimonies of these witnesses are either dead or dying. The magic and inncocence of the original flying saucer times have all but escaped us and maybe now is the time to resurrect them in order to get a better idea of how it seemed that the aliens or the extra terrestrials already had found themselves on earth, lost or willing to move in next door as long as everyone kept it a big secret.