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 filma 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 landwas fiction but drew heavily upon UFO research
and theory. Astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek
served as technical consultant on the film and made a brief
cameo appearance. Several of the movies 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 Kubricks film
2001 A Space Odyssey.
Sources
Clark, Jerome. UFOs in the 1980s The UFO Encyclopedia. Vol.
1. Detroit Apogee Books, 1990.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 filma 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 landwas fiction but drew heavily upon UFO research
and theory. Astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek
served as technical consultant on the film and made a brief
cameo appearance. Several of the movies 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 Kubricks film
2001 A Space Odyssey.
Sources
Clark, Jerome. UFOs in the 1980s The UFO Encyclopedia. Vol.
1. Detroit Apogee Books, 1990.
