It is well known that a triangulation of a closed 2-manifold is tight with respect to a field of characteristic two if and only if it is neighbourly; and it is tight with respect to a field of odd characteristic if and only if it is neighbourly and o
rientable. No such characterization of tightness was previously known for higher dimensional manifolds. In this paper, we prove that a triangulation of a closed 3-manifold is tight with respect to a field of odd characteristic if and only if it is neighbourly, orientable and stacked. In consequence, the K{u}hnel-Lutz conjecture is valid in dimension three for fields of odd characteristic. Next let $mathbb{F}$ be a field of characteristic two. It is known that, in this case, any neighbourly and stacked triangulation of a closed 3-manifold is $mathbb{F}$-tight. For triangulated closed 3-manifolds with at most 71 vertices or with first Betti number at most 188, we show that the converse is true. But the possibility of an $mathbb{F}$-tight non-stacked triangulation on a larger number of vertices remains open. We prove the following upper bound theorem on such triangulations. If an $mathbb{F}$-tight triangulation of a closed 3-manifold has $n$ vertices and first Betti number $beta_1$, then $(n-4)(617n- 3861) leq 15444beta_1$. Equality holds here if and only if all the vertex links of the triangulation are connected sums of boundary complexes of icosahedra.
