Within Spielberg
Why Spielberg's Flying Saucers Feel Sacred
Spielberg made the saucer image feel less like a weapon and more like an overwhelming object of wonder.
On this page
- Light, scale and silence
- The saucer as summons
- From object in the sky to emotional symbol
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Introduction
Steven Spielberg’s flying saucers feel sacred because he films them less as enemy machines than as overwhelming presences. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the saucer image becomes a ritual object: announced by light, framed through silence, made enormous by scale, and finally turned into a language of music and colour. The familiar UFO disc is still recognisable, but Spielberg strips away much of the usual invasion grammar. His craft do not arrive first as weapons; they arrive as something people look up at, follow, fear, misunderstand and, finally, answer.
That matters because the flying saucer was already the most recognisable shorthand for UFO contact by the time Spielberg made the film. The phrase entered mass culture after Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting near Mount Rainier, which the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum describes as the moment that added “flying saucer” to the vocabulary of millions. [National Air and Space Museum]airandspace.si.edu1947 year flying saucerRainier on June 24, 1947… Black and white comic strip depicting UFOs flying over the White House.Read more… Spielberg inherited that image, then changed its emotional charge. In his hands, the saucer became not just an object in the sky, but a symbol of awe.
How Spielberg turns machinery into wonder
The key mechanism is reversal. Earlier saucer cinema often treated the disc as a threat: a clean silhouette that could hover, invade, fire or abduct. Spielberg keeps the uncanny power of the image but changes the emotional destination. The craft in Close Encounters remain frightening because they are huge, silent, bright and beyond explanation, yet the film gradually teaches the viewer to read those same qualities as signs of encounter rather than conquest.
This is partly why the film sits so firmly inside UFO culture rather than simply borrowing its furniture. The American Film Institute’s production history notes that Columbia bought the rights to J. Allen Hynek’s The UFO Experience and hired Hynek as a technical adviser after the film’s title drew on his “close encounter” classification system. [AFI Catalog]catalog.afi.comAFI CatalogClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - AFI CatalogA settlement resulted in Columbia purchasing the rights to Hynek's book… That connection matters here because Spielberg’s saucers are not random fantasy vehicles. They are staged as the kind of sighting that demands interpretation: witnesses see lights, authorities manage secrecy, experts attempt contact, and ordinary people are pulled towards a meaning they cannot yet name.
The saucer becomes awe-inspiring through three linked choices:
First, the craft are luminous before they are legible. Spielberg often lets light arrive before the viewer fully understands the object producing it. This makes the saucer feel like an event, not a prop.
Second, the ships are scaled against fragile human bodies and familiar American spaces. Roads, houses, doorways, airfields and Devils Tower become measuring tools for the impossible.
Third, the climax makes the object communicative. The mothership is not only seen; it responds. Its lights and sounds transform the UFO from spectacle into interlocutor.
That last step is the crucial Spielberg move. A weapon can be spectacular, but a presence that answers back can become sublime.
Light, scale and silence
The most memorable saucers in Close Encounters are not introduced through explanatory dialogue. They are introduced through sensory imbalance: darkness broken by impossible light, domestic spaces invaded by brightness, and vast objects moving with a calm that human technology does not seem to share. Spielberg makes the viewer feel that something has entered the world before the mind has caught up with it.
The film’s production design and visual effects support that feeling. Douglas Trumbull supervised the visual effects, while the Smithsonian identifies the surviving Mother Ship model as the one used in the 1977 film. [Smithsonian Institution]si.eduSmithsonian InstitutionModel, Spacecraft, Mother Ship, Movie, "Close Encounters…This is the model of the alien Mother Ship used in the… The model’s museum afterlife is revealing: it is not remembered merely as a spaceship design, but as an artefact of cinematic wonder. The object that once descended on screen now sits in an aerospace museum context, blurring the line between science-fiction prop, technological sculpture and cultural monument.
Spielberg’s saucers also depart from the harsher metallic look associated with many science-fiction craft of the period. Accounts of the film’s design history emphasise the mothership’s luminous quality rather than a purely industrial surface; the commonly cited contrast is with the hardware-heavy visual world of Star Wars, released the same year. [Wikipedia]WikipediaClose Encounters of the Third KindClose Encounters of the Third Kind This distinction is not cosmetic. A weaponised saucer usually invites the viewer to scan for guns, armour and threat. Spielberg’s mothership invites the viewer to absorb radiance, depth and pattern.
Scale completes the effect. The smaller UFOs dart and tease, but the mothership overwhelms. Its arrival at Devils Tower is staged as a descent of magnitude: the human landing site, with all its floodlights, instruments and military preparation, suddenly looks temporary and small. The ship’s size does not simply say “advanced technology”. It creates a vertical relationship between earthbound humanity and something above it, which is why the sequence can feel quasi-religious without needing to state a doctrine.
Silence and restraint are just as important. Spielberg does not make awe by filling every second with explanation. He lets witnesses stare, wait and fail to speak adequately. The image of the saucer works because it produces a pause in human certainty.
The saucer as summons
In Spielberg’s UFO grammar, the saucer does not only appear; it calls. Roy Neary’s encounter is not a complete message at first, but it leaves a mark. The film’s famous compulsion towards Devils Tower turns the UFO sighting into a summons: a visual and psychological pull that reorganises a person’s life around an image.
This is where the saucer becomes more than a vehicle. A vehicle takes passengers from one place to another. Spielberg’s saucer takes the witness from one state of mind to another. Roy begins as an ordinary man who has seen something extraordinary. The sighting then becomes an interior command, expressed through obsession, repeated shapes and a destination he cannot rationally explain. The UFO is no longer “out there” only; it has entered memory, behaviour and desire.
The Library of Congress essay on Close Encounters captures this westward, almost pilgrimage-like movement by describing Devils Tower as the place where Roy and Jillian’s dream of “the heavens descending upon a mountaintop” receives coordinates. [The Library of Congress]loc.govThe Library of Congress Close Encounters of the Third KindThe chief. UFO researcher, Lacombe, is played by the French New. Wave figurehead François Truffaut, a movie…Read more… That phrase points to the film’s deeper mechanism. Spielberg anchors the saucer in geography. The impossible does not remain abstract; it names a place. Once the saucer becomes connected to Devils Tower, the film changes from sighting story to journey story.
This also explains why the saucer image in Close Encounters feels sacred rather than merely mysterious. Sacred objects often do not explain themselves immediately. They summon, disturb and reorient. Spielberg’s UFOs do the same. They do not simply prove that aliens exist inside the film’s world; they create a path that characters must follow.
The summons is not gentle. Roy’s obsession damages his family life, and the film does not make that cost disappear. But the force pulling him is presented as larger than curiosity. That uneasy mixture — wonder, fear, loss and longing — is what keeps Spielberg’s saucers from becoming sentimental decorations. Awe is not comfort. It is the feeling of being overmatched by meaning.
From object in the sky to emotional symbol
The final sequence at Devils Tower is where Spielberg completes the transformation. The flying saucer begins as an unidentified object; the mothership ends as an emotional symbol of contact. The change happens through light, sound and response.
John Williams’s music is central to that shift. The five-note phrase in Close Encounters functions inside the story as a communication tool, not just as a theme for the audience. Recent discussion of Williams’s work has again highlighted how unusual that idea remains: in Close Encounters, music is not merely accompaniment but a bridge between species. The Guardian’s review of the 2024 documentary Music by John Williams notes Williams’s own description of the phrase as spiritually charged and unresolved, ending with a sense of expectation. [The Guardian]theguardian.comThe Guardian Music by John Williams reviewThe film presents a heartwarming portrait of Williams, featuring interviews with collaborators like Steven Spielberg and directors George…
That unresolved quality is exactly why the saucer becomes awe rather than explanation. A conventional reveal might show the alien craft, identify its occupants and close the mystery. Spielberg does something more delicate. The mothership communicates enough to suggest intelligence and welcome, but not enough to reduce the encounter to a neat message. The viewer is left with response rather than translation.
The film’s use of light reinforces this. The mothership’s illuminated surfaces behave almost like a vast face or cathedral window: patterns flare, colours move, and the ship seems to speak through brightness. This does not make the saucer less technological. It makes the technology feel expressive. The machine becomes a medium of feeling.
That is why the image has lasted. Viewers may forget plot mechanics, government cover stories or individual lines, but they remember the emotional architecture: the dark landing site, the rising tones, the immense lit body of the craft, and the human beings looking up. The saucer is no longer a disc-shaped mystery. It is the shape of contact itself.
Why the familiar saucer still works
The flying saucer was already a cultural cliché before Spielberg used it, but that familiarity became an advantage. Because audiences knew the image, Spielberg could spend less time explaining what a UFO was and more time changing what it felt like.
The 1947 Kenneth Arnold story shows how quickly the saucer became a shared visual code. TIME has noted that Arnold’s original description concerned movement “like a saucer” skipping across water, while press interpretation helped turn that into the idea of saucer-shaped craft. [TIME]time.comThis Is Why People Think UFOs Look Like 'Flying SaucersThe fascination grew to include an incident on July 7, when a New Mexico rancher found what was initially thought to be a crashed flying… Whether born from exact description, misdescription or media compression, the phrase became powerful because it was simple. A saucer was domestic, round, readable and strange all at once.
Spielberg exploits that simplicity. His saucers do not need elaborate biological horror or dense lore to register. A light in the sky is enough. A shape crossing a road is enough. A disc hovering where no disc should be is enough. The recognisable icon gives the viewer instant access to the UFO tradition, while Spielberg’s staging redirects the tradition away from immediate hostility.
This is why his saucers feel different from many alien-invasion images. They retain danger because they exceed human control, but they are not organised around attack. Their power is vertical, luminous and beckoning. They make the sky feel inhabited.
Awe depends on that balance. If the saucer is too friendly, it becomes cute. If it is too hostile, it becomes only a threat. Spielberg’s version remains suspended between terror and welcome, which is why it can feel sacred without becoming safe.
The sacred feeling without a sermon
Calling Spielberg’s saucers “sacred” does not mean the film is making a formal religious argument. The sacred quality comes from cinematic arrangement: ascent, descent, light, music, pilgrimage, chosen witnesses and a meeting place set apart from ordinary life. These are ritual shapes, even when the story remains science fiction.
The film’s National Film Registry status also helps explain its cultural endurance. The Library of Congress selected Close Encounters for preservation as a work of cultural, historical or aesthetic significance, a recognition that places the film beyond short-lived genre popularity. [Wikipedia]WikipediaKenneth Arnold UFO sightingKenneth Arnold UFO sighting Its saucers matter because they changed the emotional vocabulary available to UFO cinema. After Spielberg, the UFO could still be a menace, but it could also be a promise.
The sacred feeling is built from absence as much as presence. Spielberg does not overexplain the visitors’ motives. He does not make the mothership interior the final truth of the experience; indeed, later accounts of the film’s versions note Spielberg’s dissatisfaction with showing the interior in the 1980 Special Edition and his later preference for removing that explicit reveal. [Wikipedia]WikipediaClose Encounters of the Third KindClose Encounters of the Third Kind The less the film explains, the more the saucer can remain a vessel for wonder.
That restraint is central to the symbol. Awe weakens when mystery is converted too quickly into information. Spielberg’s flying saucers endure because they stop just short of full explanation. They are visible enough to be believed in, strange enough to remain beyond possession, and responsive enough to make the universe feel less empty.
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Further Reading
Books and field guides related to Why Spielberg's Flying Saucers Feel Sacred. Use these as the next step if you want deeper reading beyond the article.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Covers the film that turned flying saucers into symbols of awe, hope and contact.
UFO
Explains how flying saucers became part of the wider public imagination around unexplained aerial phenomena.
The UFO Experience
Supplies the real UFO vocabulary behind Spielberg's awe-filled close encounter imagery.
The Flying Saucers Are Real
Provides the mid-century saucer mythology that Spielberg inherited and transformed.
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Endnotes
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Source: catalog.afi.com
Link: https://catalog.afi.com/Film/67160-CLOSE-ENCOUNTERS-OF-THE-THIRD-KINDSource snippet
AFI CatalogClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - AFI CatalogA settlement resulted in Columbia purchasing the rights to Hynek's book...
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Source: Wikipedia
Title: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind -
Source: time.com
Title: This Is Why People Think UFOs Look Like ‘Flying Saucers’
Link: https://time.com/3930602/first-reported-ufo/Source snippet
The fascination grew to include an incident on July 7, when a New Mexico rancher found what was initially thought to be a crashed flying...
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Source: Wikipedia
Title: Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting -
Source: history.com
Title: Kenneth Arnold
Link: https://www.history.com/articles/kenneth-arnold -
Source: catalog.afi.com
Title: Movie Details
Link: https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/MovieDetails/67160?cxt=filmography -
Source: airandspace.si.edu
Title: 1947 year flying saucer
Link: https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/1947-year-flying-saucerSource snippet
Rainier on June 24, 1947... Black and white comic strip depicting UFOs flying over the White House.Read more...
Published: June 24, 1947
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Source: si.edu
Link: https://www.si.edu/object/model-spacecraft-mother-ship-movie-close-encounters-third-kind%3Anasm_A19790906000Source snippet
Smithsonian InstitutionModel, Spacecraft, Mother Ship, Movie, "Close Encounters...This is the model of the alien Mother Ship used in the...
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Source: loc.gov
Title: The Library of Congress Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Link: https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/close_encounters.pdfSource snippet
(The chief. UFO researcher, Lacombe, is played by the French New. Wave figurehead François Truffaut, a movie...Read more...
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Source: theguardian.com
Title: The Guardian Music by John Williams review
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/oct/30/music-by-john-williams-review-the-man-behind-the-soundtracks-from-star-wars-to-supermanSource snippet
The film presents a heartwarming portrait of Williams, featuring interviews with collaborators like Steven Spielberg and directors George...
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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 -
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Title: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Link: https://the-jh-movie-collection-official.fandom.com/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind -
Source: ultimatepopculture.fandom.com
Title: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Link: https://ultimatepopculture.fandom.com/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind -
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Title: close encounters
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Additional References
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Title: Roy’s First UFO Encounter
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5 Roy Boards The Mothership | Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Richard Dreyfuss)...
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Title: The Close Encounters Mothership
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4 Roy's First UFO Encounter - Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1/8) Movie CLIP (1977) HD...
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Source: researchgate.net
Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394413715_Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind_and_ET_The_Extraterrestrial_The_Bonding_Power_of_Music -
Source: loftcinema.org
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