When it comes to intelligent life on other planets, I tend to not give it much thought.  This is not me being a Bible thumping Catholic.  Importantly, the Church has no official stance on the matter, nor does it need one.  If you accept that God is the Creator of the universe, then anything within that creation is His.  It need not be any more complicated.  I say this after watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), one of the gentler films about contact between humanity and beings from outer space.  In real life, such supposed occurrences are held up by atheists as proof that God does not exist.  I should hesitate to use the word “proof” in that last sentence given that there has never been anything concrete.  I would even go further in saying that the evidence for God has been much more fact based than anything pertaining to unidentified flying objects (UFO).  As such, there is no reason to avoid a classic film on the subject.

The only thing classic about the beginning of Close Encounters of the Third Kind are the vintage airplanes found in the Mojave Desert by a stunned farmer.  Immediately, the site is swarmed by officials of the American and Mexican governments, headed by a Frenchman named Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut), a UFO expert working in the United States.  Why such a person is brought in to examine such an event becomes apparent when it is revealed that these are the vehicles belonging to a flight that disappeared during a training mission out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1945.  It is the first of many strange phenomena happening around the world.  The film cuts back and forth between the government’s efforts, and what is happening in rural Indiana, but I am going to explain each fully until the threads join.  Next, Claude and his team are summoned to the Mongolia’s Gobi Desert where they are greeted by the SS Cotopaxi, a freighter that vanished off the Florida coast in 1925.  Their next destination is Dharamsala, India, where a group of Hindus witnessed a set of five musical tones that they indicate came from the sky.  If you are at all familiar with this movie, you will know the tune.  Back in the United States, they reveal their findings to the public, but are still working out its meaning.  They broadcast it back into space, and they begin receiving numbers.  It is Claude’s interpreter, a cartographer named David Laughlin (Bob Balaban), who recognizes the pattern in the digits.  They point to map coordinates that center on Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.  Given everything else happening, specifically in northern Indiana, one would not think there would be a focal point for such activity.  Outside the town of Muncie, Indiana, little Barry Guiler (Cary Guffey) lives with his mother, Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon).  Barry awakens to lights outside his window, which make his toys mysteriously come to life.  Following them downstairs, he sees something that delights him, and he follows it outside.  Jillian finally notices something is amiss only when her son is in the yard, and she hurriedly changes to go after him.  Meanwhile, in town, electric lineman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is oblivious to any extraterrestrial disturbances, and his wife, Ronnie Neary (Teri Garr), as he tinkers with a toy train set with his sons.  What eventually rouses him is a phone call stating that power is going out around town.  This means he must head into the night to figure out the problem.  While stopped at some tracks and examining maps, he has the eponymous moment, and it leaves him changed.  Sadly, when he gets home, he is unable to convince his family that he saw anything.  They also do not go with him the following night to where he had witnessed alien craft soaring through the air.  He is joined by the Guilers, who are much more believing.  From there, Roy increasingly acts in a bizarre fashion, unable to get the image of Devil’s Tower out of his mind.  He keeps making models of it with whatever substance he gets his hands on it, be it mashed potatoes or modeling clay.  Jillian is having the same issue, but her medium of expression is drawing.  She is completing yet another work of art when her home is visited by the aliens, who end up taking Barry with them.  Things are also not great for Roy.  His family has left him, and he is building a facsimile of the mountain that takes up his entire living room.  It is while he is on the phone with Ronnie trying to convince her to come home that he sees on the news that the government is quarantining the area around Devil’s Tower.  Now that he knows where to go, he immediately drives in that direction and arrives in the midst of the mass hysteria that is a governmentally mandated evacuation.  Despite the chaos, he finds Jillian, and together they disobey this order and drive offroad to the landmark.  They discover that others like them have had the same idea, and they are about to be sent away by helicopter.  Roy voices his disbelief in the narrative that there is anything dangerous in the air, and he, Jillian, and another civilian sneak away and make for the tower.  Though their companion gets left behind, Jillian and Roy get to the government facility on the side of the mountain to witness the interaction with the aliens.  Roy boldly suggests they get closer, though Jillian initially stays put.  It is only after the musical tones are exchanged and the mothership begins disgorging its human cargo, including the pilots of the planes found in the beginning, that she approaches.  Meanwhile, one of the scientists present asks Roy if he wants to be a part of the ones chosen to go with the aliens, and he accepts.  With Barry and Jillian safely at a distance taking pictures, the craft takes off and the movie ends.

My Catholic sensibilities were piqued by the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a father abandoning his family.  Hooray for Jillian’s efforts, which are in keeping with the kind of sacrifice Christian mothers are called upon to do, risking her life in order to be reunited with her son.  Roy is doing the opposite for his family.  Granted, I was shocked by Ronnie’s behavior, not to mention their children, whose main reaction to his troubles seems to be disbelief, at best, or yelling, at worst.  Yet, his marriage is not over, nor does it end when he flies away in a space ship.  Then again, this is a relatively minor point in the overall story.  Of greater import is something I noted in the introduction, the fact that the intention behind how the government is handling contact appears to be merely communication.  In so many other films dealing with interactions between aliens and humans, the outcome is usually violence.  This is understandable when you think about out history.  Too often, initial relations between peoples who had previously been strangers to one another have been fraught with warfare.  Over the centuries, the Church has sought to mitigate these interactions.  By the way, that comment is not completely out of left field.  Before the government’s team of people about to be embedded with the extraterrestrials head to the ship, they have a church service.  It is a reminder of our God given, intrinsic natures that says that it is better to be at peace with our fellow intelligent beings rather than to kill them.  The overall tone of the meeting is about building a relationship with the incredible rather than attacking that which you do not understand.  I wish there was more of that in this world, and I do not feel like I am making too crazy of a statement by saying that God wishes the same.

I also wish that you would see Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  It is not an exciting, action-packed movie, but it speaks well to the human spirit.  I would rather be slightly bored but feel good about life than to be entertained by something awful.  I hope you are of the same opinion.