Steven Spielberg Talks About the Research He Did in Preparation for Making CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of director Steven Spielberg’s classic films, widely known by fans as his more serious alien movie, with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial being the more mainstream title. Close Encounters starred Oscar-winner Richard Dreyfus in the lead role of Roy Neary, an Indiana electric lineman, who “finds his quiet and ordinary daily life turned upside down after a close encounter with a UFO, spurring him to an obsessed cross-country quest for answers as a momentous event approaches.”
This was an important project for Spielberg, and when asked by the British Film Institute if the film was based on an event in Spielberg’s real life, the director explained:
“Nothing that ever happened to me. It was a compendium of research I had done. I read everything on the market, including the clippings from the National Inquirer and the wire services, and even tried to get into the Blue Book archives, long before the project was declassified, to no avail. I was mainly inspired when I began to meet people who had had experiences, and I realised that just about every fifth person I talked to had looked up at the sky at some point in their lives, and seen something that was not easy to explain. And then I began meeting people who had had close encounters of the second kind, where undeniably something quite phenomenal was happening right before their eyes. It was this direct contact, the interviews, that got me interested in making the movie. I interviewed enough people to know that all of them could not possibly be lying. A lot of the sightings people have at night are because they never look and are just discovering the sky; so many reports are easy to explain astronomically, conventionally. There are other reports that are impossible to describe conventionally, but the basic scientific community isn’t ready to change Einstein’s rules.”
When asked if there were any notable “close encounters of the third kind” that he’d come across, he told this fascinating story:
“There have been hundreds. Betty and Barney Hill, the interracial couple from New Hampshire, had that experience when they were taken aboard a space craft. They were allegedly both given thorough physical examinations, Betty communicated with some of the entities in the vehicle, and then they forgot the entire episode completely. They spent two years having a horrendous time with each other and their marriage, persistent nightmares. Then they went to a psychiatrist, and separately they were put under hypnosis and were able to piece together what happened during those three missing hours, when they suddenly noticed they were ninety miles further down the road. There’s a book on it by John C. Fuller called The Interrupted Journey; it was also the basis of a television movie.
“The contact was that Betty was shown a star map with a configuration of broken lines and solid lines, and different points which she didn’t attempt to memorise but which she looked at very carefully. ‘They’ explained to her that the broken lines were trade routes and the solid lines were expeditionary routes, and under hypnosis she reproduced the map. When it was published in this book in the mid-60s, no one could figure out what the hell the map meant. And then three or four years later, four crucial stars were discovered by our most advanced telescopes, and those stars completed Betty’s map. They were able to find the exact duplicate of her map existing up there.”
The research done for this movie, and the stories that have cropped up since, really are fascinating. It’s true that if you start to do your own digging, you’ll find that a lot of people you know do have stories of unexplained phenomena in the sky. Do you have a UFO story of your own? Share it with us below.