Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): The Ending They Hid for Over 40 Years

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the film  that made First Contact feel like a religious experience. A story where the aliens don't  come to destroy us, but to invite us along.

[00:00:11]But even after nearly 5 decades, this film is  still hiding secrets. Did you know Spielberg filmed what's inside the mother ship, then buried  the footage forever? Or that NASA sent Spielberg a 20page letter begging him not to make this  film? Today, we're uncovering 16 hidden truths about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977,  including shocking Easter eggs that reveal a secret connection to the Star Wars and ET movies.  Number one, the ending Spielberg wishes you never saw. In the original 1977 release, the film ends  with Roy Ner walking into the mothership and the doors closing behind him. The audience never sees  what's inside. That mystery was the whole point.

[00:00:55]But when Spielberg wanted to release a special  edition in 1980, Colombia Pictures saw an opportunity. They agreed to fund the new cut on  one condition. Spielberg had to film what was inside the mothership so the studio would have a  marketing hook to justify re-releasing the film.

[00:01:12]Spielberg gave in. He shot new interior footage on  a $1.5 million budget designed by visual effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, showing a vast  luminous cathedral-like space. But Spielberg regretted it almost immediately. In a 1997  documentary, he admitted, "I never should have done that because that should have always been  kept a mystery." By 1998, when he assembled his final director's cut, the mothership interior was  gone for good, relegated to a deleted scene on the DVD. The version Spielberg considers definitive  is the one where we never see what Roy found on the other side. Number two, the droid hiding on  the mother ship. The alien mother ship in Close Encounters is one of the most detailed miniatures  ever built for a film. It was constructed by model maker Greg Jane and his team. And every inch  of the surface was covered in intricate detail, but hidden on the underside of that model is a  passenger nobody expected. An R2-D2 figure from Star Wars was affixed upside down to the bottom of  the ship. The visual effects work was handled by George Lucas' ILM studio, and someone on the team  slipped the little Astromemech droid onto the hull as a secret tribute. Spielberg's camera briefly  captures the inverted R2-D2 during the climax as the mothership rises in front of Jillian's  silhouette. But R2-D2 isn't alone. The original model is now on display at the Smithsonian's Udvar  Hazy Center, and visitors can spot a TIE fighter, the small fighter ships from Star Wars, and a  shark from Jaws. The mother ship is a treasure chest of Easter eggs that most viewers have  never noticed. Number three, NASA called this film dangerous. Before production began,  Spielberg reached out to NASA and the US Air Force hoping for their cooperation on the film. Both  agencies read the script and said no. But NASA went further. They sent Spielberg a 20page letter  warning him not to make the movie because it was dangerous. Instead of scaring him off, the letter  had the opposite effect. Spielberg later said, "If NASA took the time to write me a 20page letter,  then I knew there must be something happening."

[00:03:24]In context, NASA's concern wasn't about real  aliens. It was about Spielberg's track record.

[00:03:30]They feared that since the director had already  convinced millions of people there were sharks lurking in every swimming pool after Jaws,  he could trigger a similar mass panic about UFOs. The Air Force had a different problem.  The movie treated UFOs as real and made the military look like they were hiding the truth.  To them, that went against official Air Force and Defense Department policy. Number four, The  Hidden Pinocchio Connection. Disney's Pinocchio, the 1940 animated film about a puppet who wishes  to become a real boy, is woven throughout Close Encounters at every level. In the story, Roy wants  to take his family to see Pinocchio, but the rest of the family chooses miniature golf instead.  During Little Barry's abduction sequence, a music box playing When You Wish Upon a Star can be  heard. John Williams' score incorporates phrases from the same song during the final sequence with  the mothership. And Spielberg originally placed the original 1940 recording of When You Wish Upon  a Star over the closing credits. But during a test screening in Dallas, some people laughed  at the choice, so Spielberg replaced it with John Williams's orchestral version. The connection  is not random. Pinocchio dreams of becoming more than a wooden puppet. Roy dreams of becoming more  than an ordinary man. And by the end of the film, both of them get their wish. Pinocchio becomes  a real boy and Roy steps into the mothership to become part of something far beyond normal human  life. Number five, the film is secretly about Spielberg's parents. During an episode of Inside  the Actor's Studio, host James Lipton pointed out something to Spielberg that the director had never  consciously realized. Liptin said, "Your father was a computer engineer. Your mother was a concert  pianist, and when the spaceship lands, they make music together on the computer." The implication  was startling. Liptton suggested that Roy boarding the mothership symbolically represents Spielberg's  childhood wish for his divorced parents to be reunited. The aliens communicate through music,  the mother's domain. The humans respond through technology, the father's domain. And the moment  of contact is the moment those two worlds finally merge. Spielberg later admitted that he did  not plan this meaning on purpose, but the idea may have come from his subconscious. As a young  filmmaker still dealing with his parents' divorce, he may have unknowingly put that pain into the  story. Number seven, the ghost ship that came back. The film opens in the Sonora Desert,  Mexico, where a team of researchers stumbles upon something impossible. A squadron of World  War II era Navy planes sitting perfectly intact in the sand. No wreckage, no crash site, just  five planes that vanished 30 years earlier now returned without explanation. What many viewers  don't realize is that this is based on a real event. In December 1945, a squadron of five Navy  torpedo bombers known as Flight 19 vanished over the Bermuda Triangle during a routine training  mission. Neither the planes nor any of the 14 crew members have ever been found to this day. And it  doesn't stop there. Later in the film, a massive cargo ship is discovered stranded in the Gobi  Desert, thousands of miles from the nearest ocean, sitting in the sand as if it had been plucked  from the sea and dropped there by an unseen force. This too is based on a real disappearance.  In December 1925, a cargo ship known as the SS Kotapaci vanished while sailing from Charleston  to Havana. For decades, the ship's fate remained a genuine unsolved mystery. But then in January  2020, marine biologist Michael Barnett identified the actual wreck. It was found 35 mi off the coast  of St. Augustine, Florida. It sank in a storm.

[00:07:24]Reality gave the Kotapaci a storm. Spielberg gave  it aliens and for 40 years Spielberg's version was the only answer anyone had. Number nine, the alien  who launched a billiondoll franchise. Near the end of the film, a small alien puppet nicknamed Puck  steps forward from the group and communicates with the scientists using hand signals. The puppet was  designed by special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi with its facial expressions modeled on photos  of child actor Carrie Guffy who plays Little Barry in the film. During filming, Spielberg  became fascinated with Puck. He kept watching the puppet and asking himself one question. What  if this little guy didn't get back on the mother ship? That single thought became the seed for  ET the extraterrestrial released 5 years later.

[00:08:14]And Remaldi, the same man who built Puck,  went on to design ET himself. So, the most beloved alien in movie history wasn't born from  a screenplay or a studio pitch. It was born from Spielberg staring at a puppet on a dark sound  stage and imagining it left behind. Number 10, The Father Who Never Came Home. The film ends  with Roy Neri boarding the mother ship and leaving behind his wife and three children to journey into  the unknown. For decades, this was celebrated as a triumphant ending, a man choosing wonder over  the ordinary. But Spielberg himself came to see it very differently. In a 2005 interview, he said, "I  wrote that blly. Today, I would never have the guy leaving his family and going on the mothership."  He later said this was the kind of ending he could only write when he was young and had no children  of his own. Every film Spielberg made afterward quietly corrects this choice. In Hook 1991, Peter  Pan returns home. In War of the Worlds 2005, Tom Cruz's character learns to be a better father.  Even Indiana Jones, when he finally encounters an alien mystery in Crystal Skull, does not leave  with it. He stays behind with his family. And yet, across three different official cuts of close  encounters, Spielberg never changed the ending itself. Roy still boards the ship. Perhaps  Spielberg understood that fixing it would mean admitting the film's greatest moment of wonder  is also its crulest. Number 11, the star who said no because he couldn't cry. Steve McQueen was  Spielberg's first choice to play Roy Neri. McQueen read the script and genuinely liked it, but he  turned it down for a reason nobody expected. He said he couldn't cry on Q and he believed the role  needed an actor who could. After McQueen passed, Spielberg approached Dustin Hoffman, Al  Pacino, Jack Nicholson, and Gene Hackman.

[00:10:13]Every single one said no. Around that same time,  Spielberg was working on Jaws with Richard Drifus, and Drifus overheard him talking about the new  project on set. From there, he launched his own quiet campaign to win the role. Drifus later  said he would casually walk past Spielberg's office and drop comments like Pacino had no  sense of humor or Nicholson was too wild, hoping to make himself look like the better  choice. Eventually, Spielberg gave in. Six major stars passed on the role and somehow that  led to one of the most perfect casting decisions in science fiction history. Number 12, the bet  that made Spielberg millions. During production, George Lucas visited the Close Encounters set  in Alabama and was overwhelmed by the scale of what Spielberg was building. At the time, Lucas  was deep in post-prouction on Star Wars and was convinced his own film was going to flop, so he  proposed a gamble. They would each swap 2.5% of their film's net profits. Spielberg agreed. Close  Encounters went on to gross $34 million worldwide, a major hit by any standard, but Star Wars earned  $775 million. Because of that deal, Spielberg's small share of Star Wars profits may have been  worth as much as $40 million today. Lucas honored the bet, and the two men remained close friends,  later collaborating on four Indiana Jones films.

[00:11:40]For Spielberg, saying yes to that handshake on  a muggy Alabama soundstage turned out to be one of the best financial decisions of his career.  Number 14. The set that created its own weather.

[00:11:52]The climactic Devil's Tower sequence wasn't filmed  at the real Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Spielberg built it inside a decommissioned World War II  derigible hanger at the former Brookley Air Force Base in Mobile, Alabama. The hanger was enormous,  around 300 by 300 ft, far bigger than any normal Hollywood sound stage. It was so huge and humid  that clouds actually formed near the ceiling, and sometimes it even rained indoors. Spielberg  also had to manage dozens of giant lights to make the landing site feel like a massive government  operation. The lights helped create the glowing, otherworldly look of the mother ship's arrival.  Even though these Devil's Tower scenes make up only a small part of the final movie, they  took almost half of the entire shooting schedule to film. Number 15, the three-year-old  who outperformed everyone. Carrie Guffy was cast as Little Barry at age three. He had never seen  a movie in his life. Spielberg needed authentic reactions from him, so he used creative tricks  instead of traditional direction to get the look of wonder. When the aliens first approached the  house, Spielberg slowly unwrapped a present just off camera. Guffy smiled and exclaimed, "Toys,  toys!" And that became the final take. To get fear, Spielberg surprised him with a clown and  a gorilla off camera. Guffy's fear was real.

[00:13:14]And when the gorilla revealed a familiar face  underneath, he burst out laughing. Guffy nailed so many scenes on the first attempt that the  cast and crew nicknamed him One Take Carrie. and Spielberg had a t-shirt printed with the name on  it. His performance was so impressive that Stanley Kubri considered casting him as Danny Torrance  in The Shining. Kubri ultimately went with Danny Lloyd instead, but the fact that the greatest  perfectionist in cinema wanted a three-year-old from Alabama says everything about how remarkable  Guffy was. Number 16, a tugofwar between two mothers. In one of the film's most intense scenes,  little Barry is dragged through a dog door by an unseen alien force while his mother, Jillian,  played by Melinda Dylan, desperately tries to hold him back. The scene looks terrifyingly real  because in a way it was. The force pulling Barry from the other side of the door wasn't a stage  hand or a mechanical rig. It was Carrie Guffy's actual mother. The production placed her outside  the door while Dylan held on from inside and the two women physically pulled the child back and  forth between them. Guffy later described it as a tugofwar between my real mom and my fake mom. The  result is one of the most visceral moments in the film and it works because the physical struggle  is completely genuine. The boy wasn't acting, he was being pulled. Close Encounters of the  Third Kind isn't just a film about aliens.

[00:14:39]It's about the ache of wanting something so badly  that you're willing to lose everything you have to reach it. So, here's my question for you. If that  mother ship landed tonight and the door opened, would you walk through it? If this video surprised  you, hit like and subscribe because every week we uncover the secrets that Hollywood buried  inside the films you thought you knew.