What was Close Encounters of the Third Kind originally titled?

Imagine if Steven Spielberg never got into sci-fi movies. No, scratch that. That’s not a timeline any of us want. I don’t care what kind of bad stuff happens in this version of the multiverse, not having films like E.T., Jurassic Park, or the criminally underrated War of the Worlds is not worth going back and changing anything — and I mean anything.

Of course, Spielberg had his sci-fi breakout with 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But his fascination with sci-fi started long before that, beginning with a meteor shower he witnessed with his dad as a kid in New Jersey. 

Even before Jaws had come out, Spielberg was trying to get a sci-fi film made — and with the commercial success of the shark movie, he got the budget and support he needed to get Richard Dreyfus to make a mountain out of mashed potatoes. 

The tale of an impromptu jam session with extraterrestrial beings was a commercial and critical hit, taking its title from a classification of experiences first introduced in the 1972 book, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. But before it had taken on that title, it went through round and round of rework and rewrite, including alternate titles. What was this iconic Spielberg sci-fi movie almost called?

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