  The MACHO project is searching for dark matter in the form of massive compact
halo objects (Machos), by monitoring the brightness of millions of stars in the
Magellanic Clouds to search for gravitational microlensing events. Analysis of
our first 2.3 years of data for 8.5 million stars in the LMC yields 8 candidate
microlensing events, well in excess of the $\approx 1$ event expected from
lensing by known low-mass stars. The event timescales range from 34 to 145
days, and the estimated optical depth is $\sim$ 2 x 10^{-7}, about half of that
expected from a `standard' halo. Likelihood analysis indicates the typical lens
mass is $0.5^{+0.3}_{-0.2} \Msun$, suggesting they may be old white dwarfs.
