Encounters with the Inconceivable
“One of the McMinnville UFO photographs. First UFO picture taken by Paul Trent in McMinnville, Oregon, Usa 1950.” (Source)
McMinnville, Oregon is about an hour southwest of Portland, nestled along the historic Oregon Route 99W at the confluence of the Willamette and Yamhill rivers and is home to the second-largest UFO festival in the country, outside of Roswell, NM, boasting tens of thousands of attendees. To know McMinnville is to love it. Many of the West Coast’s picture-perfect little towns are basically retirement communities for rich Californians, but McMinnville feels lived in and unpretentious. It’s any town USA in the most charming way possible, with a beautiful little tree lined main street host to bookshops, antique stores, and restaurants. McMinnville was officially incorporated in 1876, named after the founder’s hometown of McMinnville, Tennessee. With a population of about 30,000 people, it is the main hub of Oregon’s up-and-coming wine industry, home to Linfield University, Chemeketa Community College, Cascade Steel and Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum.
In June of 1950, the town paper, the Telephone-Register, published a front-page story, with two accompanying pictures of a UFO sighting 9 miles southwest in Sheridan, OR, now known as the Trent UFO Photos. Within the week, the pictures had made it up and down the West Coast, by the end of the month they were featured nationally on the cover of LIFE magazine. The story goes that one May evening while in their backyard feeding the rabbits, Evelyn and Paul Trent saw a strange metallic saucer flying, moving through the sky toward them from the northeast. Paul ran inside and grabbed their trusty folding Kodak Roamer camera and snapped two pictures. Experts have gone back on forth on their legitimacy, as is not uncommon in this area, but the Trent’s stuck to their story until their deaths about 50 years later and never attempted to profit off the pictures or the attention.
These days, the Trent UFO Photos are little known outside the UFO community, but the story never faded from the local lore of McMinnville. In 2000, McMinnville and the local McMenamins hotel and restaurant chain held their first annual UFO festival. The festival has guest lecturers (this year included Whitley Strieber), a fun run, food booths, a parade, vendors, and of course, a costume contest for people and pets.
For many UFO buffs, this sort of thing is unserious at best, a distraction by the lizard people who run the world from underground bunkers at worst. Actual discussion of the phenomena is indeed a minor part of the festivities, and what discussion there is is bound to offend proponents of opposing theories. Some people think they come from other planets, some think they come from other dimensions, and some people think it’s a complicated government cover up.
What I consider to be the most serious approach to discussing the UFO phenomena is the data driven line of thinking pioneered by astronomer and computer scientist Jaque Vallee in the 1960s. Vallee compared the subjective descriptions by people who believed they’d encountered religious figures with those who believed they’d encountered aliens and found remarkable similarities. This led Vallee to the conclusion that the phenomenon was possibly larger than the human mind was capable of comprehending, and that contactees were just filling in the blanks with previously held beliefs. If the person believed in the Blessed Virgin Mary, that’s how they interpreted their experience, if the person believed in aliens from another planet, they interpreted it that way, but the experience, the contact, may have been the same thing.
Over the years, Vallee has taken an increasingly dark conspiratorial view of the forces behind these strange experiences, but as a mystic and philosophical optimist, I will pick up his thread with a more productive take by Dr. Kenneth Ring and his book The Omega Project. Dr. Ring started out his career studying near-death experiences, but, like Vallee, was alerted to remarkable similarities between another mysterious phenomena, near-death experiences and UFO encounters. He was initially inspired by Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book Communion, about Strieber’s own abduction, and later the two worked closely together. He also found similar psychological profiles of people prone to extraordinary experiences and similar psychological effects on the subjects after the experience had occurred.
Taking it a step further, he found that subject tended toward similar changes in their world views, or personal cosmologies. Some quotes typical of this new outlook are things like, “I’m in love with life. I know now that we take nothing out of this life except what is in our hearts”, “We must become part of the consciousness of love, for it is an entity in itself”, and “My compassion and my understanding of other people and events have led me to a greater peace within myself.” From Dr. Ring’s ample experience studying near death, he has come to a much rosier hypothesis about the meaning of these experiences than Vallee. For Dr. Ring, they represent a sort of coming-of-age ritual for humanity in a process he calls the shamanization of the modern human race, an evolution in consciousness toward the transcendent.
When looked at with this positive perspective, the seemingly innocuous family fun of the McMinnville UFO fest, perhaps even in conjunction with recent government hearings on UFOs, may be an important step in this shamanization process, laying the philosophical and phenomenological groundwork for collective encounters with the inconceivable. For a child raised on alien parades, kitch and themed snacks, the brain will build into their map of reality inconceivable beings from unknown dimensions.
I think it’s also important to point out this isn’t a UFO conference, it’s a festival, it’s a celebration of encounters with the unknowable, the mystical, the limits of our understanding, the limits of our models. Throughout the works of Robert Anton Wilson, he touches on what he calls chapel perilous, an Arthurian reference to the common stage in occult practice where a person’s models of reality no longer fit the data. Wilson theorized that there were two outcomes to the chapel perilous experience, stone-cold paranoia, and total agnosticism about everything. Wilson himself opted for agnosticism, more or less, because it’s the funnest option. In this sense, I think he’d find the McMinnville UFO fest a productive step toward the evolution of consciousness toward a consciousness of love, even toward the alien and the inconceivable.
Ian Blumberg-Enge
Ian Blumberg-Enge is a model agnostic anarchist, writer, and utopian kook. His work is focused on the intersection of mysticism and anarchism. He is co-author, with Peter J. Carrol, of Interview with a Wizard, published by Mandrake of Oxford.