As one who has been examining UFO pictures since the age of 8, I always was torn between the fact that I wanted so much to believe all those pictures were real and yet there was always something ambiguous about them that made me feel "maybe not".
What I have found over the years was that just about all UFO pictures that appear in the media were most likely hoaxes. And this for the most part was not the result of individuals "plotting" to make fake pictures and mislead the public. Most likely, it started out as ordinary people hearing about UFOs in the news and then coming across a roundish object in their midst. They pick up a camera, attach the object to a string or throw it in the air and take a picture...
Then it turns out the picture looks pretty neat. They show it around and find people are impressed. So they submit it to a local newspaper, tack a little story around it and... it gets published !
Wow ! They get their picture in the paper, it gets lots of people excited and you get interviewed. Suddenly from your anonymity, you become a personality. Lots of fun to be had.
So it all starts out as innocent fun with no ill intent and then it ends up in numerous UFO magazines and gets blown out of proportion.
As I have said in previous posts, one needs to remain objective when looking at UFO pictures. What does the object look like ? In this case, yes, it looks like a truck mirror. So... is it likely that an alien spacecraft would look like a truck mirror ? You decide. In my view, it's problematic.
In regards the stepladder, it is not the fact that they owned one but that it was photographed set up in the vicinity where it could have been used to set up a model. This is especially significant to me because when I was thirteen, I experimented with suspended models and used a similar stepladder and fishing pole to suspend my model. So yes, when I saw the stepladder in the Trent pictures, it immediately brought to mind what I did with it !