Recurring Imagery - Steven Spielberg's Shooting Stars

I plan on going outside tonight to watch the Perseid meteor shower. I try to watch the Perseids every year. There's a great spot on my driveway where I can see a very large portion of the sky. Anyway, I realized today was a good day to publish this post that I've been working on for a while. It was triggered by a recent viewing of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, one of my favorite movies.

In case you hadn't noticed or just don't remember, there are two shots of shooting stars in the movie. One right after the other. I notice them every time I watch the movie, but this particular time I was wondering whether there was any significance at all to the shooting stars. I decided to look it up on the internet. While I love the internet as a reference material, you just can't believe everything you read.

Besides reading many conflicting claims about whether or not the shooting stars in Jaws are real meteors caught on camera or optical effects that were done in post-production, what I mostly found were several rumors about the shooting stars in movies directed by Spielberg. For example, I read that the ones in Jaws are actually UFO's that the filmmakers unintentionally captured on film. Is it really necessary for me to comment on that one?

I've also read claims that the shooting stars are meant as a teaser for his movies that have to do with aliens, such as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. I also find that hard to believe. I think he probably just likes the imagery.

Something I read a lot was that Spielberg puts a shooting star in almost every one of the movies he directs, and that it's his signature, kind of like how Alfred Hitchcock has a cameo appearance in most of the movies he directs. I really don't think that's true either. I actually watched some of his movies specifically to look out for shooting stars, and couldn't find any besides the few I already knew about. I couldn't even find any in certain movies where the imagery would have fit right in, such as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Hook. I'm willing to believe I might have just missed them, but I'm usually pretty observant when it comes to small details in movies, especially if I'm specifically looking for them. If I'm right though, I guess people across the internet are just spouting misinformation without having looked for any evidence of their own. I'm not sure why that surprises me. Shooting stars in Spielberg movies just seems like a strange topic to be spreading rumors about.

I wanted to make a large post with screenshots of all the shooting stars in Spielberg's movies, but I thought the post was going to have a lot more images than this. So far it's just the two in Jaws, one in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and one in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. I'm not even positive the one in Close Encounters was actually meant to be a shooting star. It was rather ambiguous. There were two objects shooting through the sky, and I'm pretty sure at least one of them was supposed to be a spaceship. I took a screenshot of the other one. So anyway, here are the screenshots I collected. If you know of any more Steven Spielberg movies with shooting stars, let me know. I'll also continue looking for them whenever I watch a Spielberg movie. I'd love to add more shots to this post.