Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Type	Book, film or media
On the Timeline	1 event, 1972

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 American science-fiction drama written and directed by Steven Spielberg. It stars Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey and François Truffaut. It tells of ordinary people drawn to a secret first meeting between humans and extraterrestrials at Devils Tower in Wyoming. Its title comes from astronomer J. Allen Hynek's classification of UFO reports, in which a close encounter of the third kind is one where "animate beings" are seen. Hynek was the film's scientific consultant and appears in a cameo, and Truffaut's character was modelled on Jacques Vallée. Made for $19.4 million, it grossed more than $300 million worldwide. In 2007 it was added to the National Film Registry.^[1][2]

Story

In 1977 French scientist Claude Lacombe (Truffaut) and his interpreter David Laughlin (Balaban) investigate strange events. Navy aircraft of Flight 19, lost over the Bermuda Triangle in 1945, turn up intact in the Sonoran Desert, and two airliners nearly collide with an unidentified object near Indianapolis. Near Muncie, Indiana, three-year-old Barry Guiler wakes to find his toys working by themselves. Power lineman Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), sent out during a blackout, has a close encounter in which a UFO's lights burn the side of his face, and he joins police in chasing the objects.^[1]

Roy becomes obsessed with an image of a mountain, sculpting it again and again until his wife Ronnie (Garr) leaves with their children. Barry's mother, Jillian (Dillon), sketches the same shape, and Barry is abducted from their home by a UFO. Witnesses in India report that the objects make a five-note musical phrase. When scientists broadcast it into space, the reply is a set of coordinates pointing to Devils Tower. The Army clears the area with a fake nerve-gas scare and prepares a secret landing site. Roy and Jillian, recognising the mountain on television, slip through the cordon. They watch as scientists talk with the craft through light and music, a vast mothership lands and releases Barry and others taken over the years, and Roy is chosen to go aboard. Lacombe exchanges the five-note phrase in hand signs with one of the visitors.^[1]

Links to ufology

The film drew directly on UFO research of its day:

• The title. It comes from Hynek's classification of close encounters, in which the third kind involves sightings of "animate beings."^[1]
• Hynek's role. Hynek, who had worked with the Air Force on Project Blue Book, was hired as scientific consultant and made a cameo appearance. He said that "even though the film is fiction, it's based for the most part on the known facts of the UFO mystery, and it certainly catches the flavor of the phenomenon."^[1][2]
• Lacombe and Vallée. Ufologist Jacques Vallée was the real-life model for Truffaut's Lacombe.^[1]
• The police chase and the press conference. The film includes a police chase of UFOs along the Indiana–Ohio border that is dismissed at an Air Force press conference. The Wikipedia account of the Michigan "swamp gas" reports links this to Hynek's own 1966 experience. His "marsh gas" explanation for sightings near Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan, at a Detroit press conference had been widely derided.^[2]
• Blue Book. An early draft by Paul Schrader, titled Kingdom Come, centred on an Air Force officer working for Project Blue Book whose job was "to ridicule and debunk flying saucers," until he has an encounter himself.^[1]

The Air Force and NASA declined to cooperate. NASA reportedly sent Spielberg a twenty-page letter saying the film was dangerous. Spielberg said: "If NASA took the time to write me a 20-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening."^[1] In May 1972 Hynek had published The UFO Experience, in which, according to the UAP timeline published with Michael Shellenberger's 2024 congressional testimony, he called Blue Book a "cover up." See Hynek's The UFO Experience.^[3]

Production

Spielberg traced the idea to a meteor shower he watched with his father as a child, to his teenage film Firelight, and to a 1970 short story, "Experiences." In late 1973 he made a deal with Columbia Pictures. The film went through the working titles Watch the Skies and Kingdom Come. Writers including Schrader, John Hill, David Giler, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins contributed, though Spielberg received sole credit. Barwood and Robbins suggested the kidnapped child. Spielberg wanted an ordinary everyman as hero, rather than a man in uniform.^[1]

Principal photography began on 16 May 1976. Locations included Devils Tower National Monument, Burbank, and two vast World War II airship hangars at the former Brookley Air Force Base in Mobile, Alabama, six times larger than the biggest sound stage in the world. Spielberg called the production "twice as bad and twice as expensive" as Jaws, and the budget grew from a pitched $2.7 million to $19.4 million.^[1]

Douglas Trumbull supervised the visual effects, which emphasised glowing light rather than hardware, and Carlo Rambaldi designed the aliens. The mothership, designed by Ralph McQuarrie and built by Greg Jein, was inspired by an oil refinery Spielberg saw at night in India. It now hangs in the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center near the space shuttle Discovery. The small aliens in the final scenes were played by fifty local six-year-old girls. John Williams wrote more than 300 versions of the five-note motif before Spielberg chose one, and the score won two Grammy Awards.^[1]

Release and reception

The film opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York on 16 November 1977 and went into wide release on 14 December. It grossed about $288 million worldwide in its first run and became the most successful Columbia film to that time, third for 1977 behind Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit. A Special Edition, released on 3 August 1980 with a studio-demanded scene inside the mothership, brought the total to $303.7 million. Spielberg later regretted that scene and cut it from his 1998 director's cut. The film was restored in 4K for its 40th anniversary in 2017.^[1]

Critics praised it widely. Roger Ebert said its last 30 minutes were "among the most marvelous things I've ever seen on the screen," and Ray Bradbury called it the greatest science-fiction film ever made. It received numerous Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Saturn award nominations. The American Film Institute ranked it 64th among the greatest American films, and in December 2007 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry. Observers credit it, with Star Wars and Superman, with reviving the market for science fiction films. In 1985 Spielberg gave $100,000 to the Planetary Society's search for extraterrestrial intelligence.^[1]

Notes on the earlier version of this article

• Box office. The earlier version gave worldwide earnings of more than $300 million. The Wikipedia account gives about $288 million for the original release and $303.7 million including the 1980 Special Edition.^[1]

On the UAP Timeline

• Hynek's The UFO Experience (May 1972) — Blue Book adviser J. Allen Hynek writes that Blue Book was a cover-up and the problem was glossed over.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, “Michigan "swamp gas" UFO reports”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.