MCMINNVILLE, Ore. (CN) - For one weekend every May, downtown McMinnville is abducted by aliens.
Extraterrestrial enthusiasts flood the small Oregon town, rocking glittery makeup, metallic green jumpsuits and shiny tinfoil hats.
Parents pull children through the streets in toy wagons adorned with aluminum foil to resemble spaceships. Some attendees even attempt to make contact, holding handmade signs up toward the sky.
This year's festivities happened over the May 14-15 weekend.
Sponsored by McMenamins, a Pacific Northwest venue and hotel company, the annual UFO Festival transforms this town in the heart of wine country into a celebration of the paranormal.
Located in Oregon's Willamette Valley, McMinnville is filled with tasting rooms and vineyards. For most of the year, it's best known for its pinot noir. Then comes UFO Fest, when the usual wine aficionados are replaced by seemingly out-of-this-world visitors. Organizers call it the world's largest UFO festival, though fans of Roswell UFO Festival in New Mexico might dispute that claim.
Thousands gathered on the town's main street. Attendees drifted between booths selling everything from alien-themed art and literature to metaphysical services.
At one booth, an author promoted a book on the Annunaki, ancient Mesopotamian deities that some believe were extraterrestrials. A long line formed outside a massive tent promising aura photography sessions that can reveal the colors of a person's spiritual energy.
At another booth, vendors simply sold hollowed-out gourds painted neon green to resemble alien heads. Guests were purchasing them in droves.
Naturally, this festival attracts its share of eccentrics.
One older man stood beside an oversized posterboard. Covered in dense, handwritten scrawl, it linked the assassination of John F. Kennedy to Hillary Clinton through a maze of internet conspiracy theories, including QAnon. Most people passed by without stopping.
"There's always some weirder ones," a wine sommelier said with a laugh as he cleared a pair of glasses from a table outside a tasting room.
UFO Fest began in 2000 in commemoration of the famous Trent UFO sighting of 1950.
On May 11 that year, farmers Evelyn and Paul Trent reported seeing a large disc-shaped object hovering silently above their rural McMinnville property. Paul photographed the object, and his images were published in Life magazine. His photos are some of the most famous (and debated) UFO photographs ever taken.
Still, the festival is about much more than just flying saucers. It's really a celebration (or examination?) of all things weird and supernatural.
Ghosts, spirits, Bigfoot and Mothman all have a place here. Anything that might have interested The X Files' Mulder and Scully is fair game.
At one booth stood Alicia Phifer and Tobe Johnson, founders of Olympic Strange Days. The Port Townsend, Washington-based group hosts paranormal and Sasquatch-themed "interdimensional expeditions" in Olympic National Park. Their workshops visit supernatural hotspots in the forest and feature scientists, storytellers and Native American field trackers, who discuss unusual experiences and other unexplained phenomena.
At the festival, Phifer displayed alleged Bigfoot tracks collected from around the country.
"You can clearly see the metatarsal bones here," she said enthusiastically, gesturing toward a cement cast embedded with pine needles. The footprint is nearly two feet long: who or whatever made it must have been massive.
For many attendees, UFO Festival is simply an excuse to celebrate, drink and embrace the weird.
Alien-themed raves carried on late into the night under the cover of blacklights and EDM. A parade on Saturday featured elaborate floats and entire battalions of Star Wars cosplayers, who marched through downtown in coordinated, military-style formations.
For others, this gathering is sacred and serious. Some guests were wearing merchandise from PhenomeCon, a similar but no-nonsense paranormal convention held near Utah's infamous Skinwalker Ranch. The property - which has been the focus of Pentagon investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs - has long been associated with UFO sightings and other chilling, unexplained events like cattle mutilations.
For UFO Fest attendees seeking a deeper dive, special events include lectures and panels featuring historians, astrophysicists and ufologists. These speakers discuss everything from purported alien abductions and government cover-ups to AI and consciousness.
At this year's festival, Jason Martell, a regular on the History Channel show Ancient Aliens, discussed possible interactions between ancient lost civilizations and alien beings. The talk drifted into the study of archaeoacoustics, an emerging field that merges archaeology with the study of acoustics.
University of Albany physicist Matthew Szydagis gave a lecture on quantum mechanics, explaining his views on why it's likely aliens have already visited our world. Historian Rebecca Charbonneau of the American Institute of Physics discussed the future of extraterrestrial communication research, including plans to eventually place radio telescopes on the far side of the moon.
"You might have noticed that we haven't built much of anything on the moon," Charbonneau said, noting the difficult logistics of lunar construction. "That is starting to change with the new Artemis missions."
"The next ten years will be a very, very exciting time in the search for radio signals from extraterrestrials," she continued. "It's something we've been planning for over 50 years, and it's starting to really look like it's going to come to fruition."
This year's headline speaker was perhaps Dylan Borland, a former Air Force geospatial intelligence specialist who gained fame in the UFO world after he testified before Congress in 2025 about seeing a silent, triangular craft near a NASA hangar. Borland says he faced retaliation for speaking about the incident, and many view him as a whistleblower.
At the festival, Borland said the experience changed how he views government and the defense industry but not his Catholic faith.
Among those at the festival's final Q&A panel was George Leverett, a professional harpist from southern Oregon who was attending the festival for the fourth time. Leverett said his fascination with paranormal phenomena deepened when he received a letter from his father two months after his father died - an experience he still struggles to explain.
For Leverett, UFO Fest offers something that is difficult to find elsewhere: a place where people can openly discuss unusual experiences without ridicule. He appreciates how the festival prompts an optimistic rather than frightening attitude toward paranormal and extraterrestrial activity.
"Humans are very social creatures, and you can't talk about paranormal or extraterrestrial stuff at work or in a lot of social situations," he said. "Here, you have such a strong common interest, and it's a very fertile ground. You can talk to people openly without holding parts of yourself back."
Outside spaces like UFO Fest, believers might encounter more cynicism if they tried to share their stories.
During the closing panel, ufologist and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell offered a koan-like word of caution against trying to persuade skeptics.
"There's three sides to a coin. There's the truth, there's the lie and somewhere in the middle, and that's where we meet," Corbell told the packed auditorium. "Don't ever try to convince anybody of anything. UFOs are not a matter of belief. It's either true or not true, and that's up to you."
Source: Courthouse News Service
