Close Encounters of the Twinning Kind

Time. Towers. Twins.

Colorado's Chimney Rock was declared by President Barack Obama, on September 21, 2012, a national monument. As Department of the Interior photographs show, Chimney Rock is actually a twin formation.

Stephen King's birthday is on the same date on the calendar. King was born September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. (I've been keenly aware of this since I moved to Portland, Maine in the early 1980s. I was also born in 1947. An early Maine article about me and my books called me "Maine's nonfiction Stephen King." I'm not sure Mr. King appreciated that, but then, I didn't write it. A newspaper reporter did. The newsperson was doing some twinning.)

Shining is a Stephen King movie set in Colorado, and features memorable twins.

There are other "Chimney Rock" sites in the USA. One is in Nebraska.

Another Chimney Rock exists in North Carolina.

Jacque Vallée (right) and J. Allen Hynek (left) 

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, François Truffaut plays the character Claude LaCombe, who is based on ufologist Jacques F. Vallée, Ph. D.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (a/k/a Close Encounters or CE3K) is a 1977 science fiction film written and directed by Steven Spielberg and features actors Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, and Cary Guffey. The movie was released on November 16, 1977. That was quite a year. Many people have made the mistake of placing the movie as having been released before the Dover Demon sightings, which were in April 1977. Debunkers of the sighting infrequently state the Dover Demon was merely a remembrance of the little aliens in that film. But they have their chronology off.

I investigated the Dover Demon case throughout the Spring of 1977; I named it too. Then I assembled a team for the re-interviewing of the eyewitnesses, headed by Walt N. Webb, assistant director of the Hayden Planetarium of Boston's Museum of Science. Due to Walt Webb or Dr. Josef Allen Hynek or both, I was invited to a pre-release preview showing of Close Encounters. We did want to see what the aliens looked like, and compare them to the Dover Demon. The resemblance was close.

What was also startling at the screening was something else. Sitting in front of Walt and me was the actor from one scene in the movie, shown in the photo above. I remarked later how this actor's human features vaguely seemed have been chosen to mirror those of the main alien in the film, presenting a mirror image moment.

One of the other major characters in Close Encounters, surprisingly to all of us back then, is the Devils Tower. The obsessive drawings of and creating of the Devils Tower imagery by the participants in the movie paralleled the actual experiences of the Dover Demon eyewitnesses. Two of the four who saw the Dover Demon kept making drawings of the creature.

The Dover Demon is featured on the cover and in the contents of my forthcoming (August 2013) book Monsters of Massachusetts from Stackpole Books.

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In the comments below, Molly shares her alert on "Fatima's Hand, Hombori, Mali":

Wikipedia: Timm Guenther (Timm Busshaus)

By "coincidence," on Sunday, January 13, 2013, western media sources began reporting on the invasion of Mali on Friday, January 11th. See, for example, "French, EU Troops Invade Mali for Azawad Offensive."

Hombori Tondo (Mount Tondo) is visible on this war map, SE of Tombouctou (Timbuktu), Mali.

Vallee On Keel

Jacque Vallée (right) and J. Allen Hynek.

Along with his colleague, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Vallée carefully studied the phenomenon of unusual aerial sightings and close encounters with humanoids on the ground for many years.



Vallée served as the real-life model for the character Lacombe, portrayed by François Truffaut (shown above, middle) in Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

His first three highly thoughtful books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965), Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma (1966), and Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969) are classics in the field. A correspondent of mine for decades, I was able to spend some time with Vallée and his wife for the first time only a few years ago when we both spoke at a Virginia Beach, Virginia conference on unexplained phenomena.


Therefore, it was good to hear from my associate, the French-born and now California-based intellectual, ufologist, venture capitalist, computer scientist, and former astronomer, who sent along his thoughts, regarding John A. Keel passing away:

Dear Loren,

I did hear about John's death. Although this was expected, given his long fight with illness the past few years, it is very sad to realize that his voice is now silent in the debate about the nature of the phenomena that continue to fascinate us.

As you know, his writing and mine have followed a parallel course (I wish I had written JADOO, a delightful book!) as we were among a small number of "heretics" who have consistently questioned the "first-order" extraterrestrial theory. He realized very early that UFOs could not be understood apart from other, terrestrial paranormal phenomena, which put him decades ahead of most researchers. He deserves to be recognized as one of the most creative, independent thinkers in the field.

I know you had a close friendship with John, and send you all my sympathy.

Jacques Vallee
Mon Jul 6, 2009 7:08 pm PDT