12 Annual UFO Festival
Friday, May 13 & Saturday, May 14, 2011
UFO Speakers • Costume Parade • Live Music • Kids' Fun and more!
On Thursday, May 11, 1950, at a farmhouse just outside of McMinnville, Ore., Evelyn Trent went out to feed her chickens and rabbits behind the farmhouse where she and her husband Paul lived. While attending to her chores, Evelyn was astonished to see a large, metallic looking, disc-shaped object hovering silently in the sky. After a little scrambling as they looked for their trusty Kodak camera, they both ran back outside. Paul Trent clicked off two snapshots. These photos are still considered to be some of the most credible images of UFOs to date.
In honor of the Trents and their sighting, McMenamins began the annual UFO Festival which features both serious and fun for believers and skeptics alike.
For more information and a full schedule of events, visit ufofest.com.
2010 Festival Speakers
Robert Salas (our Friday evening speaker) is a highly regarded witness to the 1967 UFO encounters at Malmstrom Air Force Base. On the mornings of March 16, 1967 and March 24, 1967 – 10 nuclear missiles became simultaneously non-operational at two different launch facilities immediately after guards reported UFOs hovering above the facilities. Salas will present revealing evidence of historical UFO incidents at Malmstrom AFB. He will include compelling evidence of these events confirming how the Air Force, in collusion with the Condon Committee, covered up these incidents.
Salas has been a researcher and speaker on the UFO phenomenon at nuclear weapons bases since 1994. He is the co-author of Faded Giant (2005) with James Klotz, which deals with the Malmstrom AFB incident. Salas graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy and was on active duty from 1964 to 1971. He also held positions at Martin Marietta and Rockwell International, and he spent 21 years at the FAA as an aircraft structures certification engineer. While an officer in the Air Force, Salas held positions as a weapons controller, drone pilot, missile launch officer and engineer on the Titan III missile program.
Stan Gordon (our Saturday afternoon presenter) has conducted on-scene investigations of thousands of mysterious encounters across Pennsylvania since 1965. Gordon gained prominence in the field of ufology as the authority on the December 1965 Kecksburg UFO Incident, about 40 miles from Pittsburgh, in which observers saw a brilliant acorn-shaped object moving across the sky and falling into some nearby woods. Many people say that the military, including members of the Army and Air Force, began to arrive in the area around the village of Kecksburg within a few hours after the reported landing.
Gordon is also well regarded in the area of paranormal research with his first-hand investigation into a series of documented Bigfoot encounters and UFO sightings that occurred throughout Pennsylvania in 1973.
Paola Harris (our Saturday afternoon guest) is an Italo-American photojournalist and investigative reporter in the field of extraterrestrial-related phenomena research, which she has studied since 1979.
Harris will talk about the incident detailed in the book, Born on the Edge of Ground Zero, Living in the Shadow of Area 51 (2011), which is Jose Padilla and Reme Baca's account of a saucer crash on Padilla land in San Antonio, NM, in 1945, one of the most spectacular events in UFO history. In the book, the witnesses (then aged 7 and 9) explain what they saw - the actual crash, the creature's appearances, the pieces they took, the military clean up and an in-depth analysis of the significance of this case.
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