The results weren't that impressive, but it was fun, as was all the Super 8 stuff. I kind of miss those times and I see at least one other poster seems to have similar recollections :)
To add another nice example of this effect, which is where I learned about it, is The NeverEnding Story (1984). There it's used for the "nothing" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPfQogtS2Eo) and also in the opening of the US release (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCgfRC6gHtI). The original German release only had text on a black background.
It might not look the most realistic, but IMHO it still looks beautiful.
I'm unsurprised Douglas Trumbull was behind the Close Encounters effect since his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey captured his earliest experiments filming tanks of liquids with fluids added. They were fairly effective in Kubrick's film when they appeared to resemble fantastic nebulae, globular clusters…
(And never mind the mind-bending cleverness of how the slit-scan shots were created for 2001.)
However, checking the authors "Top/Worst films of the year", being called the "Single Minded Movie Blog" seems fitting, and not in the way they think. Some of the worst movie takes I've seen hahahahh