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Why Devils Tower Became UFO Mythology

Close Encounters turns one landmark into a destination for obsession, secrecy and final communication.

On this page

  • The landmark as a mental image
  • A destination for witnesses and officials
  • How place makes contact feel real
Preview for Why Devils Tower Became UFO Mythology

Introduction

Devils Tower became UFO mythology because Close Encounters of the Third Kind made a real, unmistakable landmark function like a message. In Steven Spielberg’s film, witnesses are not simply trying to understand lights in the sky; they are being pulled towards a place. Roy Neary’s mashed-potato mountain, Jillian Guiler’s sketches, the government’s secret Wyoming operation and the final exchange of light and music all turn Devils Tower into the geography of contact: a destination where private obsession, official secrecy and extraterrestrial communication finally meet. The effect worked because the site already looked singular. The National Park Service describes Devils Tower as a rock formation rising above the grassland and ponderosa pine forests, made of rare phonolite porphyry and marked by extraordinary columnar jointing. [National Park Service]nps.govNational Park Service How the Tower FormedNational Park ServiceHow the Tower Formed - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)…

Overview image for Devils Tower The film did not invent the Tower’s significance. It overlaid a twentieth-century UFO story on a place with deep Indigenous, geological and tourist histories. That layering is exactly why the location remains so powerful: the Tower is not a generic alien landing pad, but a specific landscape whose shape, isolation and contested meanings make contact feel as if it must happen somewhere real.

The landmark as a mental image

The central trick of Devils Tower in Close Encounters is that the place appears before it is named. Roy Neary does not initially know what the shape means. He sees it in his mind, repeats it unconsciously, sculpts it with mashed potatoes, tries to build it from clay and later recognises it only when a television news report shows the real mountain in Wyoming. AFI’s plot summary tracks that progression: Roy is “haunted by the mountain shape”, sculpts it at dinner, builds models, then recognises the flat-topped form when footage near Devils Tower appears during the staged evacuation report. [AFI Catalog]catalog.afi.comCatalog AFI|CatalogAFI CatalogAFI|Catalog…

That makes the Tower different from a normal film location. It is not merely where the climax happens; it is the image that organises the film’s middle movement. Spielberg turns geography into compulsion. The witnesses do not decode a clue in the calm manner of detectives. They repeat a form they cannot explain, and the audience watches the gap between image and meaning slowly close.

Devils Tower is unusually suited to that role because it is recognisable from silhouette alone. The NPS describes it as rising above the surrounding grassland “like a rocky sentinel”, with columns that can soar hundreds of feet and stretch up to 10 feet in width. Geologists still debate details of its formation, but agree that erosion exposed a harder igneous mass while wearing away the surrounding sedimentary rock. [National Park Service]nps.govNational Park Service How the Tower FormedNational Park ServiceHow the Tower Formed - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)… This gives the film a powerful visual premise: the landmark looks both natural and improbable, like something that could be ancient geology or a deliberately planted signal.

The flat top matters, too. A pointed mountain would suggest pilgrimage, conquest or wilderness. Devils Tower’s table-like summit and vertical sides suggest something else: a receiving platform, a beacon, a form waiting to be completed by arrival from above. The film exploits that ambiguity. Roy’s models are not beautiful landscapes; they are attempts to reconstruct a mental summons.

Devils Tower illustration 1

A destination for witnesses and officials

Once the Tower is identified, Close Encounters changes from a story about scattered sightings into a story about converging routes. The extraterrestrial signal is translated into Wyoming coordinates, while ordinary witnesses recognise the same form through dreams, drawings and compulsions. AFI records the narrative mechanism clearly: a repeated numerical signal is identified as longitude, the team determines the location is in Wyoming, and military personnel study a map of “Devil’s Tower” while debating cover stories to evacuate the area. [AFI Catalog]catalog.afi.comCatalog AFI|CatalogAFI CatalogAFI|Catalog…

That convergence gives the film its distinctive geography of contact. Three systems arrive at the same place:

  • Witness experience: Roy, Jillian and others are drawn by visions they cannot justify.
  • Scientific translation: Lacombe’s team treats the signal as data, maps it and prepares an organised response.
  • State secrecy: the military turns the surrounding area into a restricted zone, using a false nerve-gas emergency to keep civilians away.

The result is not just a landing site but a contested threshold. The same place means revelation to the witnesses, operational control to the authorities and communication to the visitors. AFI’s summary notes the staged train derailment and nerve-gas story, the evacuation, the roadblocks, the detention of civilians and the discovery of a lit landing arena behind Devils Tower. [AFI Catalog]catalog.afi.comCatalog AFI|CatalogAFI CatalogAFI|Catalog…

This is why Devils Tower feels more convincing than an abstract science-fiction base. The film does not stage contact in a clean laboratory or on a remote planet. It places it beside an American national monument, reachable by roads, visible from a distance and surrounded by ordinary land. The journey to contact therefore has recognisable social obstacles: television news, barricades, gas masks, helicopters, soldiers and people trying to decide whether official explanations can be trusted.

The production history reinforces the importance of the place. AFI lists Devils Tower, Wyoming, among the film’s geographic locations, alongside places such as Burbank, Mobile, Washington, White Sands and India. [AFI Catalog]catalog.afi.comCatalog AFI|CatalogAFI CatalogAFI|Catalog… Yet among those locations, Devils Tower is the one that becomes the film’s visual emblem. The others broaden the story into a global pattern of UFO activity; the Tower concentrates that pattern into one destination.

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How place makes contact feel real

The realism of the final encounter comes partly from the fact that Devils Tower is not fictional scenery. The NPS identifies the site as America’s first national monument, established in 1906, and describes it as a significant natural and cultural landmark in north-eastern Wyoming. [National Park Service]nps.govNational Park Service How the Tower FormedNational Park ServiceHow the Tower Formed - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)… The Tower also has visible features that make it difficult to reduce to a painted backdrop: its columnar faces, boulder fields, surrounding prairie, access roads and changing light all give the climax a sense of scale.

Spielberg uses that scale to make the impossible feel staged within a real landscape. The witnesses climb, hide, look down into an illuminated arena and watch the sky fill with movement. The landing site is technologically artificial, but the surrounding form is ancient. That contrast is crucial. The film’s science-fiction machinery looks temporary; the Tower looks like it has been waiting for centuries.

The geography also changes the emotional meaning of UFO contact. In many alien-invasion stories, the important locations are cities, military bases or national capitals. Close Encounters instead chooses a landmark on the edge of settlement. That choice shifts the encounter away from conquest and towards rendezvous. The aliens do not occupy the seat of government; they arrive at a place that has to be reached, recognised and approached.

This helps explain why the film’s most memorable act of communication happens after the journey, not before it. The five-note exchange, the light board, the mothership and the human representatives all occur once the characters have arrived at the right terrain. The place authenticates the contact. It tells the viewer that the event is not simply happening “somewhere”; it is happening at a named, mapped, photographed landmark that exists outside the film.

Devils Tower illustration 2

The older meanings beneath the UFO image

The UFO mythology around Devils Tower is powerful, but it sits on top of older meanings that the film does not own. The National Park Service describes the Tower as sacred to Northern Plains Indians and Indigenous people, and its cultural pages stress that stories associated with the site should be understood as oral histories or sacred narratives rather than merely as “myths” or “legends”. [National Park Service]nps.govNational Park Service How the Tower FormedNational Park ServiceHow the Tower Formed - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)…

Those traditions often connect the Tower to bears, rescue, ascent and the sky. In one Kiowa narrative recorded by the NPS, seven girls chased by bears pray to a rock, which rises and carries them upward; the bears’ claws leave marks on the sides, and the girls become the Pleiades. Crow, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Lakota accounts also connect the place with Bear Lodge, sacred action, worship or supernatural transformation. [National Park Service]nps.govNational Park Service How the Tower FormedNational Park ServiceHow the Tower Formed - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)…

That matters for reading Close Encounters carefully. Spielberg’s film uses the Tower as a modern symbol of cosmic contact, but the site was already a place where stories linked land, sky, danger and transformation. The film’s UFO narrative is not the same as those Indigenous traditions and should not be treated as replacing them. Instead, it shows how a landmark can accumulate meanings: sacred site, geological wonder, national monument, climbing destination, film location and UFO icon.

Even the name “Devils Tower” carries contested history. The NPS explains that many maps from 1857 to 1901 used Bear Lodge or Bears Lodge, based on a common Lakota name, while the later “Devil’s Tower” label may have arisen from a bad translation or from a deliberate renaming by Richard Irving Dodge’s expedition. The official spelling became “Devils Tower” without an apostrophe because of federal naming policy. [National Park Service]nps.govNational Park Service How the Tower FormedNational Park ServiceHow the Tower Formed - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)…

The modern management of the site reflects these layered meanings. Since 1996, the NPS has implemented a voluntary June climbing closure out of respect for tribal cultural activities connected with Mato Tipila or Bear Lodge; the agency says the closure originated in the 1995 Climbing Management Plan and has led to an average 85% reduction in climbers during June. [National Park Service]nps.govNational Park Service How the Tower FormedNational Park ServiceHow the Tower Formed - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)… This is a reminder that Devils Tower is not only a pop-culture symbol. It is a living cultural landscape whose meanings exceed the UFO frame.

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From film location to UFO pilgrimage site

After Close Encounters, Devils Tower became inseparable from the public memory of cinematic UFO contact. The National Parks Foundation describes the film as making Devils Tower a pop-culture phenomenon, while the NPS reports that the monument reached an all-time visitation high by September 2021, with more than 509,000 visitors and most visitation concentrated between late May and early September. [National Park Foundation]nationalparks.orgNational Park FoundationDevils Tower National MonumentClose Encounters of the Third Kind made Devils Tower a pop culture phenomenon, and…

Local accounts of the film’s legacy describe a particularly direct link between the location and tourism. A 2026 Cowboy State Daily feature reported that filming at Devils Tower began in May 1976 after an agreement with local rancher Jesse Thomas Driskill, and that the production transformed hay meadows near the monument into the decontamination base and main filming area. The same report says the film helped turn the landmark into a bucket-list stop for movie lovers and believers in extraterrestrial life. [Cowboy State Daily]cowboystatedaily.comSource details in endnotes.

That “pilgrimage” effect is unusually fitting because the film itself is about people travelling to the Tower. Viewers who later visit are, in a mild and playful way, repeating the structure of the story: they have seen an image, attached meaning to it, and gone to the place where the image becomes real. Unlike a studio set, Devils Tower allows that loop to continue outside the cinema.

The site’s ongoing association with Close Encounters also shows how film can reorganise the public identity of a real place. The Tower did not become famous only because it was beautiful or geologically strange; it became famous to many people because Spielberg gave its shape a narrative function. Once a landmark becomes the answer to a mystery, visitors do not just look at it. They recognise it.

Devils Tower illustration 3

Why Devils Tower still defines UFO contact on screen

Devils Tower endures in UFO mythology because it solved a storytelling problem. Alien contact can easily feel too vast, abstract or technologically distant. Spielberg made it spatial. He gave contact a silhouette, a road journey, a map coordinate, a forbidden perimeter and a final arena. The result is a geography of belief: witnesses feel it, scientists decode it, the military hides it, and the landscape holds it all together.

The Tower’s cinematic force depends on several mechanisms working at once. Its actual geology makes it visually singular. Its isolation makes arrival feel deliberate. Its sacred and contested meanings give it depth beyond science fiction. Its role in the plot turns private visions into public geography. Its continued tourist life keeps the film’s image active in the real world.

That is why Devils Tower became more than the location of the final scene. In Close Encounters, it is the place where obsession becomes evidence, secrecy becomes visible and the unknown becomes speakable. For Spielberg’s UFO imagination, contact is not only an event in the sky. It is a destination on the ground.

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Endnotes

  1. Source: nps.gov
    Title: National Park Service How the Tower Formed
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/nature/tower-formation.htm
    Source snippet

    National Park ServiceHow the Tower Formed - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)...

  2. Source: catalog.afi.com
    Title: Catalog AFI|Catalog
    Link: https://catalog.afi.com/Film/67160-CLOSE-ENCOUNTERS-OF-THE-THIRD-KIND
    Source snippet

    AFI CatalogAFI|Catalog...

  3. Source: nps.gov
    Title: devils tower sees record breaking visitation in 2021
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/news/devils-tower-sees-record-breaking-visitation-in-2021.htm
    Source snippet

    National Park ServiceDevils Tower Sees Record-breaking Visitation in 2021 - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)...

  4. Source: nps.gov
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/

  5. Source: nps.gov
    Title: National Park Service First Stories
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/historyculture/first-stories.htm
    Source snippet

    National Park ServiceFirst Stories - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)...

  6. Source: nps.gov
    Title: National Park Service About the Name
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/historyculture/aboutthename.htm
    Source snippet

    National Park ServiceAbout the Name - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)...

  7. Source: nps.gov
    Title: National Park Service Voluntary Climbing Closure in June
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/news/voluntary-climbing-closure-in-june.htm
    Source snippet

    National Park ServiceVoluntary Climbing Closure in June - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)...

  8. Source: nps.gov
    Title: National Park Service Park Statistics
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/management/statistics.htm
    Source snippet

    National Park ServicePark Statistics - Devils Tower National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)...

  9. Source: nps.gov
    Title: Geologic Formations
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/nature/geologicformations.htm

  10. Source: nps.gov
    Title: geodiversity atlas devils tower national monument wyoming
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/articles/nps-geodiversity-atlas-devils-tower-national-monument-wyoming.htm

  11. Source: nps.gov
    Title: voluntary climbing closure at devils tower
    Link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/news/voluntary-climbing-closure-at-devils-tower.htm

  12. Source: irma.nps.gov
    Title: Annual Park Recreation Visitation (1904 Last Calendar Year)
    Link: https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/SSRSReports/Park%20Specific%20Reports/Annual%20Park%20Recreation%20Visitation%20%281904%20-%20Last%20Calendar%20Year%29?Park=DETO

  13. Source: nationalparks.org
    Link: https://www.nationalparks.org/explore/parks/devils-tower-national-monument
    Source snippet

    National Park FoundationDevils Tower National MonumentClose Encounters of the Third Kind made Devils Tower a pop culture phenomenon, and...

  14. Source: cowboystatedaily.com
    Link: https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/05/31/50-years-later-sci-fi-fans-still-find-their-close-encounters-at-devils-tower/

  15. Source: youtube.com
    Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uNJqDZtaCM

  16. Source: facebook.com
    Link: https://www.facebook.com/devilstower.nps/photos/june-is-a-culturally-significant-month-for-many-of-the-northern-plains-tribes-du/7859299600747641/

  17. Source: data.hereandthere.club
    Title: devils tower
    Link: https://data.hereandthere.club/national-park-visitation/devils-tower/2008

  18. Source: Wikipedia
    Title: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind

  19. Source: Wikipedia
    Title: Devils Tower
    Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devils_Tower

  20. Source: Wikipedia
    Title: Devils Tower National Monument
    Link: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devils_Tower_National_Monument

  21. Source: cowboystatedaily.com
    Title: Sen. Ogden Driskill Recalls Filming of “Close Encounters
    Link: https://cowboystatedaily.com/2022/05/19/sen-ogden-driskill-recalls-filming-of-close-encounters-on-his-familys-ranch-at-devils-tower/

  22. Source: imdb.com
    Link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075860/locations/

  23. Source: parkrangerjohn.com
    Title: Devils Tower National Monument
    Link: https://www.parkrangerjohn.com/devils-tower-national-monument/

  24. Source: travelwyoming.com
    Title: devils tower national monument
    Link: https://travelwyoming.com/listing/devils-tower-national-monument/2466/

  25. Source: ebsco.com
    Link: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/devils-tower

  26. Source: jhwikicollection-20.fandom.com
    Title: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Link: https://jhwikicollection-20.fandom.com/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind

  27. Source: usgs.gov
    Link: https://www.usgs.gov/geology-and-ecology-of-national-parks/devils-tower-national-monument

  28. Source: deanoinamerica.wordpress.com
    Title: devils tower national monument
    Link: https://deanoinamerica.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/devils-tower-national-monument/

  29. Source: movie-locations.com
    Title: Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
    Link: https://movie-locations.com/movies/c/Close-Encounters-Of-The-Third-Kind.php

  30. Source: dictionary.cambridge.org
    Link: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-traditional/devil

Additional References

  1. Source: youtube.com
    Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS8wl03wx9k
    Source snippet

    5 Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The giant ship...

  2. Source: youtube.com
    Title: Rocks, Camera, Action: An Encounter at Devils Tower
    Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrjomjxalD0
    Source snippet

    4 DEVILS TOWER!!! Close Encounters of the Third Kind filming location and National Monument with kids...

  3. Source: youtube.com
    Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c6cVxHOZsQ
    Source snippet

    3 Rocks, Camera, Action: An Encounter at Devils Tower...

  4. Source: youtube.com
    Title: Close Encounters at Devils Tower
    Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS31KRruhWE
    Source snippet

    2 Heading For Devil's Tower | Close Encounters of the Third Kind | Creature Features...

  5. Source: instagram.com
    Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/DYhqnh4j410/

  6. Source: researchgate.net
    Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254378395_Who_visits_the_US_National_Parks_An_analysis_of_park_visitors_and_visitation_1990-2008

  7. Source: allaboutthejersey.com
    Link: https://www.allaboutthejersey.com/

  8. Source: reddit.com
    Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1iccnu5/close_encounter_of_the_third_kind_where_were_the/

  9. Source: tcm.com
    Link: https://www.tcm.com/articles/18629/close-encounters-of-the-third-kind-close-encounters-of-the-third-kind

  10. Source: intermountainhistories.org
    Link: https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/226

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