Close Encounters of the Third Kind Trivia
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59 free Close Encounters of the Third Kind trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the film Steven Spielberg made right after Jaws, and it nearly broke Columbia Pictures before becoming the studio's biggest hit. This quiz covers the whole story: Roy Neary's sunburn and his living-room mountain, little Barry Guiler's abduction, the Flight 19 planes in the desert, the five-note phrase, and the mothership finale at Devils Tower. It also digs into how the film got made. You'll be asked about the actors who turned down Roy Neary, the French director who was cast as Lacombe, the synthesizer engineer who ended up on screen, the Star Wars in-joke hidden on the mothership model, and why there are three different cuts of the movie. A few questions cover Devils Tower itself and the real UFO scale that gave the film its name. The questions run from easy to expert, so casual viewers can score well while superfans get properly tested. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and related reference pages, and each question shows the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which studio let Close Encounters go before Columbia picked the project up?
20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox. It parted with Spielberg's UFO project a few years before releasing Star Wars, and Columbia ended up with the biggest hit in its history to that point.
Q 02Which actor plays Roy Neary, the Indiana everyman whose life is upended by a UFO?
Richard Dreyfuss
Richard Dreyfuss. He heard about the project for months on the set of Spielberg's previous film and campaigned for the lead until the director gave it to him.
Q 03What is Roy Neary's job at the start of Close Encounters?
Electric-utility lineman
Electric-utility lineman. Called out to a blackout, he gets lost and stops to read his map; the headlights behind his truck then rise straight up as the roadside mailboxes rattle.
Q 04Near which Indiana city does three-year-old Barry Guiler live when he is abducted?
Muncie
Muncie. The scene was shot far from Indiana: the Guiler farmhouse was a real house outside Fairhope, Alabama, the state where the film's biggest sets were built.
Q 05Close Encounters' climax takes place at Devils Tower, a real monument in which state?
Wyoming
Wyoming. The crew did film at the real tower, but the landing strip hidden behind it existed only as a giant set built inside a hangar in Alabama.
Q 06Who composed the Close Encounters score, including its famous five-tone motif?
John Williams
John Williams. He and Spielberg worked through about 300 five-note combinations before settling on the one the film's scientists send to the visitors.
Q 07In Close Encounters, what does Roy Neary sculpt into a mountain at the family dinner table?
Mashed potatoes
Mashed potatoes. He only gets the shape right the next morning, when he tears the peak off a clay version in frustration and the flat top is suddenly the mountain he keeps seeing.
Q 08Which celebrated French film director plays the scientist Claude Lacombe?
François Truffaut
François Truffaut. It was his first role in another director's film, and he used his free time on the shoot to write the script for his own next picture, The Man Who Loved Women.
Q 09Claude Lacombe in Close Encounters was modelled on which real-life UFO researcher?
Jacques Vallée
Jacques Vallée. Consulted by Spielberg, he argued against showing visitors stepping out of a spaceship, wanting the mystery left stranger; Spielberg kept his crowd-pleasing ending.
Q 10The title Close Encounters of the Third Kind comes from a UFO scale devised by which astronomer?
J. Allen Hynek
J. Allen Hynek. Hired as the film's technical adviser, he also slipped into the finale: he is the bearded scientist with a pipe who steps forward for a closer look at the visitors.
Q 11In UFO research, what defines a close encounter of the third kind?
Sighting of the craft's occupants
Sighting of the craft's occupants. The first kind is a close-range sighting and the second leaves physical traces; Columbia paid the scale's author for the title and hired him as an adviser.
Q 12Which effects artist built the smiling alien at the end of Close Encounters?
Carlo Rambaldi
Carlo Rambaldi. Spielberg brought him in to build the visitor of the final close-ups, a mechanical puppet with a moving face, nicknamed Puck on the set; he later built E.T.
Q 13Which effects pioneer supervised the visual effects for Close Encounters?
Douglas Trumbull
Q 21Who plays Ronnie Neary, Roy's increasingly exasperated wife?
Teri Garr
Teri Garr. She asked to play the film's other female lead, the mother of the abducted boy, but Spielberg insisted she was his Ronnie.
Q 22In Close Encounters, what strange event greets young Barry Guiler when he wakes in the night?
His toys switching on by themselves
His toys switching on by themselves. Downstairs the fridge has been raided and its contents strewn across the kitchen, and Barry, delighted rather than scared, runs out into the night.
Q 23In Close Encounters' opening scene, the lost planes of Flight 19 turn up intact where?
The Sonoran Desert
Douglas Trumbull. The 2001: A Space Odyssey veteran had turned down George Lucas's Star Wars, pointing him to his former assistant John Dykstra instead.
Q 14Which Star Wars character is hidden on the Close Encounters mothership model as an in-joke?
R2-D2
R2-D2. Many of the model crew had just come off Star Wars; they also tucked a mailbox, a Volkswagen bus and a tiny cemetery among the mothership's lights.
Q 15Where is the original Close Encounters mothership model on public display?
The Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center
The Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center. The glittering model was a change of heart: Spielberg first pictured the ship as a huge black shape and had already filmed its shadow crossing the landing site.
Q 16Which Star Wars concept artist designed the Close Encounters mothership?
Ralph McQuarrie
Ralph McQuarrie. Spielberg had dropped an earlier design for a more flamboyant one, and the model shop built the finished ship from McQuarrie's artwork.
Q 17Spielberg said what sight, lit up at night, inspired the look of the Close Encounters mothership?
An oil refinery
An oil refinery. By his account he drove past one while filming abroad, its pipes and towers ablaze with light, and wanted the top of his ship to look the same.
Q 18What mark does Roy Neary's first UFO encounter leave on him?
A sunburn on one side of his face
A sunburn on one side of his face. The same mark is on the old man in the opening scene, who tells the investigators that the sun came out at night and sang to him.
Q 19In Close Encounters, what is the name of Barry's mother, who shares Roy's visions of a mountain?
Jillian
Jillian. Where Roy sculpts the mountain, she draws and paints it again and again, and both finally recognise it when the real thing appears on a television news report.
Q 20Which actress earned an Oscar nomination as Barry's mother in Close Encounters?
Melinda Dillon
Melinda Dillon. She was cast only days before her scenes began, after Hal Ashby, who had just directed her in Bound for Glory, heard Spielberg was stuck and recommended her.
The Sonoran Desert. Spielberg had planned for the planes to be found deep in the Amazon jungle; the scene was rewritten for a Mexican desert and shot on sand dunes in California.
Q 24Which vanished ship turns up in the Gobi Desert in the Special Edition of Close Encounters?
SS Cotopaxi
SS Cotopaxi. The real steamer vanished with 32 men in 1925 between Charleston and Havana; in 2020 a wreck off St. Augustine, Florida, was identified as the ship, sunk by a storm.
Q 25In Close Encounters, what does the string of numbers sent in reply to the five tones turn out to be?
Geographic coordinates
Geographic coordinates. It is the team's interpreter, a mapmaker by trade, who spots a longitude and latitude in the numbers, and a globe is hauled in from a nearby office to find the place.
Q 26In Close Encounters, what cover story does the Army use to clear civilians from the landing site?
A train wreck spilled nerve gas
A train wreck spilled nerve gas. The planners first weigh a flash flood, a plague and anthrax, until the major in charge demands something frightening enough to empty the whole region.
Q 27In Close Encounters, a crowd chants the five tones in which country?
India
India. The scene is set in Dharamsala, in the far north, but Spielberg filmed it a long way south, in a village outside Bombay, with thousands of extras.
Q 28How does Lacombe 'speak' the five tones to the visitor in the final scene of Close Encounters?
With hand signs
With hand signs. They are the Curwen signs that the Kodály method uses to teach singing, one hand shape for each note of the scale; the visitor repeats them back and smiles.
Q 29Which Disney song shaped Spielberg's writing of Close Encounters and was cut from its ending after a preview?
When You Wish Upon a Star
When You Wish Upon a Star. Spielberg said he hung the story on the song's mood, but a Dallas preview audience snickered at it over the ending, so only orchestral echoes of the tune were left.
Q 30Which screenwriter wrote the first Close Encounters draft, Kingdom Come, which Spielberg threw out?
Paul Schrader
Paul Schrader. The Taxi Driver writer's hero was an Air Force officer paid to debunk flying saucers who then sees one himself; Spielberg wanted an ordinary man and ended up writing his own script.