Historical Events  Movies
ET

Alternate:
Heart

Current:
Head

Where did ET touch Elliot when he said "I'll be right here"?

Everyone remember the tear-jerking scene at the end of the movie 'ET: The Extra-Terrestrial' where he leaves Elliot, but there's one detail some remember differently. Did ET point to Elliots head or heart when he said 'I'll be right here'?

This isn't the only Mandela Effect related to ET - the one where he first learns to speak, and reverses the later line he used "ET phone home"  is another one.

To confuse things even more, some remember the scene differently in that ET and Elliot only touched fingertips.

Something else very relevant is the Pizza Hut drinking glasses advert from the 1980's - they show various scenes from the movie, including ET touching Elliots chest.

Xfinity/Sky commercial

Although this ME has been around since 2016, interest peaked in November 2019 when Xfinity/Sky ran a clever commercial showing ET returning for a visit after all these years. It showed him touching Elliots heart at the end, which is when many said "hang on, didn't he touch his head in the original"? checking the original shows it apparently always was the heart, hence the Mandela Effect.

An interesting thing about ET is that orily it was to be a horror movie. Steven Speilberg had enjoyed the success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind a few years earlier, so wanted to capitalise on the interest around aliens for another movie. The original title was Night Skies, and rather than the enigmatic glowing finger touch being a sign of knowledge, it was in fact going to kill people. The script had the alien terrorise a family, but was parked in favour of ET. Later, it's said to have elements dusted down for when Spielberg went on to produce Poltergeist. Spielberg later said that when he was young, his father always said if there were aliens, they would be good, not bad, and this is what made him change his mind.