A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan

Hollywood has been enamored with aliens for as long as movies have been a thing, but perhaps no alien-themed movie has had quite the impact of Contact, released 25 years ago this month. Based on the novel by Carl Sagan, the movie marked a sharp departure from the space-travel-and-alien movies of its time. For starters, the aliens come in peace. (And you don’t even see them until the very end of the film, and even then, they appear in human form.) Contact featured a strong female lead in Dr. Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, in an era when scientists (let alone women scientists) were rarely seen in a starring role. And while the action spans a large swath of the galaxy, Contact is ultimately a movie about Earthlings and how we perceive science, faith, and our place in the universe. It lacked the popularity of Independence Day and Men in Black, but it arguably touched more lives.

One could say Foster’s co-star in the film was not Matthew McConaughey but rather the Very Large Array, an observatory consisting of 28 enormous dish-shaped radio telescopes in central New Mexico. A row of VLA’s iconic telescopes is featured on the film’s official poster. Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, vividly remembers seeing the film as a young teenager, a couple of years