Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 science-fiction drama written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary, an ordinary Indiana utility worker whose life is overturned after a UFO encounter. As Roy becomes consumed by visions he cannot explain, the film gradually expands from suburban mystery into something more spiritual and awe-struck, following both personal obsession and an international effort to understand extraterrestrial contact. Unlike many later alien films, it is not built primarily around invasion or destruction, but around wonder, communication and the unsettling idea that something vast is trying to make itself understood.

Although the story begins in Indiana and stretches toward Wyoming, the film was shot across a mix of California, Alabama, Wyoming and India. The most famous location is Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, which becomes the climactic meeting place between humans and the alien visitors. Much of the film’s domestic and secret-base material, however, was created in and around Mobile, Alabama, where two enormous abandoned airship hangars at the former Brookley Air Force Base were used for the government landing site, while nearby Fairhope supplied Barry Guiler’s home and Bay Minette provided the railway depot seen in the evacuation material. Additional filming took place in California, including desert work at Dumont Dunes and effects-related production in Burbank, while the brief India scenes were filmed in the village of Hal near Mumbai. The result is a film built from very different real environments: ordinary American neighbourhoods, vast industrial interiors, desert landscapes and finally the unmistakable silhouette of Devils Tower, which gives the ending its monumental and almost mythic power.