This is the page for all those projects from the land of " gee, I wish they made a model of that."

First off, we have the Mother ship from 1977's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." This one caused me many a sleepless night. The ideas of how to build this had been thought over for many years, off and on...Finally, I decided to use nothing more than Paper, plastic canvas, and some (gasp!) christmas lights, not to mention my old stand by, wood filler putty, and came up with this.
The real problem came with the dome on the ship's topside. ( Or, at least, the top, for the moment.) I looked high and low for dome shaped things, I.E. Old lamp covers, and came up empty...I resolved to using a real tricky method, createing the dome with card-stock wedges, glued over no less than 32 braces. All of this was fastened to a note-book back, and, once dried, I trimmed the bottom out. I then hollowed out the underside so as to work in those lights. There are also fiber Optics built into the "prongs" along the ship's side, but they are barley noticable.
Most of the craft's surface detail comes from my old kit scavenger box. ( If you look close enough, you will pick out things like tail lights, old exhast manafolds, carborators and the like! )
The scene depicts the mile-wide ship beginning it's Roll-over near Devil's Tower. Both the ship, and the government's landing site can be illuminated. The build time for this was relatively short... only two months! The finished product has been on display at the local hobby shop for the past two years.

here are two more shots of this model that can be used as a night light. All the colored "glass" is nothing more than clear soda-bottle plastic, cut to shape, and lightly painted .