On May 11, 1950, Evelyn Trent saw a bronze and silver object floating in the sky over her Bellevue, Oregon, farm house. 

The object was quiet, but it kicked up a furious wind. She picked up her Kodak camera and snapped a picture. She and her husband kept the photo to themselves for a while, but eventually they told a friend, who put a copy in the window at the McMinnville post office. Word spread, newspaper reporters descended, government inspectors sought to prove this was nonsense, etc, etc, etc. For some, it was photographic proof of alien contact with Earth. For others, nonsense of the highest order, a fraud, a hoax, a delusion. On and on the believers and the skeptics go, tangled in two understandings of the nature of reality itself, talking at each other in crossed purposes, fated to prove the other wrong in their minds, but never really understanding the character of the person sitting across from them. 

But for McMinnville, Oregon, a wine country hub on the far edge of the Portland metropolitan area? It’s an excuse to party! UFO Fest, now on its 25th incarnation, is a two-pronged event. The first is a little, alien-themed community fair with booths, a UFO-themed parade with floats, high school marching bands, and a shocking quantity of people milling around downtown McMinnville. It’s a nice time, recommendable to anyone with a family or a powerful desire to acquire funnel cake. 

The second event is a little stranger.

At the McMinnville community center, in an auditorium that seats about 800, is the second largest gathering of UFO research enthusiasts in the country. (The largest, unsurprisingly, is in Roswell, New Mexico, the site of the most famous contact event in history.) They’re here to see a raft of speakers from the world of paranormal research, network with other enthusiasts, and speculate on the possibilities that human beings have been touched by visitors from outer worlds.

This year’s big speaker is Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Department of Defense’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, who recently wrote a book where he claims the DoD is withholding information about UFOs from both public and elected officials. (Apparently Nixon, in particular, was not to be trusted with UFO information). Parts of Elizondo’s book are redacted. 

“I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and used to watch things in the summer sky almost nightly,” saays Ann Wilson, an enthusiast from Hillsboro, Oregon, who speaks with a cheery lilt in her voice. “We used to see these cigar-shaped ships, anywhere from three or four to 12, way up in the sky. They’re still bigger than the stars, but they would stop, turn, and go at speeds like you’d never seen. It was almost like a ballet in the sky. Then they would just shoot off in different directions and be gone in a second.” 

“My dad was in the Air Force, and we lived in Panama, and there’s not a lot of light pollution there,” Linda Hayes, who has been to UFO Fest five times, tells the Mercury. “We had a few occasions where we saw something that wasn’t explained. I’ve seen things out there since I was a little teenager.” 

Budd Hayes, Linda’s husband, chimes in. “She and I had what we thought was Venus up in the sky. It was really super bright. But it looked like it wasn’t quite in the right place. Then all of a sudden Venus went—WHOOSH—and it wasn’t there any more.’

“It’s not Venus,” Linda adds.

“It’s not a satellite, it’s not a planet. It’s something very unexplained.” Budd says.

“So I married someone with the same beliefs as me and we’re still together after 41 years,” she says as the two give each other a fist bump.

“It seems the more we come, the less we do of ‘the party stuff’,” Linda says about the event. “We want knowledge—we want to know. You know the old saying, ‘The truth is out there'? Well it’s getting closer and closer to us which makes me very happy. I’m excited about the future. I think it’s about time for the government and higher-ups to come clean with what they have. I think that for the most part, people are not as crazy as they think. If we found out yesterday that there are aliens, we wouldn’t fall into chaos and anarchy. I think there’s more people out there who would just go, ‘Huh, that is very cool'." 

“Are you just here to interview all the crazy people?” Haven, a physics student from Texas attending with his parents, asks me as I trawl through the line, speaking to attendees. There is a drip of concern, of accusation. I don’t blame him: It’s not hard to speak to people about something like this, sit down, and then vomit out hooting content about how silly this is, or how it’s all just projection, or what have you. I did confirm with Haven that, although I think there’s other intelligent life out there, I didn’t think the technology to travel across long reaches of space was totally feasible, so I didn’t really buy all this stuff. He told me about theoretical frameworks for folding space, which could be real, in the way most things could be real.

But over the years of doing this work, I have encountered all kinds of frames of thought that seem unreasonable to me. Blazer fans who believe the team will win a title in the next ten years are operating from a place of severe irrationality, but I see very little reason to think they’re more eccentric than the population at large.

Joshua Widmier told me a story. He thought of himself as a skeptic—that is until he tried CE-5 Meditation, a technique for making psychic contact with aliens. He says he tried a few times up at Mount Hood, came up blank, but felt like he was close to something... so he tried again at home. In the middle of the night, he hears a one-line sentence in his head: “Don’t be your father, play with your son.” His son has some problems, sits in a wheelchair, is nonverbal, and has trouble doing anything aside from pressing buttons. Next day, he says, his son played with a ball while sitting in a bath chair, and rolled it back and forth. 

When he came home, he rolled the ball with his son and his son rolled the ball back to him. When he was his son’s age, Joshua was upset with his father, who only had one arm and wouldn’t play with his son as a consequence. In this moment—which Joshua attributes to extraterrestrial intervention—he saw that he was repeating the pattern by not trying to engage with his son in this way. He doesn’t know if the aliens were giving him advice or if they did something to his son... but either way, he was convinced. 

Now, if you ask me, a skeptical person by nature, I would say that this was a revelation borne from meditation, and probably had nothing to do with aliens. But what does my skeptical opinion matter to Joshua? He found something good from this, he went with it, and it made his life and the life of his son a little better. The rest—the reasoning—that’s a frame of thought the same as anyone’s. 

Who’s to say if it’s right or wrong, you know?