Word: ufo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...UFO...
Undoubtedly stimulated by the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, UFO freaks have been deluging the White House with mail. Most demand that President Carter make good on a campaign promise that if there were any secrets about the UFOs he would flush them out, if elected. Carter reported in 1973, while Governor of Georgia, that several years earlier he had seen a UFO in the form of a "glowing light" in the night sky. Now the White House has asked NASA to look at the saucer data collected through the years by the Air Force and others...
...does in the second half, the flaws are those of excess rather than design. Sometimes Spielberg does not know when to stop. A sequence set in India seems to exist only for the sake of one spectacular shot; a confused subplot about an Army cover-up of UFO research looks like a hasty bow to Watergate-era current events; an attenuated mountainside chase has little purpose beyond allowing Spielberg to pay homage to the famous crop-duster and Mount Rushmore sequences of North by Northwest. If any of these elements were removed from the film, they would not be missed...
...saucers, with aluminum skin and Plexiglas bubble tops, Trumbull built about two dozen in different shapes with remote-controlled lights inside. The lights were then aimed at the camera lens, creating the optical effect known as lens flare. Says he: "We used that technique in order to have those UFO objects pass over, through or around whatever the human action was in the scene. You never really distinctly see anything except in a few very brief cuts...
...ultimate UFO-the Big Mama of the flying saucers -is the mother ship, part of which was built in a giant air plane hangar in Mobile, Ala. Big Mama is a huge, circular construction, with narrow spires rising from the center and a hundred or so windows around the rim. The mother ship is supposed to land at night, and Trumbull placed 2,000 flood lights and six arc lights along its edge to create what he calls a "wall of light" and the illusion that the entire ship is whirring as it settles to the ground...