Brand new factory sealed vhs tape is duplicated in the superior SP mode quality. Beware of others being offered that are duplicated at the slower tape speed of ep/lp. Has a rack hanger on the top middle backside, could even be hung on a nail on the wall for display.

Rare Out Of Print (OOP) full screen format is perfect for old school TVs as the image will fill your square frame. Just pop n play, no pesky menus and the uncompressed audio is more robust than most digital counterparts.

This is the Special Edition with previously unreleased footage added and other scenes thankfully shortened. Like the building of the Devils Tower model in the living room.

A squadron of WWII fighter planes, missing on a training mission more than 30 years earlier, suddenly turn up intact, as good as new. Cut from this general introduction to the "mystery", to encounters with the mystery by individual folks in Muncie, Indiana. Like Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), a blue-collar worker whose life is changed the night he spots the UFOs. Roy is obsessed by the memory, though his wife and three children think he is nuts. Another person similarily obsessed is a young mother, played by Melinda Dillon, whose four-year-old son appears to be in some kind of psychic connection with the UFOs.

The movie then settles into some crosscutting between scenes of Roy's seemingly lunatic efforts to find the UFOs again, and the efforts of an international team of scientist's who are preparing themselves for the second coming (of the UFOs). The French scientist who is the head of this team is played by director Francois Truffaut who gives the film some dramatic weight.

The final 30-40 minutes of the film is what it's all about--and they are breathtaking: the CLOSE ENCOUNTER of the THIRD KIND in which the earthlings and the alien creatures come together on a secret landing field in Wyoming sequence, has been deliberately designed to suggest a religious experience of the first kind. Now expanded with Roy actually going INSIDE the dazzling Mothership, the ultimate encounter with other-worlders. This scene is the money-shot with all the awesome effects of the interior and it's inhabitants. It's a shame this was all left on the cutting room floor as this Special Edition version is my favorite cut of the film.