A show on the History Channel called "UFO Hunters" had a graphics analyst look at these pictures and he detemined they are fake because the lighting source for the object differs from the lighting source for the surrounding area.

These are much better:

http://www.rense.com/general/mcmin50.htm

I spent some years near McMinnville. I still have family that lives out that way. I wasn't born when this happened, but I remember growing up, there were frequent UFO sightings around the area.

I don't believe they were really UFOs, though.

I have had one experience that involves a potential UFO sighting when I was 16. It was in north Phoenix(Scottsdale), Arizona on March 13, 1997. My friend and I were fishing at the Scottsdale Princess Resort at night and we both simultaneously saw these incredibly bright lights flying in a perfect V formation going south towards Tucson seemingly very slow when compared with the speed of an aircraft. They were not blinking as regular planes do, and the slow, almost hovering aspect of the speed at which they were travelling was nothing like any plane or balloon I had seen before. The official explanation was a "USAF explanation that the lights were simply slow falling, long burning flares dropped by an A-10 Warthog aircraft on a training exercise over Luke Air Force Base." The state's Governor, along with a bunch of different people, even saw this and disagreed with the official explanation. I am not a conspiracy theorist or UFO advocate, but would say I am quite rational when it comes to situations with strange but plausible explanations. The explanation involved did not seem to mesh with what I and many others saw that night. I am not saying that it was definitely a UFO from outer space, but it was an observed, multiply attested occurrence of something for which the given explanation does not compute for me.

Here is more on the Phoenix Lights:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_lights