Close Encounters

Let me tell you about my experience with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I’m old enough to have seen it first run at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood back in 1977 and this weekend is its 40^th anniversary, celebrating with new prints in a one-week run at theaters around the country.

I’d never imagined anything close to the overwhelm of witnessing the moment we make actual contact with beings from another planet, who naturally, would need to be coming to us, seeing as our piddling technical prowess is hundreds of years away from finding them. 

There were two extraordinary things about Steven Spielberg’s vision, brought to life on-screen. First, there was an incredible cinematic build-up with sightings and visions to the ultimate major encounter, which was run by government experts and professionals who were both welcoming and awestruck. And second, here was a story of a peaceful visit. No ray-guns, no megalomaniacs, no nervous, trigger-happy army generals or panic in the streets.

That blew me away; the concept that this wasn’t some catastrophe on the way, but that given the right circumstances, we could actually handle it. And welcome it. And be invited into this heretofore hidden galactic community that we had no inkling of until that moment.

I staggered home and spent the next couple of days in contemplation, ultimately writing a deadly serious song about our present situation call Exile in the Universe. 

The chorus:

We are in exile in the universe

And we’ve been sentenced to serve ten million years

Let the courts of the Infinity

Be the judges of our destiny

As we struggle with our prejudice and fears…

That was the chorus, for cryin’ out loud… And I’m looking for the tapes but don’t know if I’ll find them. If not, I’ve got to get around to re-recording something, just to have it and share it with you guys.

That experience changed me in my conscious and unconscious relationship with everything out beyond. And made me the person who ultimately came around to wanting to share that future vision on stages around the world. The movie is playing for one week only (THIS week) – so join me in experiencing history’s most powerful positive experience of things to come. I’ll be sitting center row halfway back, in awe all over again.