UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Within the specific genre of science-fiction, fantastic tales of time-travel to the far-flung future or to the distant past are hardly rarities. Take, for example, H.G. Wells’ epic novel of 1895: The Time Machine. The book tells the story of a brilliant, London, England-based scientist, inventor and adventurer who journeys to the year A.D. 802,701 where, to his complete and utter dismay, he finds that the Human Race (in the form that we understand it, at least) no longer exists. In its place are the Eloi and the Morlocks. The former are relatively human-looking beings (albeit of smaller stature), yet they utterly lack vitality, imagination, and any desire to learn or advance. The Morlocks, meanwhile, are fearsome, savage and nightmarish beasts who dwell in darkened underground lairs and who use the Eloi as we use cattle: namely, as a source of food.

Then there is The Philadelphia Experiment: an entertaining Hollywood film allegedly based on real events, and which tells the story of two sailors – David Herdeg and Jim Parker – who are propelled through time from 1943 to the Nevada Desert, circa 1984.

And we should not forget the BBC show, The Flipside of Dominick Hide, in which the main character travels through time from A.D. 2130 to London, England in 1980. Ostensibly there to observe the transportation systems of the past, Hide subsequently finds himself on a quest to locate one of his distant ancestors.

Although these three tales of fictionalized time travel are very different in nature, they all have one thing in common: the time travel that all of the characters experience is achieved via the use of highly advanced (albeit sometimes unreliable) technology: In Wells’ The Time Machine, the chief character (whose name we never actually get to learn) builds his own device to traverse the centuries. In The Philadelphia Experiment, Herdeg and Parker take part in a secret U.S. Navy operation. And Dominick Hide undertakes the journey from 2130 to 1980 via nothing less than his very own flying saucer. However, there are countless reports on record where people – in the real world – seem to have crossed the time-barrier entirely at random, and without the means of sci-fi-style machine-based technologies. Such cases have become known as Time-Slips.

One of the most famous examples of what some researchers think may have been a definitive Time-Slip involved two British women: Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who, it has been suggested, traveled through time while visiting the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, France. It was August 10, 1901 when the pair paid a trip to the Palace of Versailles. While walking through the grounds, both Moberly and Jourdain were overcome by distinctly oppressive feelings of gloom and uneasiness. They would later claim to have met with a wide variety of individuals, all garbed in 18th Century clothing, and who they came to believe had been members of the court of none other than Marie Antoinette. More controversially, the pair said they saw a figure they thought may very well have been Marie Antoinette herself.

Did Moberly and Jourdain really cross the time-barrier into centuries-past? To this day, the story has as many believers as it does detractors. But there is one important factor of which to take careful note: their amazing story does not stand alone. Indeed, there are numerous reports on record of people apparently passing through time – entirely at random, and without the benefit of any form of out-of-this-world technology.

A key event of the First English Civil War, the Battle of Hopton Heath (a small village in south Shropshire) was fought on Sunday, March 19, 1643 between Parliamentarian and Royalist forces. The battle ended at nightfall, with the actual victory and outcome still remaining matters of very much personal opinion. The Royalists, for example, had succeeded in capturing eight enemy-guns; while the Parliamentarians believed that their successful killing of the enemy commander, the Earl of Northampton, was of equal – if not even greater – significance.

But, without doubt of even more significance was a startling event that occurred at some point in the winter of 1974. It was late at night and then-thirty-six-year-old John ‘Davy’ Davis, a Lichfield, Staffordshire-based house-painter at the time, was driving near Hopton Heath when he began to feel unwell: an ominous tightness developed in his chest, he felt lightheaded, and, as he succinctly put it, “my left ear hurt and felt hot.”

Quickly pulling over to the side of the road, Davis was amazed to see the night-sky suddenly transform into daylight, while the road in front of him no longer existed: instead, it had been replaced by a mass of fields, heath-land and tangled trees. And, in front of him, countless soldiers adorned in what was clearly Civil War-clothing waged harsh war upon one another. Notably, Davis said that although at one point he was “nearly bloody surrounded” by the soldiers, it was almost as if they could neither see him nor his vehicle. This afforded Davis a degree of relief, as he was practically frozen to the spot, and “couldn’t have run if I had wanted to.” As it transpired, Davis didn’t need to run anywhere: just a few seconds later, the bizarre scene suddenly vanished, and Davis found himself sat at the edge of the road, with his car squashed against a large line of hedge, and with complete and utter normality returned.

Horning is an old village in Norfolk, England situated between Wroxham and Ludham, on the River Bure. The village’s Ferry Inn is typical of the many old taverns that dominate the area, and the 13th Century church of St. Benedict can be found half-a-mile to the east of the village. On a summer’s afternoon in either 1978 or 1979, the Margolis family was enjoying a stroll around the picturesque village when, like so many before them and since, they were overcome by a feeling of distinct uneasiness and unreality – as well as total silence, and a slight dizziness.

That uneasiness quickly mutated into concern, fright, and overwhelming disorientation as the landscape became “fuzzy” (“like a big heat-haze”), the houses were replaced by ancient cottages, and the road ahead of them became little more than a muddy track. As for the cars that had been in sight, they were no more. Instead, a battered and bruised cart appeared – that was being pulled by a large cart-horse. A thin man dressed in brown walked alongside the horse; yet appeared not to notice any of the family in the slightest.

Suddenly, however, the modern-day sounds of cars and voices began to echo all around them, and the strange spectacle was now utterly gone. Notably, it seems that Mrs. Margolis may very well have been exposed to the odd scene for slightly less a period of time than was her now-late husband and their 11-year-old son. “I looked at them when I came out of it,” recalled Mrs. Margolis in a 1997 interview, “and it was like they were in a trance: their mouths were hanging down, and their eyes looked funny. Then they looked like they woke up and we were all back together again.”

Interestingly, odd and unsettling feelings and sensations, such as those referenced in each of the cases above, were also referred to by author Andrew Mackenzie in his book Adventures in Time: Encounters with the Past. Such events, reported Mackenzie, are “often accompanied by feelings of depression, eeriness and a marked sense of silence, deeper than normally experienced.” Similarly, Jenny Randles’ book, Time Storms: Amazing Evidence for Time Warps, Space Rifts, and Time Travel firmly demonstrates that whatever we may think we know about the nature of time, in reality we may not even know the half of it.

How do you follow up a record-breaking blockbuster about a killer shark? For starters, you get out of the ocean. And then maybe you look up.

A longtime watcher of the skies, young Steven Spielberg had already been kicking around an idea involving alien visitation, spacecraft "sightings" and government cover-ups – some sort of story, in the gentleman's own words, about "UFOs and Watergate" – before he had started turning Peter Benchley's novel Jaws into a movie. One three-men-and-an-apex-predator hit later, he was a hot Hollywood director who had folks ready to sign on for whatever he did next. That included Columbia Pictures, as well as Taxi Driver producers Michael and Julia Phillips, who gamely took the director's extraterrestrial-visitors story and got him a greenlight. The result both delighted his patrons – Fox had opened a space opera earlier that year, hence the company was thrilled to have their own science fiction movie on deck – and worried them, given this expensive project was supposed to have come out the previous summer before production problems caused delays. Now, the film was going to make or break the nearly bankrupt studio.

So, in a moment of bet-hedging, Columbia decided to give Spielberg's movie with the screwy name – what the fuck was a Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and why are you driving our marketing department to drink, Steven? – a mid-November opening in two theaters, the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles and the Ziegfeld in New York. Screenings kept selling out. Their confidence had been restored thanks to these two reconnaissance runs. Now it was time to land the mothership.

It was 40 years ago today that Close Encounters of the Third Kind opened in wide release and, in quick succession, proved that Jaws was not a fluke, helped put the financially ailing Columbia firmly back into the black, established the filmmaker as someone with a knack for directing kids and grounding the fantastic, dropped that title phase into the popular lexicon and made John Williams' communicative musical motif famous. (Hum those first three notes – Dun-DUN-duuun – then check out the number of people who chime in with the two-note resolution: DUUUNNN-dun.) You could argue that, while Spielberg would go on to make more notable works involving wonderment, aliens, families, paranoia and suburbia, respectively, there are few that distill everything that's great about his filmmaking in such a pure, well-wrapped package. And seen four decades after it first hit theaters en masse, Close Encounters now feels like an incredibly pivotal American movie – the bridge between the intimate, grungy movies of the Seventies and the spectacular eye-candy blockbusters of the Eighties.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, Richard Dreyfuss

Seriously, when was the last time you watched this spirit-of-'77 sci-fi touchstone in any of its iterations? (We recommend the "Director's Cut," which blends the best parts of the theatrical cut and the "Special Edition," minus the latter's Pink-Floyd-laser-light-show ending. More on that in a minute.) If it's been a while, the first things that come to mind are probably the climactic interstellar meet-and-greet, the sculpted mound of spuds on Richard Dreyfuss's dinner table, the iconic visual of five-year-old Cary Guffey opening his front door and basking in an unearthly orange glow – an image that Spielberg claimed was one of the first conceptual sparks he'd imagined for the project.You remember the bigger moments, the ones in which those bright lights are whizzing through the air and Gregory Jein's mothership model, hovering over Devil's Tower, inspires awestruck faces framed in the director's customary low-angle shots.

It's no wonder these scenes are burned into your memory: Time has been particularly kind to Close Encounters, even if the special effects occasionally carbon-date the movie to the Carter era. What you might not remember, however, are the atmospheric things that Spielberg scatters throughout the movie, the ones that add immensely to its texture. Most of us had probably forgotten that the film starts in the Sonora desert in Mexico, with barely visible figures wandering through dust storms – the same sort of feint that The Exorcist used by kicking off at an archeological dig in Iraq before getting around to the head-spinning money shots. You can practically smell the stale coffee and flop sweat in the air-traffic control tower sequence, and the panic as people pitch coal-mine canaries in the evacuation sequence. Never mind the toys coming to life in a kid's bedroom; it's the extraordinary close-up on Guffey's face that follows, in which he expresses first dawning wonder then outright joy upon meeting his new alien friends, that makes the scene work. Go to the two-minute mark in the clip below. Those 15 seconds are the director's equivalent of the end of Chaplin's City Lights.

The gritty touches and grace notes are what really stick out now, the same way that Roy Scheider and his son crushing the Dixie cups in a faux-manly manner in Jaws adds so much humanity to the sound and fury while barely breaking a cinematic sweat. No one does this anymore, not in big movies. Spielberg told Sight & Sound magazine at the time that he wanted Close Encounters to be "about people and not about events," which feels like a very Seventies/New Hollywood conceit. (He also said that the film "does to UFOs what The French Connection said about crime in the street and narcotics and New York City," so keep that grain of salt handy.)

And for all of what the director termed "cosmic entertainment" epicness on display, this is also a movie takes place in a very recognizable America, one filled with ratty nightgowns and station wagons and instant mashed potatoes, of harried moms and frayed marriages. Yes, the scene in which our otherworldly visitors try to get Melinda Dillon's son, ending with a tug of war in a doggie door, is terrifying. So is Richard Dreyfuss' melting down in the shower, his son screaming "Crybaby" at him, which Spielberg later admitted came from his own life. No aliens there, just a nervous breakdown. You do not need a Great White or a T. Rex to present audiences with a nightmare.

It's those scenes in Roy Neary's house, the arguments and clucking neighbors and the manic episodes that end with men crawling through their broken kitchen window, that offset and compliment the hugeness of the rest of the film – a mix made explicit when Spielberg puts the giant homemade Devil's Tower in the living room right next to the real one miniaturized on TV. (So much brilliant visual wit in this movie.) They never feel like filler until the main event happens, i.e. the first-contact moments that still give you goosebumps. And even that monument to the breaching of our world and the outer limits of the universe is still rife with the sort of faces you'd see at your local gas station and drug store. They just happen to have their jaws dropping.

The climax, however, also seems to anticipate what will come next in blockbuster movies: the idea of wowing someone into submission. It's common knowledge that Spielberg didn't want to film the "special edition" scenes of Dreyfuss entering the ship; in an interview recorded for the movie's 30th anniversary, he insisted that what lay inside that gigantic vessel should be "the province of the viewer's imagination." While it's great to think of Douglas Trumbull's hallucinogenic take on Noah's Ark as a time-capsule piece – see what cutting-edge FX once looked like, kids! – they are completely superfluous. We've been given everything we need to supply our own wonderment already. And we were about to enter a whole era where such overwhelming spectacle reigned supreme.

Some of those big, blow-out-the-Dolby-speakers movies would come from Spielberg, of course, as well as the generation of filmmakers who cut their teeth studying his work. He'd expand on the ideas embedded in Close Encounters with E.T., in which the idea of friendly intergalactic ambassadors turns into, per the director, "a foreign-exchange program." He'd also embark on a career based on balancing multiplex rollercoaster rides with becoming America's cinematic civics professor. As with any feature filmography that spans nearly 50 years and counting, results will vary: If we have to sit through Amistad and The Terminal to get Munich and Lincoln, we'll take the lumps. But it's this near-perfect blend of the epic and the everyday that remains a testament to what Spielberg, at his very best, can accomplish. His ability to give science fiction a sense of emotional resonance – right at the moment between the genre's cerebral and bombastic chapters – with such a large canvas and yet such an attention to the heartbeat underneath it still feels like a major accomplishment. Who knows whether Close Encounters is his "best" movie. It remains my favorite.