Other mistake: One visual that has always bothered me that I could not find in your list were the scenes when the mother ship first appears. It's enormous scale appears to dwarf Devil's Tower and the whole surrounding area actually, but when it moves over to the "landing strip" area and begins to rotate 180° (right-side up?), it suddenly seems to shrink to a much smaller size and mass during the slow revolution. On its originally-seen scale above/behind the tower, one would think that either the great ship's outer prongs would have been torn off, or more likely the impromptu landing site and most of Devil's Tower would have been destroyed as the huge craft rotated itself. The visual scales just do not stay consistent throughout the film's climactic final act.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Ending / spoiler
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Lance Henriksen, Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr
There is no deadly epidemic. That's a cover up to keep everyone away from the place where the aliens will arrive and communicate. The aliens communicate with humans at Devil's Tower (the reason why Richard Dreyfuss made that big dirt "mountain", his fascination with that shape, etc.). The little kid is reunited with his mom. Richard Dreyfuss boards an alien ship and leaves with them.
Replicant
Project Leader: If everything's ready here on the Dark Side of the Moon... play the five tones.
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Answer: It wasn't definitively answered, but it appears the aliens took people in order to learn more about humans. It's unclear if all those who were returned had originally gone willingly, but the intent was not to keep them indefinitely or harm them, and they were returned to Earth, albeit many decades later. At the end, after the aliens had made contact, a new group of humans, including Roy, went with them voluntarily.
raywest ★