Story by Keegan Clements-Housser
Photos by Emily Fraysse
Hollywood, it would appear, is rather misleading.
UFO-obsessed motion picture characters often watch the skies for flying objects from countryside trailers while broadcasting the “truth” about conspiracy theories across pirated radio frequencies. Sometimes, they’re holed-up in claustrophobic apartments, surrounded by piles of newspapers and walls plastered with grainy photographs of questionable objects. At best, UFO enthusiast stereotypes embody zany professors rambling on in front of sniggering students; at worst, they’re crazed, wild-eyed, paranoid recluses with personal hygiene problems.
If the appearance of UFO enthusiast Regan Lee is any indication of the larger UFO-hunting community, Hollywood’s stereotypes don’t hold up. Lee’s conservative clothing and warm face sprinkled with hints of smile lines make her appear like someone’s kindly aunt. She doesn’t constantly glance over her shoulder, expecting sinister government agencies or shadowy organizations to be watching her. Lee speaks clearly and is quite capable of making small talk without twitching nervously.
Similarly, Lee’s surroundings don’t exactly paint her as a recluse. She is at ease in the casual atmosphere of the Sweet Life Patisserie in Eugene, Oregon, pushing a gluten-free brownie around her plate. She’s happily married and employed by the city’s school district, and is a University of Oregon (UO) alumnus. She spends a fair amount of her free time as a blogger—and she certainly doesn’t operate a pirate radio station. Nevertheless, to say that UFOs intrigue Lee would be an understatement.
“I’ve had my own direct experience [with UFOs] going back to childhood,” Lee says, explaining how she originally became interested in the subject. But it wasn’t until she attended the UO to study folklore that her investigations into the occurrences really took off. “Because it’s folklore, [my professors] kind of let me get away with interviewing people about UFOs,” she says. “I don’t think any other department would let me do that.”
Lee’s interviews quickly brought her to the realization that she was not alone in her interests. The Internet was a particularly popular place for those with questions similar to hers—a reality evident to anyone with web access.
Even a cursory web search for UFOs turns up hundreds of websites dedicated to discussing, debunking, or investigating UFO sightings. The sites range from antiquated and poorly cited personal blogs to the professional, scholarly sites of UFO societies, such as the national Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Network (MUFON). Though not every website is credible, all show a passion for the topic.
However, the enthusiasm for UFOs isn’t limited to just the Internet. According to Lee, groups of UFO hunters congregate in person to analyze physical evidence from sightings, attend UFO conventions, or to simply swap stories. Like their Internet counterparts, these in-person gatherings can be informal amateur enthusiast get-togethers or serious, scientifically-minded field teams representing organizations like MUFON.
The Pacific Northwest, already known for its Bigfoot legends, is also a hotspot for UFO sightings and UFO hunters. McMinnville, Oregon, hosts UFO Fest, the second largest annual UFO festival in the nation, which is only slightly smaller than the annual festival held in the mecca of American UFO culture: Roswell, New Mexico. The McMinnville festival, featuring renowned UFO experts from around the world and family-friendly activities such as a parade, is an example of the more light-hearted interest the mysterious objects in the sky engender.
But the quest for the truth about UFOs isn’t borne out of curiosity for everyone. For some, it’s a more personal matter. Many UFO believers seek answers because they feel threatened or fear being violated by unknown entities. But the fear isn’t always abstract—some claim to have experienced these intrusions first-hand. Their stories range from abduction to unexplained gaps in memory or a distorted sense of time—the desire to get to the bottom of their experience is what drives them more than anything else. Lee is a member of those ranks.
One night, Lee says, she was riding home on a motorcycle with her husband on the Lorane Highway, just southwest of Eugene, when she spotted a light in the sky. She pointed it out to her husband, and they stopped to look. The light seemed to be suspended, fairly close to them—and it had been following them. Neither could figure out what it was, but both agreed what it looked like. The object was a smooth, mechanicallooking sphere hovering near the treetops and it seemed to radiate light from within—an orange orb, she calls it.
The orb followed them until they reached home, and then it abruptly plummeted out of the sky into a neighbor’s backyard. Lee considered reporting what they saw to the police or the fire department, but she didn’t think the authorities would believe her. She debated going out to try and find it again, but found she couldn’t.
“Something prevented me from leaving the house,” she said. Though she had her doubts about going into a neighbor’s yard in search of the mysterious orb, she had all but made up her mind to go out and search anyway. But when Lee put her hand to the doorknob leading outside, her drive to know disappeared, and she and her husband went to bed. The nightmares that followed were so terrifying Lee eventually sought out a therapist to help her recover from them.
When the couple recalls the event, they also realize the motorcycle ride took hours longer than it should have, yet neither of them noticed at the time. Stranger still, this wasn’t the first incident where time had gotten away from them: Years before, while living in California, the couple had taken a walk that normally took them an hour to complete. Four hours later, they finished the walk. It wasn’t until the motorcycle encounter that either began to consider that time seemed to have passed differently for them. Out of these two events came a personal drive, and one simple goal.
“Something, whether it was the government, or aliens, or whoever—I don’t know—wiped out our memories,” Lee says. “I want to find out what the hell happened to me.”
Her case of “missing time,” a commonly reported phenomenon attributed to UFO sightings, is just a basis for her interests today. Lee now shares notes with other researchers, comparing experiences and postulating on what connections, if any, exist between different UFO encounters. Always, though, she looks for encounters that are genuinely mysterious and unsolved; potential hoaxes hold no answers for her.
Unyielding Evidence
One such case is the still-unsolved Trent sighting.
The evening that changed the lives of the Trent family forever was an unassuming one. It was May 11, 1950, on a farm ten miles west of McMinnville, Oregon, and the gray Pacific Northwest sky had just begun darkening as evening fell. The night seemed destined to be business as usual when Evelyn Trent walked behind her house to feed her chickens and rabbits at roughly 7:30 p.m.
On her way back to the house, Evelyn glanced up into the sky and saw something strange. There, just northeast of the farm, silently suspended in midair, was a disc-shaped metallic object. Realizing she was witnessing something worth documenting, Evelyn ran toward the house, shouting for her husband, Paul, to get their camera.
“It was like a good-sized parachute canopy without the strings, only silvery bright mixed with bronze,” Evelyn later said in a story published in The Oregonian, a state newspaper. “It was as pretty as anything I ever saw.”
According to newspaper accounts, after some desperate searching the couple found the camera and rushed outside to capture the strange phenomenon on film. The object was still visible, though further to the west than when Evelyn had first seen it, and Paul managed to snap a picture of it. While advancing the film to take another, the object—still completely silent—started quickly accelerating to the northwest, forcing Paul to chase after it to capture his second and final photo.
When the film was developed a month after the incident, the negatives were analyzed by photojournalist William Powell of the Telephone-Register (now the News-Register), McMinnville’s city newspaper. Powell declared that he could find no signs of doctoring and the newspaper ran the photos
as the cover story the following day. The Trents and their flying saucer quickly became a national sensation.
From the story’s first printing, other publications like Los Angeles-based Herald Examiner, quickly republished the photos and national and international news agencies, from the Associated Press to LIFE Magazine, began recounting the strange tale. This event, now well known among members of the international UFO community, sparked a wildfire of public attention and propelled the modest Trent couple into the limelight until
their deaths in the late 1990s.
Over the next 50 years, the photos became the center of intense scrutiny and drama—including a period when the photos were borrowed by LIFE Magazine and subsequently went missing, only to resurface 20 years later at newswire agency United Press International. The images have been analyzed and declared genuine by numerous photojournalists, scientists, and even governmental agencies. An official joint US Air Force University of Colorado study into UFOs, known widely as the “Condon Report” even conceded, “A hoax could be ruled out as beyond the capabilities of the photographer.”
To this day, the Trent sighting has never been definitively proven a hoax; it remains, in the truest sense of the word, unidentified.
Defending the Believers
Bruce Maccabee, a physicist known for his work with optics and as a US Navy defense researcher until his retirement in 2008, took it upon himself to verify the Trent photographs in the 1970s. It wasn’t the first time he’d analyzed footage like this, either professionally or as a hobby. His findings concluded that the photographs were authentic.
“[The Trents] couldn’t have faked the photo intentionally,” he asserts nearly 40 years later. His conclusion comes after a lengthy description of the many steps he went through to test and confirm the authenticity of the Trent images, including analyses of light levels and the chemical quality of the photographs. The level of complexity required to make a staged shot like that seem authentic would be beyond most photo editors, much less novice photographers, he says. In addition, the Trents never varied their story, and never tried to make it sound more grand or any less mysterious than it actually was. In Maccabee’s opinion, this straightforwardness implies honesty. “I spoke to Evelyn Trent for probably a total of 24 hours over a decade,” Maccabee says. “Never once did she say that it was a flying saucer
or something—she always said that she didn’t know.”
So, what was captured on film during the Trent sightings? Was it an alien craft? Maccabee is not so sure. But as someone who spent much of his professional life studying high-tech defense methods and his personal life investigating UFOs, Maccabee is not ready to discount the idea entirely. After all, he reasons, humanity’s understanding of the universe and the bounds of scientific possibility is limited based only on what’s already been
discovered. Those constraints have been shattered before. Why shouldn’t it happen again?
More importantly, Maccabee doesn’t really think it matters whether or not aliens are behind UFOs, at least as far as his personal efforts are concerned. After conducting multiple extensive scientific studies on the subject, and despite a high amount of ridicule from skeptics, he understands why UFO enthusiasts care so much about the subject. “It has nothing to do with people being nuts,” Maccabee says, explaining that most who report sightings are everyday people with nothing to gain from lying. “It has to do with people seeing things in the sky and wondering what they are … I feel like I need to be their advocate.”
He adds that he especially feels this way in light of how aggressively believers are attacked by “debunkers,” those who research UFOs using the same methods as UFO enthusiasts, but with the sole purpose of exposing witnesses as frauds and sightings as hoaxes. In a nation such as the US, which is skeptical of anything UFO-related, Maccabee says debunkers’ claims are usually approached with more consideration than believers’ claims—although, he adds, debunkers often provide inadequate evidence when trying to prove their cases against UFO phenomena. And that’s only if they bother to approach the topic scientifically at all, he says, which is far from guaranteed.
Maccabee is not alone in his feelings about debunkers. Tom Bowden, the director of MUFON’s Oregon branch, encounters what he describes as “overzealous skeptics” on a regular basis. A large part of the problem is the way debunkers approach reports of UFO sightings, oftentimes assuming UFOs are carrying extraterrestrials, Bowden explains. “The problem is that those of us who are involved in UFOs are screaming, ‘Wait, wait! All we’re saying is that there are unidentified objects in our atmosphere!’” he says.
Bowden and Maccabee agree that for the most part, people contacting MUFON to report their UFO experiences are largely from average citizens who are generally honest. There are exceptions, Bowden admits, though he adds that the more time volunteers spend at MUFON, the greater knack
they develop for filtering out legitimate reports from those submitted by fraudsters or the mentally ill. Strict policies enforcing what kind of sighting evidence is allowable in reports, such as accepting only unaltered and intact photo and video data, help as well. For those reporting legitimate experiences, however, Bowden believes MUFON provides an essential service. “They end up talking to us because they need to find someone to talk to who understands them,” Bowden says. “People who won’t blow them
off and say they’re mentally ill or something like that.”
Not that he finds time spent listening to people’s stories tiresome. After all, as Bowden points out, people who come to MUFON want the same
thing the rest of the organization does: “We want to know why, who, and what.”
Yet people who have encountered unexplainable phenomena don’t make up the entire UFO enthusiasts culture. Indeed, many enthusiasts never venture beyond their television sets, where they religiously follow investigative shows such as the History Channel’s UFO Hunters or the National Geographic Channel’s Chasing UFOs. Even modern video games, like the recently released tactical strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, are aimed towards audiences intrigued by the mystery surrounding UFOs.
So why do so many people, devoted UFO hunters and casual enthusiasts alike, care about unidentified flying objects? After many years studying unexplained phenomena, Maccabee says he’s identified a variety of reasons why people might care. Of these, two motivations stand out in particular. The first, he says, is perhaps the most obvious and the most widely accepted by mainstream culture—that people see UFOs because they want to believe in a higher power, or something beyond this world. The second, however, he
thinks is at the core of the issue.
“The question is, ‘What’s going on?’” he says, explaining that the answer to such a simple and yet incredibly elusive question is what keeps so many
people—himself included—hooked on UFOs.
 

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Secrets of the Sky