E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Plotzle Original · Puzzle #10 · May 7, 2026 · Sci-Fi / Adventure

Six plot descriptions for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). One is the real plot. Five are convincing fakes. Read them and guess which is real.

1. A young boy discovers and hides an alien abandoned on Earth in his suburban home, and while government agents search for the creature, he and his siblings bond with it and help it return to its spacecraft.
2. A teenage girl in a coastal town befriends a mute drifter who claims to be from another world and helps him build a transmitter while locals grow suspicious.
3. A linguist traveling through Eastern Europe accepts a job translating recovered extraterrestrial documents and discovers the texts describe her childhood hometown in unsettling detail.
4. Two estranged brothers inherit their father's desert observatory and find encrypted star maps that lead them to an abandoned research station where someone has been living.
5. An astronaut returns from a failed Mars mission and moves to his sister's farm where he begins receiving radio signals that match patterns he heard in space.
6. A geologist studying impact craters in rural Iceland encounters a reclusive woman who insists she arrived on Earth decades ago and wants to leave before winter.