Movie-A-Day #189: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Something strange happened in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 that people are still trying to figure out. On July 8 of that year, the public information officer of the local air base announced that the Air Force had recovered a mysterious “flying disk” from a local ranch. By the next day the big brass in Washington was dismissing it as a weather balloon, but by then the speculation was off and running. And it’s done nothing but build steam since then, making UFOlogy a cottage industry and giving rise to dozens of cheap but fun alien invasion movies. In turn, those early sci-fi cheapies inspired a young Steven Spielberg, who would eventually legitimize the alien invasion film with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” So what do you think the Air Force found back then?