UFOs in the Daily Press:

UFO expert to speak on anniversary of Mac sighting

By PAT FORGEY Of the News-Register

Bruce Maccabee was just one of many people intrigued by the historic photographs taken by McMinnville-area farmer Paul Trent on May 11, 1950. But he may have spent more time studying them than anyone else.

First he used newly developed techniques of light and optics analysis. Then he tried to recreate the work done by others who had studied the photos and published their findings.

"I spent, overall, several months, over a period of years, on the Trent case," said Maccabee from his Maryland home.

Now, for the first time, Maccabee is going to visit McMinnville, brought to town by McMenamins Pubs. The 1950 UFO incident is featured in several paintings, some highly fanciful, on the walls of McMenamins Hotel Oregon.

When the 50th anniversary of the sighting drew near, McMenamins invited Maccabee to McMinnville to talk about the photos, their history and their importance in the decades-long quest to answer those troubling UFO questions, said Tim Hills, McMenamins historian.

"We are just thrilled that he is coming out," he said. "He's doing it because it is such an important part of his life."

Maccabee is a leader in the field of ufology, the study of UFO's, and has published many papers in the MUFON Journal, a publication of the Mutual UFO Network - for which he is the Maryland state director - and others. He has also made numerous appearances on television, including CNN, Nightline, Unsolved Mysteries and others.

He began his career as a physicist doing non-UFO-related research for the U.S. Navy, and he holds a doctorate in physics from The American University in Washington, D.C.

Hills said that despite their credentials, UFO researchers sometimes have been treated like Bigfoot researchers - not considered legitimate scientists.

"When I got into the UFO research, I found it's exactly the same way," he said. "They've been shunned by the mainstream."

After analyzing Trent's photographs and negatives, Maccabee concluded they had not been doctored, and that they were what the Trents said they were: photos of an unidentified flying object some distance away.

"So I guess the bottom line is, I concluded they were real," he said.

Over the years, he talked with the Trents about 30 times.

Another person who interviewed the Trents was documentary producer Terry Halstead. His taped interview with Evelyn Trent, who has since died, was done in the early 1990s, and was the last she ever did.

The Trent portion of the documentary will be shown at the McMenamins Trent photo retrospective as well.

Maccabee also was the first researcher to obtain the FBI's "flying disc file," also known as "the real X-Files."

Maccabee recently published a book called the "UFO-FBI Connection: The Secret History of the Government's Cover-Up." The book doesn't accuse the government of any coverup in connection with the Trent photographs, but those photos did provide the entry into the topic.

"Part of the lineage of that book can be traced to the Trents," Maccabee said.

After the Trent photos were published nationally, Air Force intelligence officers interviewed the Trents, but Maccabee said that wasn't terribly exciting because the Air Force's interest in investigating UFO's was well known.

"Mrs. Trent had told me that two FBI men had come to her house," he said.

They spent some time in the backyard, throwing objects up in the air and taking pictures of them.

Not long after Maccabee began looking into the Trent photos, the federal Freedom of Information Act was passed, and Maccabee wrote to the FBI for information on the Trents' photos. He didn't learn anything new about that case, but he did learn that the FBI had looked into a number of other UFO sightings.

The information the FBI gathered itself wasn't as important as the insight that it provided into the Air Force Intelligence inquiry. "They told the FBI things they didn't tell anyone else," he said.

Information from that and subsequent FOIA requests eventually led to the publication of "UFO-FBI Connection," he said.

"If it hadn't been for Mrs. Trent telling me the FBI had been there, that line of inquiry and the book itself were unlikely to have happened," he said.