Directed by : Stephen Spielberg

Produced by : Julia and Michael Phillips

Starring : Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut

Released : 1977 (Columbia Pictures)

Country : United States / UK

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Close Encounters is a landmark Science Fiction film, particularly notable for its portrayal of extra-terrestrials as benign, even kind, which was a sharp departure from the evil monster style of most earlier films.

It popularized a number of motifs, most of which were drawn from a wide variety of public reports of UFO encounters: abductions, small and thin aliens and UFOs covered in lights rather than the disc shapes popular in the 1950 and 1960s.

The moral contradiction between the aliens' benevolence and the forced abductions they conduct is left unexplored.

The movie has been revised numerous times :

• notably for a 132-minute Special Edition in 1980
• and again for a 137-minute Collector's Edition in 1988.
• The Special Edition features several new character development scenes, the discovery of a lost ship, the Cotopaxi in the Gobi Desert
• And a view of the inside of the mothership. The interior of the mothership is deleted from the Collector's Edition, Spielberg added this scene as a concession to be allowed to make the Special Edition. He decided it was a mistake and removed it in the later edition.

The enigmatic title refers to the three kinds of close encounter with aliens, by the noted UFO investigator, Dr. J. Allen Hynek who defined :

•  Close Encounters of the First Kind as Sighting.
• Close Encounters of the Second Kind as Evidence.
• Close Encounters of theThird Kind as Contact.