Alien ‘encounters’ put this strange-looking monument on the tourist map

Devils Tower is a spiritual site for Native American tribes and the first US national monument. The 1977 film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" put it on tourists' radar in a big way. (Visions of America/Universal Images Group/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Devils Tower, Wyoming — The buzz started in a hay meadow at the foot of a mysterious-looking geological formation. Helicopters and trailers arrived in large numbers, famous faces and a distinguished director settled in near grazing cattle, and the cameras started rolling.

Fifty years ago, Devils Tower National Monument became a beacon for humans entranced by brushes with aliens in director Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” And in turn, the 867-foot monolith protruding from the surrounding Wyoming prairie like the stump of the world’s largest tree became a big draw for tourists.

The film stars Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary, a Midwesterner who becomes obsessed with an enigmatic form after encountering a UFO. He memorably builds a tower-like shape out of mashed potatoes on his dinner plate before escalating to a full-blown indoor sculpture of the formation flickering at the edges of his consciousness.

Thanks to the film, that form has flickered in the minds of tourists from around the world for half a century.

“Approximately 12 minutes of footage was filmed here in 1976 and then that movie came out the following year in 1977,” said Brian Cole, an interpretive ranger at Devils Tower National Monument, of the portion of the final film shot in the area. The movie was a hit, grossing more than US$300 million worldwide.

“We saw a huge increase in visitation after that movie came out — over 76 per cent increase in visitation from about 153,000 to over 270,000 visitors,” Cole said. “So it really put us on the map, and people even to this day come to the park because of seeing that movie ‘Close Encounters.’”

On the trail of aliens

The strange-looking tower is eye-catching in its own right.

“It’s a geological freak show,” said recent visitor Matt Ingram, who stopped at the tower during a Western road trip with his wife Kimberly. The pair from Chicago was walking along the paved Tower Trail, which includes a 1.3-mile (2.1-kilometre) loop circling the monument’s base with excellent views from every angle.

Ingram said the movie served as his introduction to the landmark.

“I was born in ‘70 and I remember seeing that movie and thinking that was pretty cool. When he builds the tower out of mashed potatoes, and the kids are like, ‘Dad, are you OK?’”

Neary was no longer OK with life as he knew it. He wanted answers. And actors in Spielberg’s upcoming alien flick “Disclosure Day,” due in theaters June 12, have suggested that the new film answers some of the questions raised in “Close Encounters.” There’s even some speculation online that “Disclosure Day” could be a sequel to the 1977 film.

The sci-fi classic was on Devils Tower visitor Kevin Thomas’ mind as well.

“We wanted to find the aliens up there that they left from ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’” joked Thomas, who stopped at the monument in April with his wife Catherine. But the movie they’d seen decades ago wasn’t the reason for their visit, they said. The tower was just a point of interest along a multi-leg trip from Alaska to their home in Michigan.

While the movie boosted the tower’s profile, the formation had already been an established tourist destination for decades. It was the very first U.S. national monument, designated by U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt back in 1906. And long before that and to the present day, it has served as a spiritual site for Native American tribes. Trees in the park are dotted with small prayer cloths and prayer bundles, which visitors are asked not to touch, photograph or disturb.

The tower has inspired numerous stories passed down through American Indian culture. Many tribes have their own oral histories related to the remarkable monolith, and in some, the tower’s original name translates to “Bear’s Tipi” or “Bear Lodge.” In one legend associated with the Crow, the grooves on the tower were made by a bear clawing at the formation trying to get to two little girls.

The name Devils Tower could be the result of a bad translation confusing Indigenous words for “bear” and “bad god,” or explorer Colonel Richard Irving Dodge might have deliberately changed the name of an important Indigenous site, the Park Service notes. Petitions to change the name to Bear Lodge have circulated in recent years.

It started with magma

The tower formed over 50 million years ago, Cole said. But its geological origins are hazy.

“Geologists aren’t sure exactly how it formed, there’s different theories,” he said. “But what they can agree on is that it was magma. And eventually the magma, it came up from the ground, it cooled and then it hardened. Then it cracked, so that’s how you have the columnar jointing from those cracks. And then it eroded around that.”

The tower is composed of phonolite porphyry, a rare igneous rock, and it is the world’s largest example of columnar jointing, which refers to its massive, often hexagonal columns that stretch hundreds of feet high. Some of the columns are up to 10 feet (3 metres) wide.

The site is popular with rock climbers. Each year, about 5,000 climbers scale the formation, which makes for an impressive spectacle for non-climbers making their way around the tower’s base. It’s the only reliable way to the summit, although a parachutist famously got stranded at the top in 1941, after the rope he planned to use for his descent landed out of reach on the side of the tower.

For the less daring, there are a total of five trails inside the park. The less-traveled Joyner Ridge Trail, a 1.5-mile (2.4-kilometre) loop, offers a wider view of the tower and the surrounding landscapes, with magical lighting at sunset.

Just inside the park’s gates, a prairie dog town is home to more than 600 of the engaging rodents, which are part of the squirrel family. Their “town” sits on about 40 acres near the Belle Fourche River and has pullouts where drivers can observe the prairie dogs sitting upright, dropping down into their underground burrows or making bark-like noises. They make for entertaining bookends on either side of the park’s main attraction.

The imposing tower never ceases to amaze local resident Ogden Driskill, whose family has ranched on the land at its base for generations. Their hay field became the Spielberg production’s hub and served as the site of the movie’s “decontamination” camp — a ruse to throw citizens off the scent of a major scientific operation aimed at making contact with seemingly benevolent beings from outer space. (The film’s closing scenes, featuring a landing site and the final “encounter,” were filmed in airship hangars in Mobile, Alabama).

Driskill has spent most of his life at the foot of the tower and estimates he takes 3,000 to 5,000 photos of it every year as the light or the surroundings shift.

“There is no doubt the Native Americans were correct — it’s a very spiritual place and it’s very special, and I’ve yet to see almost anybody that’s not touched by it when they get there,” said Driskill, who is also a Wyoming state senator.

A film set turned campground

Driskill was a teenager when Spielberg’s location scout, Joe Alves, told the director the tower would make an ideal site for alien encounters. Alves was told by a studio executive that “we need a very strange-looking mountain.” And Devils Tower fit the bill.

“Spielberg loaded up by himself and came to Wyoming and met with my mother and father a little over a year before they announced the final site for the movie,” Driskill said. Spielberg “sat and did a handshake deal with my parents on the film location for ‘Close Encounters.’”

He said the National Park Service wouldn’t allow the main part of the filming to take place inside the park, so the Driskill family was paid $20,000 for the use of their meadow.

“A majority of the filming that was done in Wyoming was done right there where the KOA campground sits,” said Driskill. Using the money from the movie, Driskill’s mother talked his father into opening that campground shortly after the movie was finished, he said. The family still owns the campground, which has grown to more than 150 sites.

“Close Encounters” has been screened there outdoors, with the tower in the background, every night of the summer season since the mid-1970s. (There’s also a first-come, first-served campground within the park, and a Best Western about 9 miles, or 14.5 kilometres, away in Hulett, which is also home to a handful of galleries, restaurants and saloons.)

While Driskill doesn’t appear in the film, he was immersed in the production, regularly receiving rides on the helicopters under contract with Columbia Pictures.

He recalls that locals working on the film got paid $20 an hour. “And then you also got admittance into the catering tent and every night they served prime rib and steak and lobster, and so if you worked even an hour, you got admission into the catering tent as well.”

Driskill said he could get within about 10 feet (3 metres) of the actors, who also included French filmmaker François Truffaut as a UFO scientist and Melinda Dillon playing Jillian Guiler, a mother searching for her young son who had been abducted by aliens.

“It was pretty enthralling for a high school kid,” Driskill said.

The Driskills once owned the neighboring Devils Tower Trading Post right outside the park, where alien-related merchandise is sold alongside snacks and souvenirs featuring more traditional depictions of the tower.

When Driskill spoke with CNN Travel by phone, he was shopping for something otherworldly.

“Ironically, right now I’m sitting in El Paso, Texas, on my way home and we’re buying aluminum aliens because our miniature golf course is Cowboys and Aliens, so we’re purchasing a few aliens to put in the miniature golf course.”

The movie and its alien lore certainly have fuelled tourism in the area. But what about real-life UFO sightings?

Nope.

“We’ve never seen anything,” Driskill said.

“Probably the closest I’ve seen to anything outer space was, oh shoot, 30 years ago, a meteorite hit the highway in front of me driving into our ranch at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

Over at the KOA campground, Teresa Brown, who does merchandising in the gift shop, runs the sweet shop and makes fudge, joked that she’s seen bizarre, “alien people” now and again.

“I haven’t seen any UFOs,” Brown said. But cell service is spotty, she added.

“So I blame it on the aliens.”

By Marnie Hunter, CNN