McMinnville farm photographs

Early in the evening Evelyn Trent saw a slow-moving metallic disk from the farmyard. She called her husband Paul, who took two photographs with a Roamer camera before the object tilted and left toward the northwest. The negatives were developed locally and later printed by the Telephone Register.

Life magazine ran the pictures that June. Photogrammetrists have spent decades on the water tower, the wires, and the shading of the disk. A 1960s Condon Committee analyst, William Hartmann, called them among the most credible of the photographic cases then available. Later critics argued the object was a model hung from a thread; later defenders argued the geometry does not fit a small hanging object.

The farm, the tower, and the two frames are still the whole of the physical case. No second photographer. No radar. Two exposures, a few seconds apart.