If you have a trained eye you can see Darth Vader's ship and R2D2 from Star Wars, and several other bits of Spielberg-Lucas memorabilia.

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".

When the aliens release the humans from the mothership, we see a man walking towards it wearing a goatee and pipe. He is Dr. J Allen Hynek. He coined the term Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hynek also worked for the Air Force debunking UFO reports.

The aliens that come out of the ship at the end of the movie were played by 7 year old girls and the scene had to keep being re-shot because their fake alien heads weighed 5 pounds each.

When Barry is being kidnapped by the aliens, somebody pulls him out of the house by the dog's entrance in the door. The person who pull him is his real mother.

Spielberg wanted to use the music When You Wish Upon A Star from Disney. It can be barely heard in the original film score in 1977. John Williams later put a very clear version in the closing credits in the Special Edition version and in the current DVD and CD.

Bright lights were used during the scene where little aliens were standing outside the mothership. This was because Spielberg wasn't too happy about the alien heads the children were wearing, because they did look fake and they sort of looked like Casper the friendly ghost.

After this movie, young Cary Guffey got to play the part of an alien himself - in the Italian movies "Uno Sceriffo extraterrestre - poco extra e molto terrestre" (English title: "The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid", 1979) and its sequel "Chissà perché. capitano tutte a me" ("Everything Happens To Me", 1980); both with the Italian actor Bud Spencer.

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.

The base station next to Devil's Tower was shot in Mobile Alabama.

Richard Dreyfuss was paid a million dollars to reprise his character in the 1980 "Special Edition" where you can see him standing inside the spaceship. In the current DVD edition, that scene was cut.