Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a science fiction film in 1977 written and directed by Steven Spielberg.
The cast are Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban and Cary Guffey. The story is in the Sonoran Desert, Claude Lacombe and David Laughlin, a government scientific researchers discover a lost squadron of World War II aircraft. The aircraft are still in one piece and perfectly operational, but no sign of the pilot and its crew. At Air Traffic Control in Indianapolis, Indiana, two airline flights almost have a mid-air collision with a UFO. In Muncie, Indiana, a three year-old boy, Barry Guiller, run out of his house when his toys start operating by itself, forcing her mother Gillian to chase after him. For the period of power outage, Indiana electrical lineman Roy Neary come into contact with a UFO, and he becomes obsessed with it, and gives much disappointment to his wife, Veronica Neary.
Roy starts seeing the image and starts creating a scale model of a unique geological structure he has never seen. Gillian also becomes obsessed with a mental picture of a unique-looking mountain. Soon after, she witnesses a UFO landing, in which Barry is abducted by unseen beings.
After Roy’s increasingly unusual behavior causes her wife Ronnie to abandon him, taking their three children with her, he sees the feature he has been modeling on a television news show: Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming.Gillian sees the same broadcast,she and Roy, as well as others with similar experiences, possessively head toward the site. Elsewhere in the world, the pace of UFO activity is increasing; Lacombe and Laughlin, the two researchers, investigate a host of occurrences along with other United Nation experts. Eyewitnesses report the UFOs to making a distinctive sounds.
After Laughlin recognizes a signal from outer space as a set of geographical coordinates pointing to Devils Tower, all parties begin to meet on Wyoming. The US army evacuates the area, using false reports that a train wreck has spilled highly dangerous nerve gas all the while preparing a landing zone for the first human contact with the UFOs and their inhabitant. While the other humans drawn to the site are unable to reach Devils Tower (one of them who escaped with Roy and Gillian was hit by a sleeping drug), Roy and Gillian persist and make it to the site as dozens of UFOs appear.
The huge mother ship lands, returning people who had been abducted over the years, including Barry. With an understanding of peace between the two civilizations, Roy is taken on board the ship as an ambassador from Earth, and one of the UFO occupants comes out to greet the humans. Lacombe communicates with it by using the hand signs (using the Kod’aly Method) that are used to create the five tones in the human contact. The UFO occupant does the same and smiles before it boards back on the ship, which then lifts off.
Close Encounters was a long-cherished project for Steven Spielberg. Filming began in May 1976 and was released in November 1977 with a critical and financial success. The film was reissued in 1980 as Close Encounters of the Third Kind : The Special Edition, Spielberg’s “director’s cut” of the film with additional scenes. The film received numerous awards and nominations at the 50th Academy Awards, 32nd British Academy Film Awards, the Saturn Awards and has been widely acclaimed by the American Film Institute. And was named to the National Film Registry in December 2007.