Whatever they were, they sure looked like the Close Encounter aliens. The Osment character got to almost be real, and got to hear his mom say she loved him, much happier than the natural ending for the story, not as happy as a typical Spielberg ending but given what a downer the rest of the movie was it was pretty happy. I'll give him technical props in AI for doing an excellent immitation of Kubrick, up until that last 10 or 15 minutes he really did manage to shelve the Spielberg style and direct like somebody else which is a pretty good accomplishment for an established director, especially given how different Kubrick's style was from Spielberg's.
If nobody expected ET to make any money then why did they spend so much on advertising? It opened in 1100 theaters, this was not a movie people thought wasn't going to make money. Maybe they didn't think it was going to make as much as it did, but there's no way they thought it would make nothing. Masterpiece my butt, it captured a bunch of foul mouthed obnoxious brats hanging out with an alien deliberately designed for mass appeal (Spielberg even pretty much admitted that when he said the key to a sympathetic alien character was big eyes).
Godfather wasn't an aberation, the movies I listed were all in the highest groses for their year too, there were good movies making good money while Spielberg was still directing TV. You don't like Blazing Saddles?! Well now we know that you should never be allowed to pass a quality judgement on movies again. The mass audiences were rushing out to see good movies and bad, just like always.