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In N.dG. Tyson's rather nutty "knotty" video, he includes a reference to latitude and longitude pulled from the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". This was one of Steven Spielberg's mega-hits: not long after "Jaws" and just a few years before "Raiders of the Lost Ark".

"Close Encounters" was a massive hit in the fall of 1977. Many reviewers thought it would have better staying power than "Star Wars" which had its boom just a few months earlier. I liked it better than Star Wars back then, at age 14. Today it's still good, but it seems quaint and unintentionally childish at times (part of the child-like innoncense was intentional, but those aren't the parts I'm talking about). The film was produced near the peak of the "Bermuda Triangle" and "UFO" boom of the 1970s. I'm not sure that UFO sightings were any more common than in earlier decades, but the public fascination with the idea of alien visitations and alien abductions was booming, and there were many pop culture references. The general idea that "humanity" was entering the Cosmos c.1970 was probably behind some of the UFO-mania [geez, folks, it's just twelve guys walking around for three days --total-- on a moon less than a quarter of a million miles away :)]. Humanity is Cosmic now! Beings from other worlds could be visiting us... since we're all "space travelers". They're coming!!

Anyway... the movie begins in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico with some old-time Hollywood ethnic stereotypes of Mexicans who are visited by some civilized scientists from the USA and France. They have difficulty communicating, and the local "primitives" don't understand. This is called foreshadowing. See it?

Among the first English-language lines of the film (at least in its modern form, different from the theatrical release), someone asks if an interpreter is available to translate French for Monsieur Lacombe, who, in a gift to film buffs of the era, was played by François Truffaut. The "interpreter" was played by the straight-man comic actor, Bob Balaban, and he gripes, yelling over the howling dust storm, "I'm not a professional interpreter. My occupation is cartography. I'm a mapmaker." [to which the reply should have been "not any more, map boy... now make with the Frenchie talk!" but hey I didn't write it]

About 45 minutes later in the film, the scientists are unable to figure out some simple triples of numbers transmitted by the space aliens. The scientists' heads are a little too buried in their own conceptual box. So our translator interrupts the muttering crowd, "excuse me... excuse me! Before I got paid to speak French ...I, uh... I used to read maps. ... This first number is a longitude. Degrees, minutes and seconds. The first number has three digits, and the last two are below 60. Obviously it's not in right ascension and declination on the sky. These have to be Earth coordinates." So he says. And thus begins the "road trip" part of the film. :)

Wait, wait, wait. Our mapmaker's analysis here is, at best, a speculative jump. First, with only one pair of triples, a cartographer might make a wild guess that the numbers are in a sexagesimal format (second and third numbers in the set below 60 and all that). In a real world case, this sort of thing can come up when puzzling over numbers from an unknown source, but you can only really start talking about the numbers being coordinates when you have multiple cases. If it's just one set of numbers, they could be anything, including random numbers that just happen to have a plausibly sexagesimal format. But if you have a few cases or better yet a few dozen, then you might fairly conclude that the sexagesimal pattern is real, and you could reduce the probability of a random match to a very low level. Second, no, there's no reason to conclude that these are "Earth coordinates" instead of celestial coordinates. Right ascension, which the character mentions, was typically listed in hours, minutes, and seconds historically (and that's what the script is referring to), but even in the 1970s it was legitimate to list RA in degrees, minutes, and seconds or better yet decimal degrees. Also, as we all know in celestial navigation, the coordinates of a star can be given in SHA and Dec which, without a label on them, could look exactly like coordinates on the Earth.

The coordinates as transmitted in the film have a big typo --and also minor differences in the small numbers that are also sometimes considered typos (*). The coordinates shown in the film many times, and repeated in a little clip briefly in Tyson's video, are 104 44 30 and 40 36 10. As longitudes and latitudes these are interpreted in the film as 104°44'30"W and 40°36'10"N. The latitude has the big typo. It should be 44° not 40° (*). So our destination would be 104°44'30"W and 44°36'10"N.

In the modern world of film, Audiences obsess over the details. Before viewers could watch movies at home, and PAUSE those movies, this 40 vs 44 typo didn't matter a bit. No one was taking notes in the theater. Now? Find yourself anyone under the age of about 35 and observe how they watch movies at home... They have their phones out, and they're consulting the internet almost continuously for details, connections, backstories, actors' biographies, and yes, lists of "goofs" and "trivia", etc. In modern filmaking, teams put a lot of effort into fact-checking certain classes of details and correcting little mistakes to avoid the nitpicking "feeding frenzy" that may otherwise distract audiences.

Some viewers today (*) also complain that the minutes and seconds in the displayed coordinates are wrong. I count that as "mere" nitpicking. If we correct the big four degree error in the latitude, the modified coordinates are quite close to Devil's Tower, where we're supposed to be welcoming our new alien overlords. The adjusted coordinated are within a few miles of Devil's Tower, and it's plainly visible and hard to miss for many miles around. Those coordinates will get you there.

Because it's a movie, no one among the scientists seems to have a common atlas of the Earth at hand, and this provides a "movie excuse" to steal a big expensive globe and roll it down a hallway and out to the "mission control" trailer (because... ?? it's fun on film). While the globe is big, a degree of latitude is still quite small (about a meter in diameter, so roughly 1 cm per degree), and a couple of miles is not even visible on the globe.

But there are other problems. From the perspective of mapping trivia, how did they decide on the signs or "names" on the coordinates? Northern hemisphere for the latitude and West for the longitude? Well, time to remind ourselves: it's just a movie. It's about the popcorn, not the science! :) But if we decide to put it through the science stress test, we could argue that the other options on the signs of the coordinates could have been discussed and dismissed off-screen. The two South latitude options are in remote parts of the South Pacific and Indian Oceans. The North latitude but East longitude option is in southern Mongolia, and in the later cuts of the film, there's even a scene in the Gobi Desert (arguably identical to the coordinates with East swapped for West). But the desert is boring while Devil's Tower is spectacular. And since the aliens are 'just so cool', the scientists can assume that they would select a photogenic backdrop in the good ole US of A for their first official, diplomatic visitation.

Tyson in his video points out that longitude would be unusually difficult for space aliens to relate to since it has an arbitrary starting point at Greenwich. That's fair enough, but they would also be familiar with this problem from any other spherical planet -- longitude always has an arbitrary zero. Tyson also asks a common question of the film here. If they're smart enough to figure out our sexagesimal map coordinates, then why didn't they just speak English? Or French for Monsieur Lacombe? Or send their landing details telepathically, as they did with poor Roy (the main character, played by Richard Dreyfus) and apparently hundreds of others... Yeah, right? Why not?!

I don't entirely agree with this complaint. The aliens clearly are having trouble communicating. This calls back to the very first scene of the movie in Mexico when language is a barrier --and that's even when one of our scientists actually knows a little bit of Spanish. This "failure to communicate" is actually brilliant science fiction. When space aliens land, there wouldn't be any translators just hanging around looking for work, like the poor "cartographer" in the film. And there's no "universal translator" plucked from the toolkit of "plot convenience playhouse" like in the "Star Trek" universe or the "Tardis translation matrix" in the "Doctor Who" universe. It's conceivable that map coordinates are one of the very few elements of human science that the arriving aliens have managed to puzzle out, and they send those coordinate for Devil's Tower endlessly, just hoping that the humans will "get it". Other human language elements remain incomprehensible to them, and it's a major element of the plot that they have some sort of musical communication (see the 2016 film "Arrival" for another sci-fi meditation on the language problem).

Drones, anyone? The drone mania this season has its roots in the old UFO mania. Some skeptics have tried to point out that some of the objects identified as drones are just bright stars observed by people who rarely look at the sky. When the skeptics say, "that's just Orion", some of the drone fans reply that it could STILL be drones arranging their formation to look like Orion for "stealth". And that takes us back to "Close Encounters". There's a moment in the film during the big meeting at Devil's Tower where a group of "drones" launched from one of the larger alien ships create a fun pattern in the sky: it's a flying version of the "Big Dipper". The characters laugh in delight when they recognize what the aliens are doing. It's a good thing they didn't try to mimic the constellation Vulpecula!

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA

* [above] One of the primary sources for movie trivia and "goofs" is a frozen resource. Edited and compiled over a decade ago, it's a resource that is mostly no longer editable, and it includes many suppositions and arguably wrong examples of "goofs". It's imdb.com and since it's considered "authoritative" for movies, its examples spread easily. The details on the lat/lon coordinates and the nature of the errors they represent have been frozen and unchanging on imdb for at least a decade. It's a fascinating flaw in the internet!

Incidentally, try the "Everything Wrong With..." series from the creators at "Cinema Sins" for some other thoughts on "Close Encounters" and hundreds of other movies.

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