There are some details of Close Encounters of the Third Kind that one could nitpick about, but I love the movie unquestioningly. I recall, vividly, seeing it at the Inland Cinema in downtown San Bernardino, CA late in 1977, when I was 16. At the end, I realized I'd been sitting mouth agape and silent in the plush seats before the huge slightly curved screen for most of the film; so had everyone else in the packed old-style single-screen downtown cinema. Earlier that year I'd seen Star Wars down in Newport at a matinee in the cavernous Edwards Lido cinema with maybe a couple of dozen other viewers, shortly after it was released and before the buzz had built - a Time Magazine article had clued me in. It was almost too much to take that TWO nearly perfect science fiction movies had been offered in the same year.
Fast forward tot he 21st century. I live online. I have Close Encounters on DVD and watch it periodically; more often I put it on late at night to distract the verbal part of my mind until I can fall asleep. The Spielberg Variations, if you will.
Spoiler Alert
(as if a 30 year old movie needs it)
There's a section of the film where numbers are sent by the aliens:
104 44 30 40 36 10
repeated over and over. The French-to-English translator, who used to be a cartographer, recognizes them as Earth surface coordinates - 104 degrees, 44 minutes, 30 seconds (west) longitude (should be -104 44 30 to conform to current international standards) and 40 deg, 36 min, 10 sec (north) latitude, and some fun with a globe and maps ensues while they figure out where exactly that place is. Lines are shown on a topographic map, labeled with the given numbers and intersecting in a meadow just southeast of Devils Tower Monument in Wyoming. The team goes there, there're spaceships, music, hand signals, and so on.
Here's the problem:
At some point a dendrite from one of my Google Earth neurons stumbled into part of my Close Encounters neuron complex and I was spurred during a waking period to make a check while the computers were up and I was online. The numbers translate into decimal degrees of:
104.741667W, 40.602778N
The given coordinates are about 275 miles due south of Devils Tower! In Google Earth, these coordinates are in a small field of crops near someone's home on Hwy. 85 , about 60 miles due north of Denver, Colorado!
Using Google Earth, a spot in the meadow that looks about right based on the movie is reported as 104.707W, 44.5848N, which in DMS coordinates would be:
104 42 25 44 35 05
I'd file a report, but I wouldn't know what kind of a report to file.
(Perhaps this is where Jimmy Hoffa is, instead of that other place I noticed.)