Close Encounters of the Third Kind

**Close Encounters of the Third Kind** is a 1977 film starring Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon and François Truffaut, directed and written by Steven Spielberg and produced by Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips.

The film was a financial success as it generated a profit of $113 million.

## Plot

In the Sonoran Desert, French scientist Claude Lacombe, his American interpreter, cartographer David Laughlin, and other researchers, discover Flight 19, a squadron of Grumman TBM Avengers that went missing more than 30 years earlier. The planes are intact and function perfectly, but are empty. An elderly witness claims "the sun came out at night, and sang to him." The missing ship SS Cotopaxi is discovered in a similar state in the Gobi Desert. Air traffic controllers watch two airline flights narrowly avoid a mid-air collision with an unidentified flying object (UFO). Three-year-old Barry Guiler wakes to find his toys operating on their own. Following something, he runs outside, forcing his mother, Jillian, to chase him.

Investigating one of a series of large-scale power outages, electrical lineman Roy Neary experiences a close encounter with a UFO, when it flies over his truck and lightly burns the side of his face with its bright lights. The UFO, joining a group of three other UFOs, is pursued by Neary and three police cars, but the spacecraft fly off into the night sky. Roy becomes fascinated by UFOs, much to the dismay of his wife, Ronnie. He also becomes increasingly obsessed with subliminal, mental images of a mountain-like shape and begins to make models of it. Jillian also becomes obsessed with sketching a unique-looking mountain. Soon after, she is terrorized in her home by a UFO which descends from the clouds. The presence of the UFO energy field makes every appliance in Jillian's house malfunction and Barry is abducted by unseen beings.

Lacombe and Laughlin—along with a group of United Nations experts—continue to investigate increasing UFO activity and strange, related occurrences. Witnesses in Dharamsala, India report that the UFOs make distinctive sounds: a five-tone musical phrase in a major scale. Scientists broadcast the phrase to outer space, but are mystified by the response: a seemingly meaningless series of numbers (104 44 30 40 36 10) repeated over and over until Laughlin, with his background in cartography, recognizes it as a set of geographical coordinates, which point to Devils Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming. Lacombe and the U.S. military converge on Wyoming. The United States Army evacuates the area, planting false reports in the media that a train wreck has spilled a toxic nerve gas, all the while preparing a secret landing zone for the UFOs and their occupants.

Meanwhile, Roy's increasingly erratic behavior causes Ronnie to become upset and leave him, taking their three children with her. When a despairing Roy inadvertently sees a television news program about the train wreck near Devils Tower, he realizes the mental image of a mountain plaguing him is real. Jillian sees the same broadcast, and she and Roy, as well as others with similar visions and experiences, travel to the site in spite of the public warnings about nerve gas.

While most of the civilians who are drawn to the site are apprehended by the Army, Roy and Jillian persist and make it to the site just as UFOs appear in the night sky. The government specialists at the site begin to communicate with the UFOs, that gradually appear by the dozens, by use of light and sound on a large electrical billboard. Following this, an enormous mother ship lands at the site, releasing the missing pilots from Flight 19 and sailors from the Cotopaxi, and over a dozen other abductees, from long-missing adults to children, and even a few animals, all from different past eras and all of whom have strangely not aged since their abductions. Barry is also returned and reunited with a relieved Jillian. The government officials decide to include Roy in a group of people whom they had selected to be potential visitors to the mothership, and hastily prepare him.

As the aliens finally emerge from the mothership, they select Roy to join them on their travels. As Roy enters the mothership, one of the aliens pauses for a few moments with the humans. Lacombe uses Curwen hand signs that correspond to the five-note alien tonal phrase. The alien replies with the same gestures, smiles, and returns to its ship, which ascends into space.