Word: ufo
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...Klan in an Alabama newspaper interview, received a death threat and had to be whisked away for two weeks. Dillon's son received a kidnaping threat that brought in the FBI. Then, late one night, shooting halted abruptly so that everyone could observe what Spielberg believed to be a UFO cruising the sky. "Everyone was lying there on their backs with binoculars," says Dillon. "I remember thinking that if there were extraterrestrial beings up there observing us, they would think that earth creatures were flat beings with strange eyes." The object turned out to be an Echo satellite...
with alien life forms?but, of course, no one will believe his story. The rest of Close Encounters' plot follows Roy and several other UFO sighters, including a mysterious international scientist (Truffaut) and a neighborhood woman (Dillon), as they overturn their lives in a mad attempt to arrange a rendezvous with the extraterrestrial visitors. When an earthling makes actual contact with aliens, that is "a close encounter of the third kind." (The first kind is sighting; the second, physical evidence...
...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...