How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Quote #1
LAUGHLIN: Tell me something: What the hell is happening here?
PROJECT LEADER: It's Flight number 19.
LAUGHLIN: 19 what?
PROJECT LEADER: It's that training mission from the station at Fort Lauderdale. They were doing target runs.
LAUGHLIN: Who flies crates like these anymore?
PROJECT LEADER: No one. These planes were reported missing in 1945.
LAUGHLIN: But it looks brand new. Where's the pilot? I don't understand. Where's the crew? Hey! How the hell did it get here?
Close Encounters opens with a mystery and a guy asking a boatload of questions. Of course, that's the whole point. Lacombe and Laughlin wouldn't need to search for knowledge, and Spielberg wouldn't have a movie, if they had all the answers to begin with.
Quote #2
ROY: Help! I'm lost. [Speaking to his maps.] You'll cough up a little Tolono, right? Tolono on Interstate Highway 90, a little familiar landmark of some sort… Cornbread? Working?
[Waves car past.]
PASSENGER: You're in the middle of the road, jackass!
ROY: Could you tell me where Cornbread is? Turkey!
Roy getting literally lost early in the film is a setup for the more serious disorientation he's about to experience shortly. His maps aren't much of a help in his truck, but there are definitely no guidelines for understanding what's going to happen next.
Quote #3
LAUGHLIN: Excuse me. Excuse me. Before I got paid to speak French, I used to read maps. This first number is a longitude. Yeah. Two sets of three numbers: degrees, minutes and seconds. And the first number has three digits and the last two are below 60. Obviously, it's not in the right ascension and declination on the sky. These have to be Earth coordinates.
Notice how Lacombe isn't solving the problem like some kind of super Sherlock genius. Instead, the film takes a more realistic approach: that is, the skills, knowledge and intelligence of several people come together to solve the problem. In this scene, it's Laughlin's cartography knowledge that put the pieces together but it's the researchers and technicians that got him the necessary information to interpret. It takes a village to understand aliens.