Phil Dodds
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Philip V.W. Dodds, credited as Phil Dodds, was an audio engineer who appeared in the motion picture "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Working for ARP Instruments, Inc., Phil was on the set to install and manage the ARP 2500 synthesizer used in the movie to play the five alien tones, and to program it for the sounds the filmmakers wanted. He had performed a similar function on other science fiction films, such as Logan's Run, and some of the early Star Trek movies.
Steven Spielberg, liking his looks, offered him a part in the movie on the spot; he spent the next 9 weeks filming the now iconic final scenes of the movie. He has considerable screen time for an extra, playing the notes on the synthesizer under the direction of several scientists and musicians, and gazing raptly up at the alien spaceship. His unnamed character (he was credited as "ARP Musician") even has a line: "What are we saying to each other?".
Later vice president of R&D for Kurzweil Music (developer of digital keyboard products), Phil is now a project analyst with Randall House Associates, Inc. in Annapolis, MD, where he is the chief architect of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, a project of the US Department of Defense.
