The Story
For years, five young astronomers ran a battered radio telescope in a field below Mount Hood. The scientific establishment laughed at them. When the funding ran out, they kept the dish alive on generators and stubbornness, listening to the static night after night.
Then, on Earth’s last quiet night, the static cut out and a rhythm broke through. It came from deep in the Milky Way, and it was heading here. By morning it was on every station in Oregon.
Some people had been expecting it. Since a spring evening in McMinnville in 1950, a recovered craft had lain hidden in a government hangar. When the signal came, it woke up.
They came from two directions at once. Vast ships descended inside the storm clouds, their beams pulling people up into the sky by the thousand. And from beneath Oregon’s rivers and fields rose the Walkers: colossal machines buried there long ago, waiting. Shielded by force fields seen only in the rain, they turned whole streets to dust.
The invaders were never seen. Only their machines. And the machines were hungry.
The Oregon Invasion follows the people of Oregon through the long months that followed: from the fields of McMinnville to the burning streets of Portland, into the dark beneath a broken church and the old tunnels under the city. There, police, firefighters, marines and ordinary people built a resistance in secret, waiting for one chance to strike back, on the eleventh of May.
It is a story about ordinary people, about love and loss, and about the resilience of Oregon.
The Crew
Cassidy – Lead astronomer. Runs the dish and the crew.
Jennie – Data analyst. Cassidy’s younger sister.
Wade – Engineer. Keeps the dish, the generators and the trucks running.
Theo – Radio and signals specialist. Lives on the frequencies.
Dez – Field technician. Radiation and sensor readings.
The History
On the evening of Thursday, 11 May 1950, on a farm outside McMinnville, Oregon, Evelyn Trent was feeding the chickens when she saw a large, silent, metallic disc in the sky. Her husband Paul ran for the camera and took two photographs before it slid away to the northwest.
The pictures ran on the front page of the local Telephone-Register, then in Life magazine. Decades later, a government-commissioned study found it one of the few cases where everything examined fitted an extraordinary flying object seen by two witnesses. The Trents never made a penny from it. “I took the pictures,” Paul said in 1998, “but I don’t want them.”
Every May, McMinnville still gathers for the UFO Festival. The Oregon Invasion takes that date as its heartbeat. The story is fiction, but the sky over Oregon has a history of its own.
Why Oregon
From the Cascade peaks to the Pacific, from Astoria’s shore to the bridges of Portland, Oregon is a place of mountains, rivers and rain, and of people who have faced fire, flood and hard times and stood their ground.
That resilience is the heart of the album. Whatever comes from the sky, it is the people of Oregon who carry the story home.