Howdy xenophiliacs,

This week you were asked to identify "a well-known science fiction movie". Five people/teams were successful in this endeavor.

This week the award for the best wrong answer once again goes to Steve G. for his guess, "OINK". Steve noted that there were four unique letters beginning the meta-related answers, saw that octaves were somehow involved, and decided the solution might be found by counting eight letters forward in the alphabet from "GAFC". So G->O, A->I, F->N, C->K gives OINK. Ingenious, and almost kind of plausible - but dead wrong.

As for the correct solution? Five clues were marked with numbers and at least one asterisk (*). Also, the clue for 9D read:

"Like the meta hint suggested by the clue marked with **, in relation to the meta hints suggested by the clues marked with * "

Each of the starred clues had an answer that consisted of a single letter followed by a word. Each of the single letters was in the range of A to G. The puzzle title was "scale model", and the clue for 9D indicates that one of these meta answers is "one octave lower" than the other four.

So successful solvers deduced that the single letters represented notes of the scale. When put in the indicated order they were:

G A F F C

...where the second F is played in the octave below the other notes.

What does this sound like? If you are musically inclined maybe you can sound it out in your head. I am a musical ignoramus, so I used a web site to confirm that the sequence sounded as I expected.

If you are young or not a fan of SF you may not recognize that musical phrase. However, there is an alternate path to the solution - googling "GAFFC" turns up several pages that reference CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, the meta answer. In the film, GAFFC was the musical phrase played to establish communication with the visiting aliens.

The puzzle's title provided one additional hint to the solution - in a famous scene from the film, Richard Dreyfuss's character uses his mashed potatoes to build a "scale model" of Devils Tower, the location where contact with the aliens was eventually made.