So the check for Erlang magic numbers ended up being passed before the _existing_ checks for other file types? Nice bit of pushing in, there.
Still, it was accepted by the "file" devs . . . .
Looking at the patch (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff), the issue was that the string "Tue Jan 22 14:32:44 MET 1991" is matched to check for an Erlang file, which seems weird but reasonable. The bug is that the spaces weren't escaped in the string, so it was only looking for "Tue" instead of the full string.
File should detect all possible file types, there is no reason to detect only the first one... It should not be used as a file type detection anyway if you want a reliable system.