Close Encounters of the Third Kind Poster 1 Mother Ship Cary Guffey Barry Guiler

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 science fiction film written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, and François Truffaut. The film depicts the stories of Roy Neary, an everyday blue-collar worker in Indiana, whose life changes after an encounter with a UFO; and of Jillian, a single mother whose three-year-old son was abducted by a UFO.

Close Encounters was a long-cherished project for Spielberg. In late 1973, he developed a deal with Columbia Pictures for a science-fiction film. Though Spielberg received sole credit for the script, he was assisted by people who contributed to the screenplay in varying degrees. The title is derived from Ufologist J. Allen Hynek's classification of close encounters with extraterrestrials, in which the third kind denotes human observations of extraterrestrials or "animate beings".

The mothership was designed by Ralph McQuarrie and built by Greg Jein. The look of the