The buzz started in a hay meadow at the foot of a mysterious-looking geological formation. Helicopters and trailers arrived in large numbers, famous faces and a distinguished director settled in near grazing cattle, and the cameras started rolling.
Fifty years ago, Devils Tower National Monument became a beacon for humans entranced by brushes with aliens in director Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” And in turn, the 867-foot monolith protruding from the surrounding Wyoming prairie like the stump of the world’s largest tree became a big draw for tourists.
The film stars Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary, a Midwesterner who becomes obsessed with an enigmatic form after encountering a UFO. He memorably builds a tower-like shape out of mashed potatoes on his dinner plate before escalating to a full-blown indoor sculpture of the formation flickering at the edges of his consciousness.
Thanks to the film, that form has flickered in the minds of tourists from around the world for half a century.
“Approximately 12 minutes of footage was filmed here in 1976 and then that movie came out the following year in 1977,” said Brian Cole, an interpretive ranger at Devils Tower National Monument, of the portion of the final film shot in the area. The movie was a hit, grossing more than $300 million worldwide.
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