In the night skies over Indiana, working-class power repairman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) has an extraordinary encounter with a strange spacecraft while out on a repair call. Recurring visions of a mountain fuel an increasing obsession that drives him to an emotional breaking point, and a painful break with his wife (Teri Garr) and family. Desperate to understand what he has experienced, he finds an ally in Jillian Guiller (Melinda Dillon), a single mother who believes her son has been abducted by extra-terrestrials. Meanwhile an international group of scientists led by French linguistics expert Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) search for a breakthrough in human-alien communication. Their collective, global quest culminates in a remote Wyoming rendezvous and an event of unequalled importance in all of human history, an event where we finally discover that we are not alone in the universe.

With revolutionary special visual effects by Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey), John Williams’ unforgettable score, and winning performances by Dreyfuss, Garr, Dillon, Bob Balaban, and legendary film director Truffaut, Close Encounters quickly joined Spielberg’s previous picture, the unprecedentedly successful Jaws, as one of the most popular films of all-time upon its release in late 1977.

Spielberg would reedit and shoot additional sequences—including one of Roy Neary’s experience inside the Mothership, for a 1980 theatrical rerelease of Close Encounters of the Third Kind The Special Edition. Displeased with the Columbia Pictures-mandated sequence, however, the director would once again revisit his classic film again in the 1990s to reedit what he considers his definitive director’s cut.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning for Best Cinematography by Director of Photography Vilmos Zsigmond (The Sugarland Express).