Ahh, the 70s. Not so long ago that it feels completely ancient, but not so recent that most 20-year-olds can remember them. Three great things made their debut in 1977: Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and me!

Lately I’ve been on a Close Encounters kick. It’s probably inspired by recent developments in the news regarding UAPs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, which is the new term for weird stuff in the skies that avoids the stigma that people associate with the old term, “UFOs.”

The thing is, UAPs could be anything, but if you ask most people what they associate with UAP, or UFO, they’ll say, “Aliens.” And that’s the part that intrigues me.

As a Catholic, I automatically believe in non-human intelligences existing in the universe. They’re called angels and they’re a completely separate species from us. If those exist, and we exist, it’s absolutely possible, even probable, that other intelligences exist in the universe. God made us, and I believe He put a lot of stock into us. He surely made other people to enjoy His Creation right alongside us!

UAPs could be natural phenomena, which doesn’t bother me, as long as the evidence points in that direction. But there are some pretty weird cases where the natural explanation isn’t a good one at all. It doesn’t fit the physical evidence. In those cases, there’s a chance that persons from another world are responsible for events we can’t explain.

I’m not sure how I feel about them being so sneaky around us, instead of just coming out of the skies and saying, “Hello, we brought you a casserole! Please take us to the nearest government official.” Good friendships often start with sharing a good casserole.

I’ve decided to pick apart Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and look at some of the research that went into making the movie. I’ve picked up two books to help me out as I do my deep dive into the very first movie I ever attended (I was only a month old when Star Wars came out in May 1977, so I had to wait until the Close Encounters debut in November to start my movie-watching habit).

The first is Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Making of Steven Spielberg’s Classic Film by Ray Morton. This is a pretty in-depth look into the making of the movie, including several chapters going into the special effects of the movie, which, personally, I feel hold up very these 47 years later, and a scene-by-scene recount of exactly what happens in the movie. Very useful for when I can’t remember what happened in what order.

The second resource I’m using is The UFO Experience: Evidence Behind Close Encounters, Project Blue Book, and the Search for Answers by J. Allen Hynek. Hynek was a scientific advisor to the U.S. Airforce, an intellectual who studied the issue of UFOs with extreme rigor, and the gentleman who invented the “close encounters” scale. He even consulted on the Close Encounters movie and has a cameo at the end (he’s the pipe-smoking official guy with the glasses)! I picked his book because I wanted to kind of get inside his head with regard to how he thought and what he contributed to the movie.

I don’t know where I stand on UFOs/UAPs. As I said, we don’t have any concrete evidence that anybody from another planet or another dimension has been visiting us, but we do have weird reports, and from what I’ve read of Hynek’s book, there’s good evidence that something is happening, and that they’re not all swamp gas or hoaxes. I want to do more research and see what our good evidence points towards. I’d like it if friendly people from other places were visiting, but at the same time, humans can be either good or evil, which means aliens probably can be either good or evil, too, and if they’re flying our skies being sneaky, I don’t know if that’s a threat.

In the end, whether or not they’re visiting us, it’s the wonder of the thing that gets me. That’s why I’m going to unpack Close Encounters of the Third Kind — it’s a cinematic masterpiece that inspires my curiosity every time I watch it. I watch it, and then look up at the night sky with a million questions. They’ll probably never all be answered, but that’s okay. Asking the questions expands my horizons, after all.

Here’s to the unknown, folks! And, maybe, just maybe, some day some friendly neighbors from the next galaxy will pop by with a casserole! Until then, happy dreaming!