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When Roy leans towards the steering wheel to watch the UFO, the position of his hands over the wheel changes between shots. See more...

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The only close-up of all the aliens in CE3K was a mechanical one called "Puck." Puck can be seen smiling at one point. Steven Spielberg was handling the hydraulics to create the smile. See more...

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - 29 corrections

Directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Lance Henriksen, Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr (add more)

Genres: Adventure, Drama, Sci-fi

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

Mistakes
Trivia
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When Roy starts collecting supplies to start his sculpture, he throws things through the kitchen window, breaking it. After he's done, he uses a ladder to climb through the same window, which he then slam shut behind him. It went from closed and broken to fixed and opened within a matter of frames. [This has already been submitted and corrected. The window over the sink is already open when Roy starts throwing shrubbery inside. It is a vase sitting by the window that falls and shatters.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez
Close Encounters of the Third Kind won a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the loudest film ever created. [Nowhere on the Guinness Book of Records site is there a listing for loudest film ever created. Besides which, the volume setting in a theater has more to do with how loud a film is.]
Edit Corrected by rswarrior
At the beginning of the movie, Barry is going down the stairs to look for the aliens. He is holding a flashlight, but in the next shot his hands are empty. [You may be mistaking the lightbeams on the walls and floor as coming from Barry, but it's the aliens. In fact, it's the appearance of the lights on the walls of the stairwell that prompts Barry to investigate downstairs. At no point do you see Barry carrying a flashlight.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez
The old guy near the beginning of the film is whistling while he and others see UFOs flying down a road. The tune he is whistling is "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain." The better known title for this old dude's (Roberts Blossom) tune is "Happy And You Know It". [No, the song tunes are different.]
Edit
In the scene just as Roy, Gillian, and Larry take off for Devil's Tower, the army officer is on his car phone speaking to his superior. When his superior tells him if they don't get Roy and company off the mountain in one hour, to use EZ4. Lacombe, who was talking to David at the time, looks at the officer and says, "What's EZ4?". Lacombe should not have known what was said over the phone, as only the officer and we, the audience, knew what was being said. It wasn't a speaker-phone. [You don't always need a speakerphone to overhear something that is said on a phone. I've had phones where I could hear both sides of the conversation when someone stood nearby speaking on the call.]
Edit
When Ronnie hastily backs the car out of her driveway it smashes a Big Wheel to the opposite curb, where it comes to rest right next to the neighbor's driveway entrance. In the following shot, showing Roy getting up off the ground, the Big Wheel is a good 10-12 feet away from the driveway entrance. [We never see the opposite curb when Ronnie backs out of the driveway, so there's no way to determine where the Big Wheel landed. It happens offscreen. Also, the Big Wheel is about a Big Wheel's width from the edge of the neighbor's driveway (*maybe* two feet), not 10-12 feet.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez Time
Throughout the shots of Roy speeding to catch up with the UFO all of his truck's exterior lights are on, but in the shot where he sideswipes the guardrail the truck's roof lights and tail lights are off. [This is consistent with the UFO affecting the electrics of his vehicle, such as it stalling when the UFO first came close, and the lights flashing on and off when nearby. Not a mistake.]
Edit Time
In the scene where Roy is building the tower in his house, the TV shows Days of Our Lives, then an ABC News break. Days of Our Lives was an NBC soap. [There's a subtle time cut when the shot switches from Roy back to the TV. You can see Roy's cleaned up the beer can and casserole dish from the top of the television. If you listen carefully to the Budweiser jingle, you can hear where two different audio tracks were spliced together. So we're hearing the first part of the Budweiser ad during "Days of Our Lives"; and then the second part of the same ad, but airing on ABC.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez
In the scene where the abducted Earthlings are released from the alien mothership, the pilots of the TBF/TBM Avenger torpedo bombers all give their ranks as "captain."   However, a Navy captain is equivalent to an Army/Marine Corps/Air Force colonel and the pilots are way, way too young to have attained this rank. Based on the insignia on their uniforms, they were really Navy lieutenants. [Actually, only one returnee (Harry Ward Craig) identifies himself as a captain and he is notably older than the others.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez Time
When Richard Dreyfuss and his family are having breakfast, there is a milk carton from "Giant Food" on the table. "Giant Food" is a regional Washington D.C. area chain. The milk would have had to been shipped in to appear on the table. [And so it was shipped. While Giant Foods is a regional mid-Atlantic grocery chain, it's also a dairy supplier to a wider area.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez Time
When the little boy is sleeping and he gets awakened by the strong wind, his toy monkey turns on, and then his toy record player turns on and then his remote control cars turn on. If his house was hit by an electromagnetic disturbance, wouldn't ALL of his electronic toys turn on at once, instead of one toy turning on right after another? [Since the phenomenon is never explained, it can happen any way the filmmakers decide. And it's consistent throughout the movie - Roy in the car: flashlight, car and radio don't turn off/on at once; Jillian and Barry in the house: lights, vacuum, mixer, stove don't all operate at once.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez
When Barry is being kidnapped by the aliens, the persons who pulls him outside the house by the dog's entrance in the door is his real mother. You can see her hands - not very alien-like. [Even by freeze framing, you can't see any hands pulling the boy, human or alien.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez
In the desert at the landing site, I noticed that when the big alien ship comes and everyone screams and runs for cover, you can hear a bunch of women's voices shrieking and screaming. But there are no women there - except the one that came to get her little son, and SHE doesn't scream at all. [Only one person runs for cover and there is no screaming or shrieking (female or otherwise) when the mothership appears.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez
In the scene where Roy joins the rest of the potential travelers, they all wear jumpsuit uniforms. Each suit has an American flag displayed on the right shoulder sleeve with the stars on the left upper quadrant of the flag. By tradition, this is the way the flag is displayed on the left shoulder sleeve; on the right sleeve the stars should be in the right upper quadrant to represent the way the flag would appear if the wearer was moving forward, not retreating. [There are no uniform traditions for interstellar travelers, American or otherwise.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez
Only the pilots reported in and Avenger bombers also had two enlisted men as crew members: the radio operator and the ball-turret gunner. [There were at least dozens of people coming off the ship. We didn't witness everyone reporting in.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez
When Roy and Jillian are driving to Devil's Tower, they see all the downed animals on the side of the road. In the shot where you see the cars' tires passing by the animals, you can see the ear of one of the animals move. (Technically, the animals aren't dead, they have been gassed with a heavy sleep agent. But it breaks the illusion of the animals supposed to be appearing dead). [1)Since the animals are not dead, any slight movement they have is not considered a mistake. 2) In this shot, the camera angle is from the bottom of the car, so the main characters wouldn't have seen this, and slight movement from a moving vehicle would be hard to spot anyways. 3) When the car is driving by the animal in question, the tires pass close to it, so it could even be the wind from the vehicle that caused the flap of the ear to move. At best this is a character mistake due to the military's poor choice in selecting an effective enough sleep agent.]
Edit Corrected by Jazetopher Time
In the Gobi Desert scene the camels are Dromedarys (one humped) from Arabia not Bactrian (two humped) from the Gobi Desert region. [It is surely possible for nomadic tribes to have camels from other regions. There are Arabian horses nowhere near Arabia, German Shepherds nowhere near Germany, etc. Domesticated animals tend to move around and be sold a lot.]
Edit
Just before Lacombe is introduced to the committee, they play the audio tape where they recorded the large group of men singing the five tones. But the notes they're singing on that tape are a full step lower than the original singing. [The recording was cleaned up and enhanced for clarity and it might have changed because of this.]
Edit
When the scientists decode the pulses broadcast by the aliens, Mr. Lacombe puts on a set of headphones and starts to play the notes on the piano in front of him. Numbers are written on the keys, ranging from 1 - 5, so he knows in which order he must play them. [Since LaCombe probably wasn't a piano player, they obviously setup the piano so anyone could play the signal tune.]
Edit Corrected by William Bergquist Time
There are many flaws in the logic and details of the aliens sending coordinates as a longitude and latitude in degrees, minutes and seconds. Firstly the units - 90 degrees in a right angle with 60 subdivisions and 60 sub-subdivisions is arbitrary and how would the aliens know that humans often divide angles like that? If they were being mathematically pure it would be natural to use units of radians. Secondly the origin of the coordinates - for latitude there is a natural choice of the origin, being the equator, so that makes sense, however for the longitude there is no natural choice of origin, and how would the aliens know that humans arbitrary choose the observatory in Greenwich, London, England as the zero meridian? Thirdly the order of the components of the coordinates - if the aliens knew so much about the way we do things to know about the above two points, why did they give the longitude as the first part and the latitude as the second part, when the human convention is to do the opposite? Fourthly the direction of the angle from the origin - why did everyone assume that the longitude was West and the latitude was North? Those coordinates could equally correspond to three other points on the globe. [Haven't you forgotten something? The aliens have had humans with them since 1945 (perhaps earlier) when they captured the pilots of Flight 19 over the Bermuda Triangle. These men were skilled and experienced Air Force pilots and navigators and they'd be able to tell ET and his mates everything they need to know about latitude, longitude, zero degrees going through Greenwich and so on. They made a couple of mistakes, sure, but it's new technology to them. It'd be surprising if they got it right first time.]
Edit

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