Brett's Close Encounters of the Third Kind Notes

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Background

Supposedly the Air Force and NASA declined to participate on the film, and NASA wrote a twenty-page letter to Spielberg saying it was “dangerous” to release it. In a 1978 Cinema Papers interview, he said:

If NASA took the time to write me a 20-page letter, I knew there must be something happening. When they read the script, they got very angry and felt that it was a film that would be dangerous.

Spielberg himself is the only source for this likely bogus claim, and this kind of red pill programming tactic is actually subtly depicted in the film itself (the government lies about the UFO phenomenon, which only feeds into the mystery). As mentioned below, the Queen of England at least didn’t object.

“Columbia raised $7 million from three sources: Time Inc., EMI, and German tax shelters.” Time was a longtime CIA press organ, founded by Allen Dulles’s close friend Henry Luce and overseen by OSS psychological warfare expert C. D. Jackson, one of the founders of the Bilderberg meetings. Time executives continue to be regulars at Bilderberg meetings.

Contributors

Quite an ensemble of sus figures connected to this project, apart from Spielberg himself, who’s been chummy with presidents and politicos since the days of Close Encounters.[1]

Paul Schrader wrote an early script for the movie titled “Kingdom Come,” which apparently merged his Calvinism with exotheology. Spielberg abhorred the script. Schrader, like Brian DePalma, is a kind of Forrest Gump of New Hollywood cultural engineering.

David Giler, who co-wrote The Parallax View, also worked on the script.

Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwoodwere frequent collaborators both with each other and with Spielberg. Among their sus credits is Warning Sign (1985), the synopsis of which begins:

In a secret military laboratory operating under the guise of a pesticide manufacturer, there is an outbreak of a virulent bacteria. During routine work, a sealed tube is broken, releasing the secret biological weapon.

Of course, Close Encounters also involves a government-released toxin as part of a psyop. These two also introduced the “kidnapped child” theme in the film.

Douglas Trumbull, who did special photographic effects for the film, is probably the most sus of the bunch. From Wikipedia:

Trumbull was born in Los Angeles. His father was an aerospace engineer who had briefly worked in Hollywood creating visual effects for the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz.

His father, Donald (Don) Trumbull, also did special effects work on Close Encounters. This is how the son, Douglas, came to work on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, according to Hollywood Reporter:

[He] landed him a job at Graphic Films, which produced shorts for NASA and the Air Force and had been contracted to make a film for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.

To the Moon and Beyond featured a 70 mm circular image projected onto a dome screen and took viewers on a journey “from the Big Bang to the microcosm in 15 minutes.” Two of the thousands who saw it were Stanley Kubrick, the filmmaker, and Arthur C. Clarke, the writer, who came away from it convinced that an A-level sci-fi film — which eventually became 2001: A Space Odyssey — was possible. Kubrick contracted Graphic Films to produce conceptual designs for the project, but, once it got off the ground, moved it to London, at which point 23-year-old Trumbull cold-called the director and got a job on the film. His greatest contribution to it was devising a way to create a believable “Star Gate” effect, representing “the transformation of a character through time and space to another dimension.” Even though Kubrick alone claimed screen credit and an Oscar for the film’s VFX, Trumbull instantly became a name in the business.

Douglas also did special effects for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, among other major projects.

Most significantly, he directed the 1983 MKUltra film Brainstorm. “To prepare for film,” says the Wikipedia article, “Trumbull took most of the key cast and crew to the Esalen Institute.” So Trumbull is a link between Esalen, a key intelligence-linked cultural engineering hub pushing the human potential movement, and Close Encounters. All of the alien-related films he worked on, particularly 2001 and Close Encounters, push the human potential movement, esoteric evolutionist idea of enlightened aliens guiding humans toward their superhuman telos.

Nor was Trumbull’s connection to the UFO phenomenon restricted to special effects work. Back to Wikipedia:

In 1969 Trumbull was filming the annual Flying Saucer Convention in Giant Rock California. This evolved into a full-length project initially called Giant Rock, Rutabaga Deluxe, and then Saturation 70: An Ecological Horror Fantasy. The star of the film was a five-year-old Jason Jones, who was the son of Brian Jones, of Rolling Stones fame.

Also starring in the never-completed film were Laurel Canyon luminaries Michelle Phillips and Gram Parsons, as well as the Polish-French artist who called himself Balthus, “known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls.” The plot of the movie, according to Wikipedia, was

an update of Alice in Wonderland. A Victorian-era child falls through a wormhole and ends up in a dystopian future Los Angeles where he meets a group of aliens, called the "Kosmic Kiddies," who have come to Earth to save it from pollution.

Sounds very much like a Monarch film used as a vehicle to promote technocratic globalism by way of environmentalism. Brian Jones, incidentally, would die this same year under circumstances suspicious enough to warrant multiple murder investigations. He became a member of the “27 Club.”

The whole conference at Giant Rock, I might add, is highly suspect all by itself, being organized by a “contactee” named George Van Tassel who was once the top flight inspector at Hughes Aircraft and also worked for Lockheed and Douglas Aircraft.

Nor did Trumbull’s promotion of the UFO/alien psyop vanish with age. In 2014, Trumbull

introduced a short dramatic film, UFOTOG, to highlight the capabilities of the Magi system. The story deals with a man who has developed a sophisticated 3D photographic system to track UFOs and prove their existence, despite interference from a shadowy government agency. The film has been shown at film festivals and industry conferences and to filmmakers and studio executives. (Wikipedia)

Note here the same kind of pseudo-dialectic, with “shadow government” baddies as the foil to idealistic stargazers, who in reality are being egged on and promoted by hyper-elite factions represented, e.g., by the To the Stars Academy psyopers.

Trumbull died in 2022, and reportedly his ashes are due to be shot into space with those of two Star Trek actresses.

J. Allen Hynek was an astrophysicist who worked on numerous UFO debunking projects for the government, including Project Blue Book. By the early 60s he was openly expressing his dissent with the official public position and went on to become a leading ufologist. Hynek coined the terms “close encounters” of the “first, second,” and “third kind.” He was one of the chief inspirations for the movie, acted as a technical advisor, and appears in a cameo in the final scene.

At the First International UFO Congress in Chicago in 1977, the same year Close Encounters was released, Hynek addressed three different hypotheses to explain the data: ETI (the extraterrestrial hypothesis); EDI (the extradimensional intelligence hypothesis); and a third of his own invention, M&M (the material-and-mental technology hypothesis), a hypothetical technology possessed by a super-advanced civilization that could work on both the material and mental realms. Part of the motivation for the third hypothesis was all the “psychic” phenomena associated with close encounters of the third kind, including “poltergeist” phenomena (Spielberg would go on to produce—and partially direct—Poltergeist). It sounds like the he’s actually referring to cryptotech already possessed by the deep state.

Hynek wrote a book in 1975 with Jacques Vallee, who was supposedly the inspiration for the Francois Truffaut character. Hynek, however, told Mark O’Connell that the actual inspiration was Claude Poher

In short, Hynek’s position on the UFO/alien phenomenon corresponds to interest in the topic by many elites (e.g., Christopher Mellon, Mellon family scion and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence), and anticipates the “disclosure” craze that has lately received official recognition. In retrospect, his “dissent” fits into the long-term trajectory of the alien psyop.

“Hynek's son Joel,” quoting Wikipedia, “is an Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor. He oversaw the design of the camouflage effect for the movie Predator, and won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for his work on What Dreams May Come.” Joel Hynek has done an array of DOD- and CIA-supported movies and variety of other sus projects.

Vilmos Zsigmond (cinematographer) and Laszlo Kovacs (additional photography), two of the most renowned cinematographers in cinema history, were friends who fled Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising again the Soviets, which was supported by the CIA. They shot footage of the uprising by placing a camera in a shopping bag with a hole cut out and smuggled the footage out of the country. Soon after, they made their way to the United States, where they were welcomed as refugees. Having met someone who also participated in the uprising and was assisted by the CIA in making his escape to the US, I find it probable that these men received help from US intelligence services, particularly as they risked their lives to shoot and smuggle film footage damaging to the Soviets. And I think this is pretty significant, given the astonishing number of high-level military and intelligence connections among the people creating the counterculture, including the New Hollywood set—and Kovacs and Zsigmond, between the two of them, worked for almost every single one of the major New Hollywood directors (Spielberg, De Palma, Scorsese, Woody Allen, etc.), having emerged, like most of these people, from former Navy officer Roger Corman’s cultural engineering operation at American International Pictures.

Julia Phillips co-produced Taxi Driver with her former husband, Michael Phillips. Julia’s father was a chemical engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project. Her cocaine problems in the late 70s pushed her out of the business. She wrote a “tell-all” memoir, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, exposing the debauchery of New Hollywood.

Michael Phillips: Apart from Taxi Driver, Phillips’s sus credits include his last, for The Last Mimzy, about children developing psi powers (there’s a p-e-d-o symbol on the cover).

According to imdb, “His dream project in the 1980s was to film Isaac Asimov's ‘The Foundation’ trilogy of novels.”

Art director Daniel A. Lomino has some very interesting credits, including The Puppet Masters (1994), a movie starring Donald Sutherland about “stingray-shaped alien ‘slugs’ that ride on people's backs and control their minds,” based on a Robert Heinlein novel; The Rage (1997), about a hunt for a serial killer who is actually “an entire army of disgruntled CIA mercenaries from Vietnam,” specifically said to be in “the Phoenix Program” (a la McGowan’s Programmed to Kill); and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988).

Lomino and production designer Joe Alves worked on John Carpenter’s Starman.

Messaging

The Aliens Are Our Friends

As admitted by Spielberg and others involved with the project, the “noble purpose” of this movie, paraphrasing star Richard Dreyfuss, was to take the fear out of the UFO/alien phenomenon and convince audiences that they’re our friends.

Spielberg says, rather naively (apparently), that he believed in the extraterrestrial hypothesis based on the clear similarities in the accounts of witnesses spread over different geographical areas.

As such, this movie is a trial run for ET, which peddles the same message of benevolent, enlightened aliens but aimed more directly at a younger audience.

Globalism

It’s highly significant that the government’s response to the UFO phenomena is being directed by transnational actors, led by Lacombe. In a scene in the Special Edition (SE) cut, Lacombe’s cavalcade is flying the UN flag. But he’s actually the leader of something called “The Mayflower Project,” which has its own flag (a dark triangle with an asterisk-like star and the word “Mayflower”). In the scene where he addresses the government officials after returning from India, the flag is placed between the French and American flags behind him, and the Mayflower flag is also displayed in the observatory and in the command station in Devil’s Tower at the end.

When Roy is detained by the military en route to Devil’s Tower, he’s questioned by Lacombe and his assistant. When he demands to speak to the man in charge, the assistant replies, “Mr. Lacombe is the highest authority,” at which Roy shouts back, “He’s not even an American!” Clearly, Lacombe is at the top of the chain of command when it comes to the international response to UFOs/aliens. The US deep state characters he briefs follow his orders, and the military follows their orders. The deep state characters and most of their functionaries, especially the people in red jumpsuits trained to board the UFO, act like they’re in a cult.

There is a minor conflict between Lacombe and the Army commander over the former allowing Roy and the other fanatics to make their way to Devil’s Tower. This conflict reflects the probably real conflict within the world of deep politics between those who want to use the UFO/alien issue to promote globalism and those who want to use it to promote militarism and supported inflated military budgets—the latter are frequently the bad guys in UFO/alien movies.[2]

In the scene where personnel and vehicles with phony corporate logos are being assembled to carry out the “nerve gas” psyop, a deep state guy in a suit refers to the “Foreign Service.” Which is strange, because the US has a “State Department,” not a “Foreign Service,” and the latter term is usually applied to the British HMDS. So another indication that Anglo-American Establishment globalists are running the show.

And one of the messages implied here is that, just as we need to give up our fears and embrace our enlightened space brothers, we also need to learn to stop worrying and trust the globalist cryptocracy.

According to an article titled “Jimmy Carter, Steven Spielberg, and UFOs,” which was formerly posted to a site called presidentialufo.com,

Spielberg and his wife were invited to London to screen the film for Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip. Philip had long expressed open interest in UFOs. He had been a long-time subscriber to Flying Saucer Review, the most popular UFO journal in Britain.

Although I cannot confirm the private screening, I’ve found a picture of the Queen at the London premiere of the film, shaking hands with Richrd Dreyfuss.

Religious Engineering

Apart from the fact that the original title was “Kingdom Come,” there are several indications that UFOs/aliens are meant to displace traditional religiosity,[3]or to herald a new ecumenical religiosity a la Star Trek. In the Dreyfuss intro scene from the SE cut, his kids watch the parting of the Red Sea scene from The Ten Commandments. During the final sequence, before the “chosen” ones in red jumpsuits board the craft, they attend a kind of ecumenical service in a makeshift chapel, with both a cross and a Star of David visible.

Quoting Psalm 91:11, the pastor says, “God has put his angels in charge of you.” So the aliens are angels, i.e., fallen angels, i.e., demons (see “Occultism and Satanism” below).

In the planning for the nerve gas psyop, the commander demands “something so scary it will clear the area of every living Christian soul,” which hints not only at the government’s ability to stage UFO psyops but also subtly communicates that the alien phenomenon is anti-Christian and is being used to subvert and displace Christianity.

It’s been suggested that Roy is supposed to be a type of Moses. If so, one can imagine that he would return from space with a new code of laws vouchsafed to him by the aliens.

Freudian Attacks on the Family

There’s a pretty obvious implication, built into the plot around the Dreyfuss character, that the alien phenomenon will undermine normal family attachments.

The movie is aimed primarily at a “regular guy” audience, which in this era still meant men with families. It plays on the target audience’s natural struggles and frustrations with family life and feeds into the repressed desire (as perceived by the filmmakers) of these men to escape their responsibility to bear these struggles and frustrations and instead regress into a primordial wish fulfillment fantasy. Trumbull said the mothership was designed to “subliminally” suggest a breast and nipple, and so Roy’s desire to abandon his family and board the mothership reflects the ordinary man’s desire to abandon family life and “return to the mother,” the great nipple, the fulfillment of all desires. This Oedipal background explains why the woman is a single mom and why Roy effectively replaces the child on the mothership: the child gets to have his mother all to himself, and Roy gets to be with what will turn out to be what Jasun Horsley calls Big Mother. Enacting this Oedipal fantasy through the UFO/alien trope couches regression in the garb of transcendence and thereby ennobles it.

It's significant too that the mothership, though originating from space, comes from below the tower, indicating that it represents a chthonic, dark feminine force.

When the blonde lady tells Roy that she’s not “ready” to go into the mothership, he replies, “I just can’t stay here. I’ve got to go.” She approves, and then he kisses her goodbye. Adultery is definitely implied here, but the further message is that socially destructive sexual adventurism isn’t about finding the next “one true love”; rather, it’s a dissolving stage on the way toward something beyond normal human relationships altogether.

Notwithstanding Spielberg’s reputation as a clean, family-friendly director, he is a promoter of the sexual revolution, as revealed in 1941 (1979), co-written by fellow crypto-sexual revolutionary Robert Zemeckis. Psyops like the sexual revolution were promoted both through frontal assault and through more subtle subversion of social mores.[4]

Etc.

Spielberg said he wanted different species of aliens to reflect the racial diversity of humans.

Monarch Material

There appears to be a bird cage in the opening encounter scene involving the little boy.

The multiple references to Pinocchio in Dreyfuss’s intro scene may be a deliberate invocation of children-as-puppets and even p-e-d-o (given the allusions to it in the movie). In Cathy O’Brien’s book, she specifically mentions her father bringing her and her brother to see Pinocchio and reminding them that they were “his puppets still in the carving stage.” In the theatrical cut of the film, there is only a subtle reference to Pinocchio, but in the SE cut there’s a fairly extended conversation about going to see the movie. It’s notable that the reference remains even in the much-shortened version of the scene.

Spielberg says the song “When You Wish Upon a Star,” featured in Pinocchio, influenced the script. “I hung my story on the mood the song created, the way it affected me personally.” This song is specifically listed by Springmeier and Wheeler among the songs used for Monarch programming, and it is built into some of John Williams’s score.

Also notable is that Spielberg made his own “Pinocchio” movie, AI, which is full of creepy Monarch-related material. Matthew Robbins, an uncredited screenwriter on this project who frequently collaborated with Spielberg, has a story credit on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio(2022), and it was Robbins and his frequent collaborator Hal Barwood, who’s also an uncredited screenwriter on this project, who suggested the “kidnapped child” theme.

The porcelain windup musical toy seems to be related to Pinocchio.

In the Dreyfuss intro scene in the SE cut, the younger boy is repeatedly smashing a doll in the background until its head comes off.

There are also creepy p-e-d-o vibes when the little boy, running away from home while chasing the UFOs, comes upon the hillbillies, who, like the government UFO people, act like they’re in a cult, as they’re probably being telepathically manipulated by the aliens, like Roy and the woman. Later, in the SE cut, when Roy and others are gathered for a second sighting of the UFOs and he’s talking to the boy’s mom, they come upon a man taking photographs of the boy, and she says to the man, “He’s a little young for a record.” This is also very odd.

Note that the daughter wears a hat with Mickey Mouse on it.

The closest thing to a Revelation of the Method on micro-to-macro Monarch programming comes in the scene where Roy wakes up in front of the TV and there’s a Looney Tunes cartoon playing called “Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½ Century” (1953), featuring Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian. After seeing a Martian rock formation bearing a resemblance to the shape he’s been fixated on, Roy for a few moments thinks maybe he’s discovered the non-supernatural source of this obsession. Relieved, he begins tearing down all the UFO-related paraphernalia, but as he’s tearing down the sculpture of the rock on the train table, he tears off only the top, transforming it by accident into the plateau shape that more closely resembles his involuntary mental imagery. As he does this, Daffy Duck can be heard on the TV in the background saying “That’s the last straw. Now I’ll use my secret weapon.” A few moments before he could be heard, less audibly, referring to his “super video-detecto set.” Roy then stares hypnotically at the cartoon, starburst explosions on the screen, representing his “final realization” moment.

Sounds like TV is the “secret weapon.” Given the telepathic power the aliens demonstrate over Roy and the others, the implication is that they are exercising hypnotic mind control more broadly, including through the TV.

In a scene shortly following, in the same room, after his family has left him, Roy is watching TV again. The hourglass from the intro to Days of Our Lives is onscreen, the hourglass being a Monarch symbol highlighted by Springmeier. This is followed by a Budweiser commercial with the strapline, “Here Comes the King” (king=Monarch). (There are two Budweiser cans visible around the TV.)

Bob Balaban, who plays Truffaut’s (Lacombe’s) assistant and translator, said that the children who played the aliens at the end were “balletstudents.” (Spielberg says they were trained in dance by sometime actress and dancer Susan Helfond.) The actor who plays the little kid said he had to wear ballerina shoes in the scene where he’s walking off the mothership.

Psyops (Limited Hangout)

In a scene fairly early in the film, people are gathered to see if the UFOs return. They do, but then the “arrival” is interrupted apparently by another arrival, that of military helicopters, whose lights, through the film’s editing, displace the lights of the UFOs. (In the SE cut, it seems like they were only helicopters all along.) Within the diegesis of the film (in which there is no question that the UFOs are real), the arrival of the helicopters appears calculated to function as a cover story to explain the UFO reports by the witnesses.

In the documentary Mirage Men, “former” Air Force counterintelligence officer Richard Doty describes an operation in the New Mexico desert in the early 80s (I believe), where the military used a secret, silent helicopter, fitted with lights, to mimic UFO phenomena and generate mistaken witness reports. They coupled this with staged cattle mutilations in the area. The purpose of these operations, he says, was to conceal an operation to dig giant tunnels for a secret base.

The staged cattle mutilations bear comparison with the use of dead farm animals in this film as part of a government psyop to make people believe that nerve gas had leaked in the area to keep people away from Devil’s Tower. Again in the planning for the latter operation, the commander demands “something so scary it will clear the area of every living Christian soul,” which hints at the government’s ability to stage UFO psyops as well as at the anti-Christian drift of the psyop (see above).

In the meeting between government officials and witnesses, one man even challenges them that the Air Force was “conducting tests out there.” Echoing the official line of that era, the high brass guy disingenuously claims that they know nothing about UFOs…which of course only increases the fascination, by making it a “dangerous” and “forbidden” topic (red pill programming).[5]

If there is a “real” phenomenon (whether extraterrestrial, interdimensional, demonic, or otherwise) responsible for any of the great volume of witness accounts of UFOs and alien abductions, it is in practice nearly impossible to isolate this phenomenon from the psychological operations campaigns which have been deployed around it.

It’s notable that the nerve gas is supposed to have spilled from a derailed train, which makes one think of the recent East Palestine, Ohio, spill, which was predictively programmed in White Noise(filmed in the same area, with extras from East Palestine).

There are even hints of the mask psyop. When Roy and the woman arrive in the area outside Devil’s Tower, in the zone where people are being assembled for evacuation, most people are not wearing masks, but some are. None of the soldiers are, as handkerchiefs and bandanas and such aren’t going to protect anyone from nerve gas. Of course, the only nerve agents are those being sprayed by the government, which they’re spraying between the civilian areas and the command station in the Tower, to prevent anyone from getting near. In those areas, the government people are wearing biohazard suits, not cloth masks. Roy, who has been given a kind of gnosis via alien telepathy, knows it’s a psyop and takes off his gas mask.

Roy exclaims to Lacombe and his assistant, “You have no right to make people crazy! Who are you people?” This scene really smacks of the “targeted individual” (TI) phenomenon and perhaps at the mass gaslighting implicit in the red pill programming around the UFO/alien phenoemenon.

Occultism and Satanism

Devil’s Tower is clearly supposed to be like a pyramid, a la the Egyptian Great Pyramid. This is confirmed late in the film, when one of the military guys chasing Roy and the other fanatics up to the Tower calls in to his superiors using the call sign “Pyramid”: “Bahama, this is Pyramid.” (Bahama is probably a reference to the Bermuda Triangle, where Flight 19 disappeared.)

The choice of a location with the word “Devil” in it, which happens to be the first US National Monument (established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906), does not seem coincidental. Nor that other locations with the word “Devil” are also associated with alien abduction phenomena, including Devil’s Den State Park in Arkansas, where Terry Lovelace says he and another Air Force buddy were abducted. (Technically, they had wandered just out of the park, onto military land.)

Nor is it a coincidence that the ABC correspondent on TV is framed with the word “Devil” over his shoulder: the media is run by Satanists.

It is suggested that the aliens are angels and thus fallen angels, i.e., demons (see under “Religious Engineering” above).

It's the child that the aliens actually abduct. For overtly demonic aliens pretending to be friendly who take a special interest in children, cf. Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, probably an oblique influence on this film. In that novel, the aliens are basically theta programmers, trying to develop psi abilities in children.[6]In this film, after Jillian’s son is abducted, a reporter shouts out, “Do you practice any kind of parapsychology?”

The G-Men refer to the makeshift command center/landing zone in the Tower as the “dark side of the moon.”

The military and government people are portrayed in a very cult-like way, at once clownish and mechanical. It’s actually pretty eerie. The ones in red jumpsuits, who have evidently been trained to “infiltrate” the aliens, look and act like members of the Heaven’s Gate cult. Within the diegesis of the film, the explanation is partly that the aliens are exercising hypnotic mind control over them, but given that aliens are fake and gray, the implication is that these circles use mind control extensively to maintain discipline and control.

The number “33” is painted onto the Flight 19 WW2-era plane that Bob Balaban inspects. The number “333” is prominently displayed on a piece of equipment in the observatory.

Note the many downward-pointing triangles in the Neary house (e.g., on a wall poster and on a piano music book).

Odds and Ends

Boxes with “Lockheed” are visible around the command post outside Devil’s Tower.

The WWII abductees from Flight 19 (which actually disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle) have effectively time traveled.

“A large portion of the sound stage in Alabama was damaged because of a lightning strike.” Maybe God was sending them a message.

[1]Spielberg made an amateur alien abduction movie at age 17, titled Firelight(1964).

[2]The Army commander at the command post has a pink flower for an insignia design. This may be a backhanded dig at the militarists/nationalists.

[3]From p. 278 of Julia Phillips’s autobiography, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again:

The year we started shooting Close Encounters, 1976, Time magazine ran a black cover with the question IS GOD DEAD? Not a question to ask me; IS GOD ALIVE? was more to the point, and then, looking around at the state of the world I’d add, AND WHY IS HE SO MEAN? Nah, he/she/it had never existed.

“If God is dead, why not UFOs?” reads a quote of mine in the Washington Post. This makes Steven furious, not because I have offended his personal beliefs, but because he worries that I might have cut into the commerciality of the project.

[4] It should be noted that Spielberg says in the making-of documentary (which was filmed in 1997, I think) that when he made this movie he had no children but, looking back as a father of seven, he would never abandon them to board a mothership.

[5]Charles Upton, Cracks in the Great Wall: UFOs and Traditional Metaphysics:

Among the more common mind-control techniques, useful to anyone who wishes to use it and can command sufficient attention via the media or the internet, is the Government Coverup Ploy: if you assert that a given fact is true but that the government is covering it up, a certain percentage of the public will automatically believe you – especially if you can pressure the government to the point where it will start issuing denials. It’s a cheap and reliable tool; even the government itself can use it.

[6]Springmeier and Wheeler say in no uncertain terms that the “aliens” are in fact programmers.