The McMenamins Hotel Oregon UFO Festival is an annual UFO enthusiast event in Oregon, United States. Every year, thousands of visitors flock to McMinnville, a quiet Willamette Valley town located an hour southwest of Portland, to attend the city’s famous UFO Festival. First organized in 2000, it is the largest annual event in McMinnville, Oregon; the largest UFO-themed event in Oregon; and the second-largest UFO-themed event in the United States.
McMenamins UFO Festival parade.
The very first McMenamins UFO Festival took place on May 11th, 2000 at Hotel Oregon in McMinnville, Oregon. Ufologist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, the expert on the Trent case, was invited as a guest speaker and presented on the famous UFO sighting by Paul and Evelyn Trent in 1950, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of that event.
Notable persons who have appeared at the UFO festival include George Noory, George Knapp, Whitley Streiber, and others. The family-friendly UFO Festival includes two days of special events, including live music, expert speaker panels, a pet alien costume contest and more. Over the festival’s nearly two decades, featured speakers have run the gamut from authors, filmmakers and investigators to crop circle experts, Bigfoot hunters and alien implant removal specialists.
You may have seen the original Trent photo, but do you know the whole story?
The Trent UFO Photos An Interview With Paul and Evelyn Trent
Read also: Living in Corvallis
The Trent UFO Photographs
Three years earlier, in June 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a fleet of silvery objects traveling at supersonic speed near Mount Rainier, southeast of Seattle. Seventy-five years ago this week, a McMinnville area farmer took two photos of what appeared to be UFOs.
One of the two photos taken by Paul Trent.
Those photos are still held up as some of the best evidence that flying saucers are real. She called for her husband, Paul Trent, who snapped two photos of the object hovering above the fields before it vanished. He showed the photos to a friend, who alerted the local Telephone Register newspaper.
From there, the photos were published in The Oregonian and Life magazine, and they drew international attention. The images caught the attention of the U.S. Air Force, which in 1967 published an exhaustive study that concluded Trent’s photos were “difficult to explain in a conventional way.”
In June 1947 - a month before the legendary Roswell crash - pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a fleet of silvery objects traveling at supersonic speed near Mount Rainier, southeast of Seattle. Since 1947, reports of flying saucers had been accumulating around the country.
Read also: Unveiling the Mystery of Space Aliens
Reports continued to stream in nationwide through 1948 and ’49. Then, early in 1950, a flurry of new sightings prompted no less than The New York Times and President Harry S. Truman to address the issue. Prior to the McMinnville encounter of May 1950, the most recent Oregon sighting of note had occurred in mid-1949. American Airlines pilots flying over the Cascade Mountains during a regularly scheduled commercial flight encountered a flying saucer.
The Trents themselves had even witnessed UFOs before May 11, 1950, according to Evelyn Trent. She told an interviewer that she and her husband had seen similar flying objects while visiting the Oregon Coast on three previous occasions. The point is, the Trent sighting was not an aberration, but rather a continuation of an existing pattern.
Though both Mr. and Mrs. Trent have passed away, their story survives in many written accounts compiled since 1950. Considering the great amount of time that passed between some accounts, their details vary surprisingly little. Here is a synopsis of their statements:
- It was approximately 7:30pm, Thursday May 11, a gray, overcast day.
- Evelyn went out behind their farmhouse-situated about 11 miles southwest of McMinnville-to feed her rabbits.
- The rabbits gave no indication of disturbance, but Mrs. Trent was startled to see a large, metallic-looking, disc-shaped object hovering in the sky a little to the northeast of their farm.
- Evelyn yelled at Paul to come look and then ran toward the house to fetch him.
- For a short time, they scrambled around looking for their camera, a very basic model known as a folding Roamer.
- The Trents estimated that the object was maybe 30 feet in diameter and came within a quarter mile of where they were standing.
- It made no noise.
- No life-form nor light nor flame was detected.
- Evelyn noticed “something oval-shaped on top of the object in the center.”
- Years later, she would say this was where they thought “the man [whomever-or whatever-was piloting the craft] would sit.”
- While hovering, the strange craft shifted both its position and orientation.
- After a long period, it tipped, slowly accelerated then moved away rapidly toward the west.
- The saucer did not rotate.
- Paul clicked off a picture, advanced the film as fast as he could and then, as the object gathered speed and turned toward the northwest, he had to move rapidly to his right to get the second picture.
- Evelyn then ran into the house and called her mother-in-law, who lived on a neighboring property.
The Trents’ photo of that strange little disc set off a flurry of media attention and the couple appeared on several radio and television shows to share their experience. Mr. and Mrs. Trent are seen here embarking on a flight to New York to be guests on the “We the People” radio and TV show.
The Hotel Oregon Connection
Paul Trent's 1950 photographs spawned an annual UFO Festival in McMinnville. The Trent incident would have remained a quirky piece of forgotten history had Tim Hills not discovered a news story about the photos at the Yamhill County Historical Society.
Read also: Pop Culture Aliens
Hills was a historian working for the McMenamins hotel and restaurant chain, which had recently purchased the Hotel Oregon in McMinnville. Hill was researching the history of the hotel and McMinnville itself when he found the Trents’ story and saw an opportunity for the hotel to host an event.
But even if you’re not looking to meet an extraterrestrial, Hotel Oregon’s rich history and hip, revitalized vibe makes it an essential stop on any visit to the area. Originally named the Hotel Elberton, the building was designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style popular at the turn of the 20th century, inspired by European architecture of the 11th and 12th century.
In its early years, the hotel thrived, including a restaurant feeding both locals and visitors to the town. The Elberton was a social hub for McMinnville residents, a respite for travelers and a symbol of an era of prosperity for McMinville with its elegant style and prime location. McMenamins undertook a meticulous renovation of the property, restoring the building to its former glory, while also adding the mix of art, photography, vintage fixtures and overall quirk that are the company’s hallmarks.
Rebranded as McMenamins Hotel Oregon, the building reopened in 1999, boasting 42 European-style rooms, three bars (The Rooftop, The Cellar and Carter the Great Bar) and a restaurant. In 1999, a longtime McMinnville resident strolled through the newly reopened Hotel Oregon and saw paintings and articles commemorating the 1950 Trent UFO sighting.
Hotel Oregon cupola.
Hotel Oregon once had a beauty shop on the first floor, first known as the Mullikin Beauty Shop, before Joyce and Iva Widness took ownership and renamed it the Beauty Maid Shoppe from the 1930s to 1977. The hotel’s cupola is seen hovering above, a reference to the 1950 UFO sighting.
The sisters had been twisting hair and chatting it up with customers in their hairdressing parlor in McMinnville’s Hotel Oregon since the mid-1930s. On June 8, however, the overriding subject for the day at the Hotel Oregon beauty parlor was UFOs. All other news suddenly seemed irrelevant, for June 8 was the day McMinnville’s weekly, the Telephone Register, printed on its front page photographs of a flying saucer taken by a local man and his wife at their nearby farm.
Joyce, one of the shop’s two sibling proprietors, recalls that time well. She said most of the women who came into the Beauty Maid that day (and days immediately following) voiced opinions that the photos and the accompanying story were no hoax. The couple at the center of the incident, Paul and Evelyn Trent, were well known as hard-working, honest people. No one believed the Trents would-or could-fake something as sophisticated as the truly remarkable images in the photos.
The Festival Today
The first UFO Festival was held in 2000. It was intended to be a one-time celebration, but the UFO Festival was a hit. The next year, the downtown association put on a parade, and the festival has only grown over the years.
No festival was held in 2020, making this the 25th annual event. This year’s speaker series, at the McMinnville Community Center, includes presentations by Brit Elders, Stanley Milford Jr., George Knapp with Jeremy Corbell, and Luis Elizondo.
The signature event is the UFO Festival parade, which begins at noon Saturday, May 17, with a route through downtown. McMenamins UFO Fest takes place each May. The aliens will be back in McMinnville for the 25th time. Well, 26th if you count the original sighting 75 years ago that started it all.
The McMenamins UFO Festival takes place May 16-17, with a lineup that offers presentations by ufologists for the true believers and costumed silliness to entertain even the skeptics.
| Year | Event | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2000 | First UFO Festival | Held at Hotel Oregon, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Trent sighting. |
| 2020 | No Festival | Event was cancelled. |
| Annual | UFO Festival Parade | A signature event with a route through downtown McMinnville. |
tags: #mcminnville #oregon #alien #festival