Most geologists believe that Devil's Tower in the Black Hills of Wyoming was formed by a hardened plume of lava that never broke through to the surface. Unlike most national monuments, visitors are allowed to climb Devil's Tower and get an extraordinary view of the night sky. In this view of the Milky Way, we can see strands of the Pipe Nebula:

As well as the red glow of the Lagoon Nebula to the right of the Tower:

[Astronomy Picture of the Day]

Bernard Herrmann

Herrmann is one of the most celebrated composers in Hollywood history, having scored classics from Citizen Kane to Psycho to Taxi Driver. He makes our list for his groundbreaking score for 1951's The Day The Earth Stood Still (pictured above), with its prominent use of the theremin. After this movie, use of the eerie, otherworldly, electromagnetic instrument became the signature sound of sci-fi scores.

Louis and Bebe Barron

The Barrons took Herrmann's innovation a quantum leap further with their score for 1956's Forbidden Planet, which featured not a single traditional acoustic instrument. The husband-and-wife team's collection of all-analog burbles and bleeps sounds delightfully retro today, but the movie's all-electronic score was, at the time, controversial. Still, the sounds ideally complemented the tale of an isolated planet beset by an invisible monster.

Jerry Goldsmith

Goldsmith's 1968 score for Planet of the Apes swung the pendulum back toward traditional orchestration for sci-fi movies. Well, sort of; his tense, percussive score (echoing Charlton Heston's attempt to hold onto his sanity) included a Brazilian instrument called a culka that sounds like hooting monkeys. Goldsmith would go on to write many other memorable sci-fi scores, notably, Alien (1979) and the majestic theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which would be reworked for TV as the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

John Williams

With the original Star Wars (1977), John Williams became the gold standard of sci-fi composers. His Wagnerian use of leitmotifs created instantly memorable themes for the major characters, and his grand opening fanfare is so thoroughly evocative of the movie that it instantly transports viewers back to the sense of awe and wonder they felt when they first saw that imperial cruiser fill the screen. Williams has scored just about every film Steven Spielberg has made; his five-note theme for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) became a character in itself.

Vangelis

The Greek new age composer is best remembered for his electronic score for Chariots of Fire, but his work on Blade Runner (1982) was similarly stellar, a mix of electronica, noirish brass, and traditional orchestral sounds that matched the movie's polyglot futurism.

James Horner

Yes, now he's known for syrupy goo like Titanic, but he got his start as a scrappy Roger Corman factory worker (Battle Beyond the Stars, 1980). He soon graduated to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), where he expanded on Jerry Goldsmith's score for the first movie to include nautical themes (fit for all those Moby-Dick references in the script). His elegaic music surrounding Spock's death and funeral was an early sign of Horner's ability to create music tearjerking enough to make a Vulcan cry. (Genre fans will also recall Horner's memorable scores for 1983's Krull and Brainstorm.)

Alan Silvestri

Silvestri, who's scored nearly every Robert Zemeckis film, is a disciple of John Williams who has a knack for creating a grandiose sound that makes his patron's movies seem bigger and zippier than they are. Case in point: his first big job, the Back to the Future trilogy (1985/89/90). Heard now, it instantly evokes Marty McFly zipping along on his skateboard, or Doc Brown firing up the time-traveling DeLorean. Silvestri's other genre works include Predator, The Abyss, and both Lara Croft movies.

Danny Elfman

Elfman, whose work is so closely associated with Tim Burton that he seems to be the musical portion of the director's brain, combines a reverence for traditional movie orchestration with an irreverence toward classical melody, bred perhaps of his days as the frontman for Oingo Boingo. The result is a frenetic, jumpy, off-kilter sound that's nonetheless grand and majestic, a sound that makes Elfman's music instantly recognizable, not to mention well-suited to such Burton genre pastiches as Ed Wood (1994) and Mars Attacks (1996).

Basil Poledouris

Poledouris created stately, mournful scores for movies with rugged, damaged heroes (the Conan the Barbarian films) and lent a gravity to Paul Verhoeven's science fiction films (notably, 1987's RoboCop and 1997's Starship Troopers) that helped ground their deadpan satire in real human emotions.

Bear McCreary

The ubiquitous 30-year-old composer (who'll be performing the score from Battlestar Galactica this Saturday at a free concert at Los Angeles' California Plaza, as well as next month at Comic-Con) is the sci-fi scorer of the moment, thanks to his television work on BSG and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. His tension-filled scores, mixing traditional orchestration with less orthodox instruments (accordion, bagpipe, duduk, erhu), is completely integral to his shows; particularly BSG, where his Middle Eastern/metal rearrangement of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" (familar and strange at once) was key to understanding the plot and characters.

At the end of this scene — which is totally worth watching in its entirety to see the full, beautiful goofiness of UFO representations — you can see the three lights in the sky separating and zooming into the clouds. Looks amazingly similar to the video of the Phoenix lights above.

I have never understood why people assume that UFOs will be covered in lights when they visit Earth, unless it's because Steven Spielberg's vision in Close Encounters basically convinced them that it makes the most sense for aliens to arrive covered in visible light spectrum. I sure hope the next Phoenix encounter includes some music too! Bee bee bee boop boop!

These films join 475 others in the National Registry, although only 13 others are science fiction, including everything from Alien to The Nutty Professor. Even Groundhog Day is in there, trapping Bill Murray for all eternity in a regressive time loop. The Library itself chooses a few of the films, and the public nominates the others, which means you've got films like Fast Times At Ridgemont High sitting alongside Citizen Kane, so we're not clear on how auspicious an honor this is. But at least future generations will have access to topless Phoebe Cates.

Check out some of the cool features of the National Film Registry's Film Vault/Bunker:

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• It's built mostly underground, so a nuclear attack won't stop us from having fresh copies of Dances With Wolves at hand.
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• There are over 90 miles of shelves inside, which make browsing a real bitch.
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• A below-freezing vault keeps film masters, as well as Walt Disney's head, perfectly preserved.
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• They preserve digital film at the petabyte (one million gigabytes) level. Cell phones will catch up to that storage level around 2015.
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• It is fully equipped to playback antique film formats, even movies on Beta tapes.
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• It has high-quality fiber optic connections to Capitol Hill for when your congressman needs to run out and catch a few minutes of Do The Right Thing.
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Wuthering Heights Among 25 Top Films [Yahoo]

• Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: Spielberg sure knows how to milk it. We've already had a Special Edition of this come out, complete with new footage. However, not content to just swim in pools full of thousand-dollar bills, he's now putting out the 30th Anniversary Collector's Edition. Okay, it's the best the film has looked, and it has all three versions of the movie in the set. Just, enough already. We get it. Don't make us go Richard Dreyfus loco.
• Battlestar Galactica: Razor: This just aired on TV a couple of weeks ago, but you can now own it without the annoying Quiznos commercials, plus there's a frakload of extra features, deleted scenes, and flashbacks on here for you to spend your time with while you hide from Aunt Mildred and her holiday fruitcake. You can also put it under your pillow and rock yourself to sleep at night while you wait for Season Four.
• Battlestar Galactica: Season One: While both the original miniseries and Season One have already been available in DVD sets, this one gives you both in high-definition. Once you make the jump to HD, you'll never go back. So say we all. This newly-available set includes all the extras from the previous editions as well. If you have been waiting on trying this show out, stop waiting and learn to start loving the Cylons.
• Heroes: Season One: This is what started it all, and it's filled with a load of extras. The commentaries on these discs are great, especially the ones with Jack Coleman, Greg Grunberg, and Sendhil Ramamurthy, who basically joke their way through the whole thing. But some of the extras are just plain dorky. There's one where Grunberg "Reads Your Mind." Young kids might find amusing, but why not just dump some of that content from the NBC.com site onto the discs? Okay, enough bitching. The episodes look amazing (especially in the high-def version), and it's a great way to catch up on or try out the show while the writer's strike keeps it off the air.
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut: Warners really scraped the bottom of the tank on this one to make sure they satisfied every Blade Runner fan on the planet. If you go for the briefcase version, you get all of the versions of the film, plus a ton of extra junk, including a scale model of one of the "Spinner" flying police cars, a replica of the origami unicorn that Gaff (Edward James Olmos) makes, and a lenticular motion card featuring Harrison Ford encased in carbonite... crap, we mean lucite. It's not all just fanwank toys either: there's a ton of new material about the movie, including a feature length "Dangerous Days" documentary about the making of the movie. Yes, it includes new interviews with Harrison Ford too.
• X-Files: The Ultimate Collection: This is your ultimate gold-standard fanjob edition that other studios should set the bar by. It features all nine seasons of the show, plus the feature film. It's also housed in a cool black box that has a slide-out drawer on the bottom containing a comic book, a guide to the series, trading cards, a poster, and your dignity. This monster contains over 9,000 minutes of television, so make sure you clear a little room on your holiday calendar. The only thing that makes us sad is that they didn't toss in the complete The Lone Gunmen spinoff series, which only ran for 13 episodes. We're sure they'll release another version of this to bleed dry the remaining fans out there, but until then, have at it.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have put little inside jokes and sly references to their other films in some of their movies, including a fair share in the Indiana Jones films. In Raiders of the Lost Ark you can see THX-1138 (Lucas' first sci fi film) on the wing of one of the planes, and the opening scene of Temple of Doom takes place in "Club Obi-Wan."

However, Indiana Jones finding aliens in storage at the fabled Area 51? We can hear the faint sounds of a motorcycle revving up, attempting to jump over a shark somewhere. At least this will keep us on our toes when Indiana pulls a lightsaber out of his man-bag and chops E.T. into tiny pieces and then races off in one of the original cars from American Graffiti .

New Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Cameo Rumor [Movieweb]

Famous Names: Steven Spielberg (Director); Richard Dreyfuss, Terri Garr, Francois Truffaut (Cast).

Crunchy Goodness: 5

Bang for Your Buck: The special effects may not be modern-CGI, but Spielberg's team still deliver astonishing visuals — especially in the eye-popping, mind-blowing final sequence.

Stunt Casting: Director Francis Truffaut plays ... an international UFO expert?

Elevator Pitch: "It's an alien-invasion movie ... but made by hippies and potheads!"

Variety's 1977 review