Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Title of a 1977 movie about UFOs or flying saucers, produced by Columbia Pictures and directed by Steven Spielberg. The film—a story about a group of people mysteriously drawn to a site in the Western United States where government personnel hoped to communicate with a extraterrestrial craft expected to land—was fiction but drew heavily upon UFO re-search and theory. Astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek served as technical consultant on the film and made a brief cameo appearance. Several of the movie's subplots were based on firsthand accounts of claimed sightings of UFOs.
The title derives from a grading of types of UFO sighting reports developed by Hynek; the first kind denotes sightings without contact, the second kind involves UFO reports that include some accompanying physical evidence, and the third kind designates claimed contacts with extraterrestrial entities.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is particularly notable for its special effects, the creation of Douglas Trumbull, who also created the noteworthy special effects in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Sources:
Clark, Jerome. UFOs in the 1980s: The UFO Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. Detroit: Apogee Books, 1990.