Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in November, 1977. Luckily for kid’s book publishers and toy/game makers, ‘UFO’ can’t be trademarked.
The cover artist for the first book is Irv Gnat (front and back covers are identical). I’m not sure who did the second cover, but the Camaro (or Cobra, or whatever) is boss! I’ve got my eye out for both books.
(Images via Vintage Toy Archive and Matt Perry/Pinterest)
2 Warps to Neptune 
I had both of those! Wow… weird how looking at the cover make me smell (or think I smell) the scent of crayons.
I’m jealous. If I can find them for cheap, I’ll post them whole.
WOW! I never knew! Dood, Whitman takin’ it by the horns. Crazy.
I’d LOVE to see these. What an amazing trip down memory lane it would be! Did anyone ever manage to track them down?
Yes! I got a hold of both and they are fantastic. They pop up on eBay pretty frequently for reasonable prices.
Do you happen to onow who did the cover to the 2nd one?
I had the “UFO Encounters” comic, which was also published by Whitman in 1978. It was one of two seperate volumes reprinting older material, kinda like the Star Trek Enterprise Logs that Whitman did. I ordered it from one of those book forms they used to give kids at school. You took the form home, talked your parents into letting you get something, then you brought the money to school to order stuff and waited until the orders arrived. Additionally, I had a Marvel one shot magazine called “The UFO Connection”, another artifact from the UFO trend that coincided with the Spielberg film.