History Film / CloseEncountersOfTheThirdKind

After a series of bizarre incidents where long-lost ships and aircraft begin reappearing in very unusual places around the world, a wide swath of the state of Indiana is buzzed by a very flashy troupe of [=UFOs=]. One of the many witnesses to this flyby is power-company employee Roy Neary (Creator/RichardDreyfuss). Following the event, Neary is inflicted with visions of a distinctive-looking mountain. His family life quickly falls apart, and his wife Ronnie (Creator/TeriGarr) leaves him. He eventually learns that what he has been seeing and obsessively sculpting is the Devil's Tower rock formation in Wyoming. He meets fellow witness Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) a mother desperately seeking her young son Barry, who has been carried away by the [=UFOs=]. They attempt to reach the Tower, even as the U.S. government, well aware of what is happening, concocts a biohazard scare involving the derailment of a train carrying nerve gas and places a military cordon around the site...

[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/close_encounters_of_the_third_kind.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:300:''Bah [[superscript:bi]] bah [[subscript:bom]] baaaaaaa.'']]

* TheBermudaTriangle: There's a brief shot in the Special Edition of a ship in the middle of the Gobi desert. It's supposed to be [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Cotopaxi the SS Cotopaxi]], one of the BermudaTriangle disappearances. The film opens with the discovery of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_19 Flight 19]], a Navy aviation training exercise that disappeared out of Ft. Lauderdale.

'''Laughlin''': (stunned) But it looks brand new. Where's the pilot? I don't understand. ''[[NothingIsScarier Where's the crew?]]'' Hey! How the hell did it get here?

After a series of bizarre incidents where long-lost ships and aircraft begin reappearing in very unusual places around the world, a wide swath of the state of Indiana is buzzed by a very flashy troupe of [=UFOs=]. One of the many witnesses to this flyby is power-company employee Roy Neary (Creator/RichardDreyfuss). Following the event, Neary is inflicted with visions of a distinctive-looking mountain. His family life quickly falls apart, and he eventually learns that what he has been seeing and obsessively sculpting is the Devil's Tower rock formation in Wyoming. He meets fellow witness Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) a mother desperately seeking her young son Barry, who has been carried away by the [=UFOs=]. They attempt to reach the Tower, even as the U.S. government, well aware of what is happening, concocts a biohazard scare involving the derailment of a train carrying nerve gas and places a military cordon around the site...

** Muncie, Indiana, is over thirty minutes from the Ohio border.

* BigBlackout: The UFO's presence causes Muncie and other cities in Indiana to go dark, along with temporarily disabling Roy's truck with an {{EMP}}-like effect when it {{Hypno Ray}}s him.

* ReCut: The 1980 Special Edition added an extended introduction to the Neary family, a UFO scanning a [=McDonalds=] billboard, another UFO passing over Roy on the highway after the tunnel, the [[SaharanShipwreck wreck of the Cotopaxi in the Gobi desert]], Roy's ShowerOfAngst, and the inside of the spaceship after Roy gets in. The billboard and spaceship interior shots were removed in the 1998 Director's Cut, which, conversely, restored some of the {{deleted scene}}s[[invoked]] from the original theatrical version, including Jillian's arrival at the press conference, and Roy gathering the materials for his RoomFullOfCrazy.

* NewscasterCameo: Creator/{{ABC}}'s Howard K. Smith introduces the report on the evacuations near Devil's Tower due to the "gas spill". It was originally supposed to be Creator/{{CBS}}'s Creator/WalterCronkite, hence the spot reporter's line, "Order your steak well-done, Walter".

* AppealToForce: The aliens abduct men, women and children in the 1940s then return them, unaged, 30--40 years later. This isn't exactly nice, but with that display of the mothership at the end no one really wants to pick a fight on the issue of Earth's rights and jurisdiction in the matter.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: During the initial UFO chase, Barry and Jillian encounter a farmer [[note]]played by stage actor / poet Creator/RobertsBlossom[[/note]] sitting next to the road who is whistling "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain." During the final scene, of course, [[spoiler: a mothership comes 'round a mountain]].

* HopeSpot: After a family blowup over it, Neary decides to give up on his obsession. He takes down the UFO articles, and and in trying to dismantle the mountain statue he has, [[SelfFulfillingProphecy the dismantling makes it look like the real-world mountain it's supposed to]]. Next scene, he's chucking dirt into his house to make a bigger mountain.

** It's implied a great number of people had visions of Devil's Tower, but only a few could decipher the visions or had the ability to travel there to meet the deadline. Of the few that do make, all save Roy, Jillian, and Larry meekly leave when the army scoops them up.

* SaharanShipwreck: There's a brief shot in the Special Edition which shows the wreck of the Cotopaxi, a ship that disappeared in the BermudaTriangle, in the Gobi Desert.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: During the initial UFO chase, Barry and Jillian encounter a farmer [[note]]played by stage actor / poet Roberts Blossom[[/note]] sitting next to the road who is whistling "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain." During the final scene, of course, [[spoiler: a mothership comes 'round a mountain]].

* BrickJoke: Early in the film, Roy tries to convince his kids that seeing ''Disney/{{Pinocchio}}'' would be more fun than mini golf, after which Ronnie calls him "Jiminy Cricket". Later, when Roy is about to enter the ship, the music plays the first line of "When You Wish Upon A Star".

''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' is a 1977 science fiction film written and directed by Creator/StevenSpielberg.

* DramaticAlienVTOL: In fact, Spielberg did a lot of help make this trope. The climax has the ship come in first, just as the bright lights at first with the shadow of the FlyingSaucer shape eventually becoming clearer as the five notes we've heard through the movie comes through the score. It lands and then the ramp opens and again a crack of light and then the shadows of the aliens themselves, stamping the image of the Greys, in one of their first appearances on film, in our heads.

* TheGreys: The extraterrestrials were physically modeled after real-life accounts of alien abductions. This is one of the first times they were actually used in cinema, the first been in 1956's ''Film/EarthVsTheFlyingSaucers''. Also an UnbuiltTrope, as Spielberg deliberately gave the Grays different heights, intending to show that their species had the same kind of diversity as ours. Most abduction accounts and subsequent fiction describe the Grays as all identical. The initial tall alien was a marionette. It was impossible to completely film it without the strings showing except in the shots visible in the movie, which is why you only see it the once. The other aliens at the end were played all played by young girls, Spielberg felt that "girls move more gracefully than boys."

** Muncie, Indiana, is over thirty minutes from the Ohio border. The longitude and latitude provided by the aliens actually refer to a spot which is a good 200 miles away from Devil's Tower.
** In his truck, Roy looks for Tolono on his map. Tolono is in central Illinois. The voices on his radio speak about activity at or near Harper Valley. There is no Harper Valley. The song is based on ''Harpeth'' Valley, Tennessee. However, Cornbread Road exists in Muncie. It's also the title of an [[https://k9zw.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/cornbread-road-a-ke9v-audio-amateur-radio-novel-fully-on-line/ on-again, off-again podcast radio series]] begun in 2011 by ham radio operator [[http://ke9v.net/ Jeff Davis]] ([=KE9V=]) about a secret society of hams in a little country town where all is not as it seems...

* MonochromeCasting: The only non-white speaking role is the NASA operator at the beginning.

* CelebrityParadox: Roy has models of the Starship ''Enterprise'' and a Klingon battle cruiser, but doesn't notice that his wife looks quite a bit like Roberta Lincoln from the ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode "[[Recap/StarTrekS2E26AssignmentEarth Assignment: Earth."

* CanaryInACoalMine: in order to test the government cover story of a deadly chemical spill at what is really an alien meeting site, the protagonists buy a canary as they enter the area.

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: At the end of the film it's implied that all of this was in order to make First Contact with the Human race, that the aliens are benevolent and want to be friends. Which is all well and good except they very explicitly have kidnapped people over the course of the last century. We don't speak to these people after they are returned except for Barry, who is a very young child and was only gone for perhaps a few months. These people are years out of time, their family and friends have moved on or died without them, never having known what happened to them. They haven't visibly aged, so they may not even know how long they were gone and are in for a nasty shock when they attempt to go home. We don't even know what was done to them while on the alien craft and it's possible Roy and the other astronauts are in danger.

* TakingTheKids: When Roy start acting really crazy, his wife takes the kids and they drive off to her sister's.

After a series of bizarre incidents where long-lost ships and aircraft begin reappearing in very unusual places around the world, a wide swath of the state of Indiana is buzzed by a very flashy troupe of [=UFOs=]. One of the many witnesses to this flyby is power-company employee Roy Neary (Creator/RichardDreyfuss). Following the event, Neary is inflicted with visions of a distinctive-looking mountain. His family life quickly falls apart, and he eventually learns that what he is seeing and obsessively sculpting is the rock formation Devil's Tower, Wyoming. He meets fellow witness Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) a mother desperately seeking her young son Barry, who has been carried away by the [=UFOs=]. They attempt to reach the Tower, even as the U.S. government, well aware of what is happening, concocts a biohazard scare involving the derailment of a train carrying nerve gas and places a military cordon around the site...

After a series of bizarre incidents where long-lost ships and aircraft begin reappearing in very unusual places around the world, a wide swath of the state of Indiana is buzzed by a very flashy troupe of [=UFOs=]. One of the many witnesses to this flyby is power-company employee Roy Neary (Creator/RichardDreyfuss). Following the event, Neary is inflicted with visions of a distinctive-looking mountain. His family life quickly falls apart, and he eventually learns that what he is seeing and obsessively sculpting is the rock formation Devil's Tower, Wyoming. He meets fellow witness Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) a mother desperately seeking her young son Barry, who has been carried away by the [=UFOs=]. They attempt to reach the Tower, even as the US government, well aware of what is happening, concocts a biohazard scare involving the derailment of a train carrying nerve gas and places a military cordon around the site...

After a series of bizarre incidents where long-lost ships and aircraft begin reappearing in very unusual places around the world, a wide swath of the state of Indiana is buzzed by a very flashy troupe of [=UFOs=]. One of the many witnesses to this flyby is power-company employee Roy Neary, played by Creator/RichardDreyfuss. Following the event, Neary is inflicted with visions of a distinctive-looking mountain. His family life quickly falls apart, and he eventually learns that what he is seeing and obsessively sculpting is the rock formation Devil's Tower, Wyoming. He meets fellow witness Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) a mother desperately seeking her young son Barry, who has been carried away by the [=UFOs=]. They attempt to reach the Tower, even as the US government, well aware of what is happening, concocts a biohazard scare involving the derailment of a train carrying nerve gas and places a military cordon around the site...

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/close_encounters_of_the_third_kind.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350:''Bah [[superscript:bi]] bah [[subscript:bom]] baaaaaaa.'']]

''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' is a 1977 science fiction film directed by Creator/StevenSpielberg.

* BittersweetEnding: Jillian gets her son back and all those people who've been abducted over time are returned to Earth. However, Neary leaves the Earth to go off into space, which might be cool for him but remember he's leaving behind a wife and kids who, last they saw him, thought he was going insane.

* BittersweetEnding: Jillian gets her son back, but Neary leaves the Earth to go off into space, which might be cool for him but remember he's leaving behind a wife and kids who, last they saw him, thought he was going insane.