Richard Dreyfuss wears a Timeband T231

Timeband barely registers outside the collector community. It was a Fairchild brand that made red-LED digital watches in the mid-1970s, when a digital display on the wrist was still a novelty. The T231 is one of them, a red LED type that stays dark until you press a button, the way the technology worked before LCDs took over. Richard Dreyfuss wears it as Roy Neary, a power-company lineman in Muncie, Indiana, in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One night Neary sees something in the sky, and he spends the rest of the film trying to understand it. He becomes obsessed with a shape he cannot name, sculpting Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes at the dinner table while his family comes apart around him.

Prop Store auctioned the screen-used watch, cataloging a metal Timeband T231 with a red and black acrylic face on a black leather band, one of the company's early men's digital watches. It came from someone who worked on the film and sold with a letter of authenticity tracing its history.