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FEATURE Courtesy of Paul Trent via Wikimedia

UFOregon People report UFO sightings every year in Central Oregon,

WWW.BENDSOURCE.COM / APRIL 28, 2022 / BEND’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

and one1959 incident is still legendary By Jack Harvel

Farmer Paul Trent took the McMinnville UFO photo in 1950. It became one of the most famous UFO photographs of all time, and skeptics and believers have argued its authenticity for decades.

n Sept. 24, 1959, Redmond police officer Robert Dickerson spotted a flying mushroom-shaped object moving side to side in the sky. It glowed green, yellow, crimson and blue, he reported, bright enough to illuminate nearby treetops and reportedly hovered in the sky for over an hour. The object pinged the Federal Aviation Administration’s radar, and the Air Force deployed six jet interceptors from Portland Air Base to Redmond to search the skies. On Oct. 1 the FAA downplayed the incident, saying that people likely saw Venus. The incident occurred less than two years after the launch of Sputnik, and Americans looked up at the night sky with a new sense of curiosity and anxiety. Humans have gazed at the stars since pre-history, and for the first time that gaze could be returned, be it by the Russians or the little green men. “Do you believe in the possibility of flying saucers?” a reporter for the weekly broadcast, Space Report, asked a Redmond resident who saw the flying object. “I believe in the possibility of almost anything in the sky these days,” she said. “There’s so many things that’ve come to pass, and the government put so many things up in the air.” The FAA and Air Force stuck with the claim that people saw Venus, never explaining the blips in the radar the object set off. “Venus would have behaved very strangely if the people who saw it were reporting accurately,” said Trish Pinkerton, a former writer for the “Redmond Spokesman” who’s written about Redmond’s history. “That was the FAA explanation—it must have been Venus because Venus was bright that day.”

The encounter became legendary for people studying UFOs, and in 2008 Tracy Thille started the Project Blue Book Festival in Redmond, an event named after the military investigations of UFOs in the ‘50s and ‘60s to find fellow enthusiasts and shed light on the town’s UFO history. “I was thinking about how McMinnville had turned their sighting into a big festival and a gathering of people to share stories and have some fun, and I thought that Redmond should have something like that because we have our own documented sighting,” Thille said. The Blue Book Festival, modeled after the annual McMinneville UFO Fest, had a parade, booths where people could make tinfoil hats and mashed potato sculptures and one trailer where people could detail sightings to the Mutual UFO Network, a nonprofit group of volunteers who study reported UFO sightings. MUFON is one of the oldest and largest organizations of its kind and has branches in 43 countries and all 50 states.

Investigating Oregon UFO sightings The Oregon chapter of MUFON investigates between 100 and 150 reported sightings a year, according to Oregon State Director Tom Bowden. Investigation results are categorized as explainable, insufficient data, information-only, hoaxes and unknown. “The last time I did an analysis of what we have for our Oregon cases I came up with somewhere in the neighborhood 40% unknowns, and then I had about a 50% rate of knowns,” Bowden said of cases from Jan. 1,

“It’s got to be some group doing some strange ritual. Human activity certainly seems possible. It is absolutely the strangest thing ever.” —SCOTT DUGGAN 2021, to the end of February 2022. The rest were either insufficient data, or information only—as in, when information is provided but no follow-up investigation takes place. Bowden didn’t have one hoax recorded in the timeframe. Labeling something unknown doesn’t necessarily mean little green men have been caught, just that MUFON can’t deduce an explanation for the event. “This is not always an exact science. We’re dealing with percentages. We want to be at least 80% sure that we cannot come up with a good explanation on a case before we say it’s an unknown, and we feel much more comfortable for up in the 90% range, that we can rule out any known explanation before we call it unknown,” Bowden said. “But you can never be 100% certain unless you’re talking about a really close encounter where the person is obviously confronted with something that we can only consider to be anomalous craft of some sort.” Investigations take place after someone reports a sighting to MUFON, where they fill out a description of what they saw and provide contact information