In the Sonora Desert in Mexico a team of investigators finds what appears to be a fleet of planes that had been missing since May 1945. The planes were intact and functional, but the crews were missing. Traffic Control Center in Indianapolis receives a call from two planes that report something strange in their airspace. After a few minutes of communication between the planes and Traffic Control results in neither being able to confirm what it is that they are looking at. In the Gobi Desert a Russian ship the Cotopaxi was found, after the ship went missing in 1925.
In Muncie, Indiana little Barry Guiler (Cary Guffey) is aroused up from sleep by all his electronic toys suddenly turning on. He goes downstairs to find the refrigerator opened and a trail of food leading outside. Barry’s mother, Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) wakes up and sees her son running from the house.
Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is a lineman for Indiana’s Public Works Department. He is called to work when a blackout hits the area. He stops at a railroad crossing to look at a map. While standing he is overtaken by a UFO. He tries to follow it and almost hits Barry who is standing in the middle of the road. As Roy exits his truck he and a small group of people, including Barry and his mother Jillian, see several small UFOs pass overhead.
Roy becomes obsessed with what he saw and is driven to try to understand everything. His fixation culminates in him believing that something alien is going on and he is determined to get to the bottom of things. When he sees a picture of Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, he believes that he is receiving a subliminal message telling him to go to the tower. At the same time Barry is kidnapped by the aliens. Jillian is also receiving subliminal messages and makes her way to Devils Tower looking for her son.
During all this, experts from various countries are also converging on the landmark with hopes of communicating with life from another world. Overseen by French government scientist and UFO expert, Claude Lacombe (Francois Truffaut), the project is locally run by Major Wild Bill Walsh (Warren Kemmerling) who locks down the area around Devils Tower. The government may be trying to keep Roy out, but the aliens are inviting him in.
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was released in 1977 and was directed by Steven Spielberg. It is an American science fiction epic movie. In December 2007, the movie was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
The wreck of the Cotopaxi was discovered sometime in the 1980s off the coast of Florida. It wasn’t until January 2020 that the ship was actually identified as the Cotopaxi. The look of the mother ship is based on that of an oil refinery located in India. The model is now in the Smithsonian.
The inspiration for the movie was a film that Spielberg created when he was 17 called “Firelight”. Of the supposed two hour and twenty-minute film, only three and a half minutes of movie and behind-the-scenes stills are still around, and a good portion of that is without sound. Everything else is considered lost.
Movie
Firelight