Steven Spielberg has had a lifelong fascination with alien beings from beyond the stars. When the legendary director was just 17, he made a nearly two-and-a-half-hour epic on his 8mm camera called Firelight, a film that he more or less remade 14 years later as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That 1977 classic would be the first of three professional movies Spielberg would make about aliens arriving on our planet, the other two being E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and War of the Worlds (2005). And each trip into the extraterrestrial has led to one of the director’s most successful and acclaimed films (we’re not counting 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull since Spielberg didn’t actually want aliens in the movie).
It’s also a subject that continues to fascinate the filmmaker, with Variety recently reporting that Spielberg’s next film is going to be another UFO story based on his own original idea. But of the many announced films that Spielberg never made (and there are a bunch), one continues to intrigue his fans decades after he began developing it: Night Skies. Pitched as the darker, nastier flipside to the friendly aliens in Close Encounters, Night Skies was meant to follow a group of extraterrestrial beings that land on Earth and begin to terrorize a family on their isolated farm.
The idea for Night Skies came to Spielberg after he heard about an alleged real-life incident while doing research for Close Encounters that involved a family under attack by extraterrestrials. But what exactly was the incident, and why is it famous in Ufology? How did it influence Night Skies, and how did Night Skies itself morph into an utterly different film altogether? Well…
Hellbound and Down 