Steven Spielberg talks about the research he did in preparation for CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

Close encounters of the third kind he is one of the directors Steven Spielbergclassic films by, widely known by fans as his most serious alien film, featuring ET the extraterrestrial being the most mainstream title. Close encounters Oscar winner Richard Dreyfus in the lead role of Roy Neary, an Indiana electrical lineman, who “finds his quiet, ordinary daily life turned upside down after a close encounter with a UFO, driving him on a cross-country obsessive search for answers as a momentous event approaches . “

This was a major project for Spielberg, and when asked by the British Film Institute whether the film was based on an event in Spielberg’s real life, the director explained:

“Nothing ever happened to me. It was a compendium of the research I had done. I read everything on the market, including clippings from the National Inquirer and news agencies, and even tried to get into the Blue Book archives, long before the project was declassified, to no avail. I was mostly inspired when I started meeting people who had had experiences and I realized that nearly one in five people I spoke to had looked up to the sky at some point in their life and seen something that wasn’t easy to explain. And then I started meeting people who had had close encounters of the second kind, where undeniably something absolutely phenomenal was happening right before their eyes. It was this direct contact, the interviews, that made me interested in making the film. I’ve interviewed enough people to know that not everyone could lie. Many of the sightings people have at night are due to the fact that they never look and are just discovering the sky; so many ratios are easy to explain astronomically, conventionally. There are other ratios that are impossible to describe conventionally, but the basic science community is not ready to change Einstein’s rules.”

When asked if there were any notable “close encounters of the third kind” he had encountered, he related 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 spaceship. Supposedly, they both received thorough physicals, Betty communicated with some of the entities in the vehicle, and then completely forgot about the entire episode. They spent two years having horrible times with each other and their marriage, lingering nightmares. Then they went to a psychiatrist, and separately they were put under hypnosis and were able to piece together what happened during those missing three hours, when they suddenly noticed they were ninety miles further down the road. There is a book by John C. Fuller called The Interrupted Journey; it was also the basis of a television movie.

“The touch was that Betty was shown a star chart with a pattern of broken lines and solid lines, and several points which she did not attempt to memorize but which she looked very closely at. “They” explained to her that the dotted lines were trade routes and the solid lines were shipping routes, and under hypnosis she reproduced the map. When this book was published in the mid-1960s, 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 existing map up there.

The research done for this film and the stories that have emerged since then are truly fascinating. It’s true that if you start digging on your own, you’ll find that many people you know have stories of unexplained phenomena in the sky. Do you have your own UFO story? Share it with us below.