Fan Casting

In the Sonoran Desert, French scientist, speaker at the Montsoreau conference, Claude Lacombe and his American interpreter, cartographer David Laughlin, along with other government scientific researchers, discover Flight 19, a squadron of Grumman TBM Avengers that went missing more than 30 years earlier. The planes are intact and operational, but there is no sign of the pilots. An old man who witnessed the event claimed "the sun came out at night, and sang to him". At an air traffic control center in Indianapolis, controllers listen as two airline flights narrowly avoid a mid-air collision with an unidentified flying object (UFO), which neither pilot chooses to report, even when invited to do so. In Muncie, Indiana, 3-year-old Barry Guiler is awakened in the night when his toys start operating on their own. Fascinated, he gets out of bed and discovers something or someone (off-screen) in the kitchen. He runs outside, forcing his mother, Jillian, to chase after him. Investigating one of a series of large-scale power outages, Indiana electrical lineman Roy Neary experiences a close encounter with a UFO, when it flies over his truck and lightly burns the side of his face with its bright lights. The UFO, joining a group of three other UFOs, is pursued by Neary and three police cars, but the spacecraft fly off into the night sky. Roy becomes fascinated by UFOs, much to the dismay of his wife, Ronnie. He also becomes increasingly obsessed with subliminal, mental images of a mountain-like shape and begins to make models of it. Jillian also becomes obsessed with sketching a unique-looking mountain. Soon after, she is terrorized in her home by a UFO which descends from the clouds. The presence of the UFO energy field makes every appliance in Jillian's house malfunction and Barry is abducted by unseen beings. Lacombe and Laughlin—along with a group of United Nations experts—continue to investigate increasing UFO activity and strange, related occurrences. Witnesses in Dharamshala, India report that the UFOs make distinctive sounds: a five-tone musical phrase (soft D', E', C', soft C, G) in a major scale. Scientists broadcast the phrase to outer space, but are mystified by the response: a seemingly meaningless series of numbers (104 44 30 40 36 10) repeated over and over until Laughlin, with his background in cartography, recognizes it as a set of geographical coordinates, which point to Devils Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming. Lacombe and the U.S. military converge on Wyoming. The United States Army evacuates the area, planting false reports in the media that a train wreck has spilled a toxic nerve gas, all the while preparing a secret landing zone for the UFOs and their occupants. Meanwhile, Roy's increasingly erratic behavior causes Ronnie to become upset and leave him, taking their three children with her. When a despairing Roy inadvertently sees a television news program about the train wreck near Devils Tower, he realizes the mental image of a mountain plaguing him is real. Jillian sees the same broadcast, and she and Roy, as well as others with similar visions and experiences, travel to the site in spite of the public warnings about nerve gas. While most of the civilians who are drawn to the site are apprehended by the Army, Roy and Jillian persist and make it to their secret landing zone just as dozens of UFOs gradually appear in the night sky, while the government specialists at the site begin to try to communicate with the UFOs by use of light and sound on a large electrical billboard controlled by a multiple-manual synthesizer. Following this, an enormous mother ship lands at the site. After using light and sound to teach the specialists the aliens' basic vocabulary, it releases the missing pilots from Flight 19 and over a dozen other long-missing adults, children, even a few small animals, all from different past eras and all of whom have not aged since their abductions. Barry is also returned and reunited with a relieved Jillian. The government officials decide to include Roy in a group of people whom they have selected to be potential visitors to the mothership, and hastily prepare him. As the aliens finally emerge from the mothership, they select Roy to join them on their travels. As Roy enters the mothership, one of the aliens pauses for a few moments with the humans. Lacombe uses Curwen hand signs that correspond to the five-note alien tonal phrase. The alien replies with the same gestures, smiles, and returns to its ship, which ascends into space, as Barry bids Roy goodbye.