UFOs, Aliens & Steven Spielberg's 20-Year Obsession
The director's childhood celestial event led to 'Close Encounters' and a new sci-fi blockbuster era
Joe Pompeo writes about Hollywood history every other Saturday. He recently revisited the feud between horror-movie hosts Vampira and Elvira, Al Pacino’s role in Dog Day Afternoon and the echoes of Marilyn Monroe’s fatal overdose in the Matthew Perry tragedy. You can email him at joepompeo@substack.com or sign up for his personal Substack. Today Joe explores the story behind Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which defined an era of sci-fi blockbusters when it premiered 47 years ago this month, and marked a landmark role for Teri Garr, who died Oct. 29 at 79.
Steven Spielberg was sound asleep when his father came bounding into the room. Wake up, son!
It was well before dawn one morning in 1957, around the time Arnold Spielberg had moved the family to Phoenix after taking a new job at General Electric.
“Come with me,” Arnold told Steven, who groggily followed his father to the car, pajamas and all. “I have a surprise for you.”
Gazing out the window as they drove the darkened desert roads, Steven couldn’t help feeling a little frightened. Where were they going? And what sort of surprise was urgent enough to rouse him out of bed in the middle of the night? The blankets and coffee only heightened his anxious curiosity.
After 30 minutes or so, they pulled over to the side of the road. Stepping out of the car, they observed what Arnold would later describe as a “bright canopy of dust” overhead. It was intense, eerie even. Arnold found a spot for the blanket and spread it out over the sandy ground.
Steven lay down, unaware that his whole world was about to be transformed.
Arnold finally let his son in on the purpose of their midnight expedition. He’d dragged them to the middle of nowhere at this ungodly hour because he’d heard that a comet would be visible. Staring into the heavens, they didn’t view a comet. But something else took the younger Spielberg’s breath away: a spectacular meteor shower.
“All these incredible points of light were crisscrossing the sky,” he would later recall. “It was a phenomenal display.”
Spielberg lay there as if time had stood still, transfixed by the celestial light show. His father tried to explain the science behind what they were witnessing, but the boy didn’t want to hear it. As far as his 10-year-old imagination was concerned, he was seeing a bunch of shooting stars.
Reflecting on this experience as an adult more than four decades later, Spielberg said, “That was my first introduction to the world beyond the Earth.”
More significantly, the experience had instilled in Spielberg a desire that would drive his career: “To tell stories not of this world.”
A 16-Year-Old and an 8MM
Six years after the meteor shower, on Dec. 8, 1963, the Arizona Republic’s Sunday magazine published an article under the headline “Teenage Cecil B.”
The subject of the profile was a 16-year-old from Phoenix armed with a Kodak Brownie 8mm — a cheapo home-movie camera that he’d been futzing around with ever since his old man received it as a Father’s Day gift in 1958.
“In the field of amateur movie-making, increasingly popular with teenagers,” noted the article’s display copy, “Steve Spielberg is an award winner.”
Spielberg had already made several such amateur movies, including an eight-minute Western (The Last Gun) and a World War II action flick (Escape to Nowhere) that won a film festival competition.
Now he was in the midst of his most ambitious project yet: a 90-minute feature called Firelight that marked the first cinematic manifestation of Spielberg’s zeal for the otherworldly.
“Earthlings in ‘Firelight’ are doomed to a weird fate,” wrote Esther Clark in her magazine feature, summarizing the plot, “because their obsession for interplanetary travel affords the opportunity to take hate, war and prejudice to outer space residents. To prevent such an occurrence, script writer Steve has leaders of the planet Altaris transport entire cities from Earth, but in miniature, as exhibits Altarians would pay to see.”
Spielberg remained as fascinated by space as he was on that night in the desert with his father. He’d dreamed up Firelight based on something his fellow Boy Scouts claimed to have witnessed during an overnight trip he wasn’t able to attend — a supposed “blood-red orb rising up behind some sagebrush, shooting off into space.”
The incident was most likely an embellishment, or an outright fabrication — right?? — but no matter: It triggered Spielberg’s creative impulses. He funded Firelight with $60 (about $618 today) earned from his previous films and set out to raise another $300 ($3,090 in 2024). Arnold ended up bankrolling most of the production, for which he also assisted with lighting and set design.
The cast and crew consisted of dozens of Spielberg’s classmates, who worked tirelessly after school and on weekends.
“I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction,” Spielberg told them.
Filming locations for Firelight included a jet at Sky Harbor Airport, the wards of Scottsdale Baptist Hospital and the laboratories of the Middleton Institute of Electronics. Spielberg also turned his yard and carport into a makeshift movie set. “We’re all for Steve’s hobby,” Mrs. Spielberg said. “This way we know, and the parents of his teenage friends know, where they are. They’re not cruising up and down Central Avenue.”
Steven had additional help beyond his family and friends. During a family trip to Universal Studios, the aspiring director met a film executive named Chuck Silvers, who according to Spielberg’s biographer, Joseph McBride, “recognized his extraordinary potential as a filmmaker, gave him advice about the making of Firelight, and eagerly awaited a chance to see the finished movie.”
The finished movie arrived on March 24, 1964 when Firelight premiered at the Phoenix Little Theatre. A reviewer for the Arizona Journal concluded, “Firelight is just as good, although this may be construed as criticism, as some of the science fiction movies seen by the late-late television viewers. The plot, the action, the basic material of the movie, is sound and not as far out as some of Hollywood’s fantasies-de-science.”
Silvers was indeed blown away when he saw the movie Spielberg had made in his free time while a high school junior. “What a project!” he gushed years later. “There was no doubt that he was special. There was this tremendous confidence everything was going to work out the way he wanted it.”
Well, not everything would work out exactly the way young Spielberg envisioned. In an interview with local press for Firelight’s release, Spielberg said he planned to attend UCLA film school and work for Universal Pictures. The summer before Spielberg’s senior year, he squeezed his foot into the door with an unpaid internship at Universal. He didn’t get into UCLA though, instead attending California State University, Long Beach. But he was a regular visitor on the Universal lot throughout college, determined to make it his professional home upon graduation.
As it turned out, there would be no graduation. In 1968, with Silvers’ help, Spielberg was offered a job at Universal as a television director, which he dropped out of school to accept.
He “hoped to persuade Universal to back him in making a big-screen version of his sci-fi tale,” McBride wrote in Steven Spielberg: A Biography. “Spielberg saw Firelight as his entrée to a career as a Hollywood director.”
His career was blasting off, but Spielberg’s big league sci-fi film would have to wait.
A UFO Obsession
Before making movies of his own, Spielberg needed to prove his mettle. He directed episodes of shows like Columbo and Marcus Welby, M.D. Then came a string of television movies (Duel, Something Evil, Savage) before his theatrical debut, The Sugarland Express — a dark comedy crime drama starring Goldie Hawn — which premiered in March 1974.
By then, Spielberg had begun laying the groundwork for the dream project he’d first dabbled in 10 years earlier — and America’s zeitgeist was on his side. The midcentury flying-saucer craze had primed audiences for stories about UFOs and visitors from outer space, from The War of the Worlds to The Day the Earth Stood Still. Many of these productions were B-movie kitsch, but Spielberg believed he could approach the genre with complexity and big-budget innovation.
In 1970, Spielberg wrote a film treatment called “Experiences” about a group of kids who encounter UFOs late one night on a midwestern lover’s lane. Reminiscent of his formative stargazing experience in the Arizona desert, the story would morph and evolve over the next several years, during which Spielberg struck a development deal with Columbia Pictures.
In this same time frame, Spielberg became interested in the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, whom the U.S. Air Force had retained as a scientific consultant for its Project Blue Book investigations. Hynek studied scores of UFO reports, gauging their legitimacy and assessing whether the incidents in question could be explained by known astronomical phenomena. Initially a skeptic, he became a believer.
“He found the witness reports very credible,” Spielberg said, “and he found so many similarities from so many portions of America, as well as throughout the world, that he became a convert to the fact that the government was hiding something.”
In 1972, Hynek published a book called The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, in which he categorized different levels of extraterrestrial encounters. Chapter 10 is about those rarest of alleged encounters in which humans come into contact with the occupants of UFOs.
The chapter’s title? “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
Now that Spielberg had the name for his long-percolating sci-fi flick, he continued playing around with different plots. One of them involved a Project Blue Book official whose storyline reflected Hynek’s real-life experience — a “UFOs and Watergate” concept, as Spielberg described it.
Close Encounters simmered on the back burner throughout 1974 and 1975 while Spielberg worked on Jaws, which was about to make him a mega-star. When Jaws entered post-production, Spielberg began working on the Close Encounters script. Its protagonist was no longer a whistleblowing government official, but rather an ordinary guy — just like him.
As Spielberg once put it, “I wanted to make it a very accessible story, about the very common, everyday individual who has a sighting that overturns his life as he once knew it.”
Now he just had to find the right actor for the part.
Hoffman, Pacino Said No to Playing His Everyman
During the making of Jaws, Spielberg got to talking with Richard Dreyfuss about the UFO movie he was trying to get off the ground. Some mornings, Dreyfuss would accompany Spielberg to his office and spitball ideas. Eventually, it dawned on Dreyfuss that he wanted to play the role of Roy Neary, a Midwest average Joe whose world irrevocably changes after an encounter with a UFO.
Spielberg, still attached to Dreyfuss as the shark-obsessed marine biologist of Jaws, had other candidates in mind. He went hard after Steve McQueen, who regretfully declined due to his inability to cry on camera, as was required of Neary’s character. (Spoiler alert: Neary becomes so consumed by his UFO experience that he eventually leaves his family for a journey with the aliens aboard the mothership.) Dustin Hoffman also turned down the role. Ditto Al Pacino and Gene Hackman.
Finally, Spielberg realized that Roy Neary had been staring him in the face all along: Dreyfuss got the part, cast alongside François Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey and Teri Garr, who played Roy’s wife, Ronnie Neary.
“I worked very hard in developing this character, with Steven’s help,” Garr told Ray Morton for his 2007 book, Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Making of Steven Spielberg's Classic Film.
In Dreyfuss’ recollection, “We all felt that this particular project had a noble agenda. This was a big idea that Steven was talking about. It wasn’t just a sci-fi movie, and it wasn’t just about monsters from the id, it was that, we are not only not alone, but that we have relatively little to fear. People don’t realize, or it’s hard for people to remember, that Close Encounters was truly the first cultural, iconic moment that said, calm down, we’re OK, they can be our friends. That really was a huge statement.”
After the smashing success of Jaws — it grossed $470 million globally; inflation adjusted, that’s $2.75 billion — Spielberg had the luxury of a long leash. Columbia was willing to give him a large degree of creative control with a nearly $20 million budget (a little less than $110 million in 2024), more than double Jaws’ $9 million.
Echoes of Spielberg’s amateur feature-film resonate throughout Close Encounters. As Jean Weber Brill, who did the makeup for Firelight, told McBride, “Close Encounters was actually a remake of Firelight. There were scenes in Close Encounters that were almost direct copies.” (There’s also a scene that evoked Spielberg’s father waking him up in the middle of the night to look at the stars.)
This time around, Spielberg had resources at his disposal that the teenage director of Firelight could only have dreamed of. For one thing, to make Close Encounters as accurate as possible — or at least as accurate as a movie about UFOs could be — Spielberg hired Hynek as a consultant: “I owe a lot to his instilling in me a professional’s point of view on this kind of field reporting. He helped me make the movie more credible than it would have been without his existence.” (Hynek got a cameo out of the deal, too.)
An Oscar Nom and a $1 Billion Gross
On Nov. 16, 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind premiered at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater. After its national release a month later, it went on to rake in more than $340 million globally (approximately $1.8 billion in 2024).
“It sealed Spielberg’s commercial clout within the industry as a filmmaker with a seemingly magical box-office touch,” wrote McBride.
It also earned Spielberg his first Oscar nomination, as well as garnering numerous other nominations, awards — and 30 years later, inclusion on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, which called it an “intelligent sci-fi film in which the climactic scene is set far from an ocean: Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming. Long a sacred place in Native American folklore, the monument served as an iconic image around which to construct this film about the quest for extraterrestrial life and UFOs. Also making the film effective and believable is Richard’s Dreyfuss’ Everyman character . . . The five-tone musical motif used for communication with the aliens has become as quotable as any line of movie dialogue.”
Today, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is remembered as a pioneering entry in the sci-fi canon that took hold in the '70s and '80s. Writing in The New Yorker in 2017, David Denby described it as “unparalleled in its combination of scary and funny ideas . . . In Spielberg’s movies, transcendent or threatening forces enter ordinary existence, where, despite them, children play and couples quarrel, make up, and split. Life goes on. The people don’t know, so to speak, that they are part of a movie with a fantastic premise.”
For Spielberg, Close Encounters’ legacy is a bit more complicated.
“I look at my movie and I see a lot of naivete, and I see my youth, and I see my blind optimism, and I see how I’ve changed,” he said in a documentary that was released as part of a 2001 “collector’s edition” DVD. “I look at Close Encounters and I see a very sweet, idealistic odyssey about a man who gives up everything in pursuit of his dreams, or his obsession. In 1997, I would never make Close Encounters the way I made it in 1977, because I have a family that I would never leave . . .
“When I see Close Encounters, it’s the one film I see that dates me. I really look back and see who I was 20 years ago compared to who I am now.”
Image credits: Teri Garr in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, 1977 (Columbia Pictures/Getty Images); Devils Tower (Harvey Meston/Archive Photos/Getty Images); Spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Columbia Pictures); Alien from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images); Steven Spielberg, 1975 (Giorgio Ambrosi/Mondadori via Getty Images); Richard Dreyfuss climbing Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Screen Archives/Getty Images); Wood paneling background (jakkrit)
Steven Spielberg at age 8 in 1954 (ARCHIVIO GBB); Cecil B. DeMille (Gaby/Getty images); astrophysicist Dr. H. Allen Hynek (Bettmann); Meteor shower (Adastra); Wallpaper (Spiderstock)
Al Pacino, 1975 (Screen Archives/Getty Images); Steve McQueen, 1970 (Bernard Cahier/Getty Images); Dustin Hoffman, 1976 (Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images); Steven Spielberg on the set of Jaws, 1975 (Universal/Getty Images); Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, 1975 (Universal Studios/Courtesy of Getty Images); Wallpaper (Thomas Winz)
Poster (LMPC via Getty Images); Arrival set (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images); Spielberg (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images); Guffey (Columbia Pictures/Getty Images); Dreyfuss (Columbia Pictures/Getty Images)
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