E.T.'s Species: What Is E.T., Where Is He From and Why He Phones Home

E.T. was going to be a monster. After Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Columbia wanted a sequel and Steven Spielberg developed Night Skies, a horror film about a farm family besieged by small aliens, drawn directly from the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter of August 1955, in which a Kentucky family said they had spent a night shooting at glowing, big-eared, floating creatures. John Sayles wrote the script, with an alien who could kill by touch and one, called Buddy, who befriended a child; Rick Baker built the creatures. Spielberg, shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark in Tunisia in 1980, found he no longer wanted to make it. He told Melissa Mathison, who was on the set, about an imaginary friend he had invented after his parents' divorce, and about the gentle alien from the abandoned script, and she wrote the first draft of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in eight weeks.

The horror film survived in pieces. Buddy became E.T.; the family under siege became Elliott's, and the government agents who search the house with lights and instruments are the menace Night Skies had assigned to the aliens. The film opened in June 1982, grossed more than any film before it, held that record for eleven years and turned a decade of screen aliens from invaders into lost children. The Kelly-Hopkinsville case, which had given Spielberg his hostile creatures, ended up as the origin of the friendliest alien in cinema.

Carlo Rambaldi built E.T. from three faces. Spielberg wanted a creature that only a child could love and gave Rambaldi a composite of a poet, a scientist and a dog: the eyes of Carl Sandburg and Albert Einstein, a face with the wrinkled patience of a pug. The result, about a metre tall, stands on short bowed legs with a wide waddling body, long-fingered hands, a neck that telescopes to lift the head above a crowd, and skin the colour and texture of a walnut; Rambaldi built three mechanical versions plus a suit worn by two small actors and a boy born without legs, who did the walking. The heart glows red through the chest when E.T. feels strongly, the tip of one finger lights to heal a cut, and the same touch that heals can make a dead flower stand up.

The link with Elliott is the film's one piece of speculative biology. From the night the boy lures the alien into his room, the two share sensations: Elliott gets drunk at school when E.T. drinks beer at home, and frees the frogs in biology class as E.T. watches a couple kiss on television. When E.T. sickens, Elliott sickens, and the film's bleakest passage is the two of them under a plastic tent in a house turned into a laboratory. The bond breaks when E.T. dies and returns when he lives, and the film explains none of it, which is why it works.

"E.T. phone home" is the plot. Stranded, the alien learns English from television and Sesame Street, understands from a Buck Rogers comic that a signal can be sent, and builds a transmitter from a Speak & Spell toy, a coffee can, a record player, an umbrella lined with foil and a circular saw blade; on Halloween night the children carry it to a clearing in the hills, and the ship that answers is the same ship that left. The word "phone" was Mathison's and the toy was a product-placement coup for Texas Instruments, whose Speak & Spell became the first thing millions of children associated with talking to another world.

What the ship goes home to exists only in print. William Kotzwinkle's novelization (1982) and its sequel E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet (1985), which Spielberg outlined, place E.T. on Brodo Asogi, the Green Planet, a world of thinking plants and long-lived botanists ruled by a council; E.T. is demoted on his return for the Earth incident and, in the sequel, sets out to get back to Elliott. Spielberg considered a film sequel, Nocturnal Fears, in which hostile aliens of the same species kidnap Elliott, and rejected it as a betrayal of the first film. The species has never been shown on screen again apart from a 2019 television commercial in which E.T. visits a grown Elliott for the holidays.

E.T. is a Grey with the fear removed. The Grey of the abduction reports is short, hairless, large-eyed and long-fingered, and so is E.T.; the difference is the pug's face, a chest that glows with feeling, and a story in which the government, not the alien, does the abducting. Spielberg had already drawn the benign version in Close Encounters, where the small aliens come out of the mothership like children at a party, and E.T. made it a child, which is the shape in which the Grey entered the culture for a generation of viewers before Communion gave it black eyes and a table. The Greys in fiction entry follows that face through both versions.

The transmitter belongs to another tradition. Sending a signal home is what SETI listens for, and the film's home-made rig, a toy, a can and an umbrella, is closer to the spirit of the 1970s amateur radio culture that fed SETI than to any starship. Real contact, if it comes, is likelier to be a signal than a landing, and the child who built a phone to call another world was the one screen alien whose method the scientists could endorse.