In the fall of 1977 millions of moviegoers watched Richard Dreyfuss shape a flat-topped, fluted mountain out of mashed potatoes at his dinner table, then build a bigger one of dirt and plants in his living room, without knowing what it was. Neither did most of the audience, until a television news report in the film named it. Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, released that November, ends with its characters drawn across the country to a rendezvous with visitors from the stars at Devils Tower, and the monolith in northeast Wyoming has had a second identity ever since.
Filming at the tower
The production designer Joe Alves scouted the location, and the cameras rolled near the tower on May 17, 1976. The tower scenes were set at dusk, so the crew could shoot for only a few hours each evening. The Park Service would not allow the main filming inside the monument, and by the account of the family that owned it, Spielberg agreed on a handshake to use the Driskill ranch's meadow below the tower, for $20,000. In the story the Army clears the surrounding country by faking a chemical spill. The landing itself, on the far side of the tower, was filmed on an enormous set built inside a former airship hangar in Alabama. The monument's rangers count about twelve minutes of the finished film as shot in Wyoming.
The visitors who came
The effect on the monument was immediate. By the Park Service's figures visitation rose by roughly three-quarters after the film opened, from about 153,000 a year to more than 270,000, and it has kept climbing; in recent years it has topped half a million. The trading post at the junction below the entrance has aliens everywhere, and a good share of the people who come still say the movie is why they did.
The older story
The film borrowed a place that already meant a great deal. Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Crow and Shoshone people all have stories of the tower, many of them about a bear, and it remains a place of prayer. Bundles and cloths tied in the pines along the trail around its base are offerings, and the Park Service asks visitors to leave them where they hang. The movie sent more people to see the tower than any proclamation or guidebook had managed. Many still arrive looking for the landing site and find the prayer cloths instead.