“I REALLY FOUND MY FAITH WHEN I heard that the government was opposed to the film. If NASA took the time to write me a 20-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening,” director and self-proclaimed UFO fanatic Steven Spielberg once said, regarding the impetus for making his 1977 epic Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
Originally envisaged as a low-budget sci-fi movie titled Watch The Skies that was inspired by his childhood memories of witnessing a spectacular meteor shower, Close Encounters ultimately took its philosophy and elongated title from the 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry.
Written by astronomer and former UFO skeptic turned advocate Dr J Allen Hynek, the book stated that a Close Encounter of the First Kind was a UFO sighting with no evidence; the Second Kind was where a UFO leaves
