Roy Neary is an electrical lineman in Muncie, Indiana, for the local power company when the power goes out one night. He is told to get in his truck and investigate. On the way, he has a Close Encounter of the First Kind: contact with a UFO. Along with the members of the local police force, he gives chase through tunnels and mountains and across the Ohio state line until the UFOs finally fly into the cloudy sky. Muncie, Indiana has no mountains, no tunnels and is 170 miles southwest of the Indiana Toll Road, which becomes the Ohio Turnpike at Perrysburg, Ohio. Its also been noted that the stars are inappropriate for the season and latitude of Muncie. Thats probably because all of the scenes were filmed in Georgia. While playing the five tone song the aliens have sent to them, a series of numbers appear on their computer monitors and printers. David Laughlin notes that the coordinates are geographical coordinates. A globe is found, and the coordinates show Wyoming. A geodesic map is ordered and a location to meet the aliens is mapped. Trouble is, the aliens were off by four degrees latitude. The coordinates given, 44°36'10" N by 104°44'30" W, actually point to a spot over 300 miles to the south, near Ault, Colorado. What it should have read was 40°36'10" N by 104°44'30". That would put them about a mile northwest of Devils Tower. However, even with their geodesic map of northeastern Wyoming, the scientists still had the location wrong. They put their landing field southeast of the tower. Good thing that the aliens bothered to look for the big bright landing strip.
