Contact -- Ellie Arroway, UFO Contactee?

[lpetrich]

I remember reading the novel long ago. However, a part of it soured me on it, and for that reason, I have not seen the movie version.

When Ellie Arroway and her fellow wormhole travelers finish their extraterrestrial journey, all the physical evidence of that journey got erased -- all the videotapes that they had used to record their travels. So they were left with their memories, and everybody else was dependent on their assertions. From  Contact (novel), "Ellie finds herself asking the world to take a leap of faith and believe what she and the others say happened to them."

That's what I didn't like -- the destruction of the evidence, destruction that seemed very contrived to me.

Even worse, she had only the same kind of evidence as UFO contactees do of their contacts and travels. How was she any different from George Adamski or Billy Meier? Did Carl Sagan himself ever see the connection? He himself had once run into a UFO contactee early in his career, and he disdained UFO contactees from then onward, if not before.

Silver Screen Saucers: Looking Back at 'Contact' by Robbie Graham -- RG himself also notes the similarity:

And so an individual is selected for contact and provided with philosophical nuggets but zero physical evidence of their alien encounter, before being left to tell their story to whomsoever will listen. Ellie, it seems, has much in common with the contactees of UFO lore.

In the movie, Ellie is asked why she does not withdraw her testimony because of the lack of evidence beyond her assertions:

“Because I can’t. I... had an experience... I can’t prove it, I can’t even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us, are alone! I wish I could share that. I wish that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope. But... That continues to be my wish.”

In effect, a spiritual awakening. She even gets a quasi-religious sort of following of her as a prophet of the "new world".

Like many a contactee, Ellie has attracted followers with her stories of otherworldly communion. Certain elements of society see fit to believe her, while most do not. Either way her story is out there.

Something that I did not pick up on, I must concede. But then again, I was very bummed out by the erasure of the evidence.

I could take the preposterous notion that pi was fixed by some superintelligence rather than fixed by logical necessity ("The Artist's Signature"), but not that.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

If you are interested, regarding the video evidence in the film,

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the video evidence is just static. However right before the end of the movie you find out the length of static and the likelihood her story is true. Also, only Ellie went.

Personally, I don't see the problem with Ellie's statement. People seem to see it at a 180 from where I see it. The tables have been turned. The religious are requiring direct proof while the scientist is asking for a bit of faith, granted, she is in a position of it more requiring trust than faith.

I found the religious dismissal of her claims to be grossly hypocritical. I thought that was Sagan's point. Only Joss seems to get that.

 

[braces_for_impact]

There's other evidence to consider too. In the book/movie, we still received a signal from the stars that we managed to decode and use to build one incredible ass machine. Anyone could (theoretically) learn the mathmatics and decode the signal themself. Everyone could work together to build a giant machine. There's a LOT going on there, even if the end was less than climactic.

 

[lpetrich]

If you are interested, regarding the video evidence in the film,

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the video evidence is just static. However right before the end of the movie you find out the length of static and the likelihood her story is true. Also, only Ellie went.

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So there's that much physical evidence -- the video cameras were operating for as long as Ellie had claimed that they were. Not much, but still some.

Personally, I don't see the problem with Ellie's statement. People seem to see it at a 180 from where I see it. The tables have been turned. The religious are requiring direct proof while the scientist is asking for a bit of faith, granted, she is in a position of it more requiring trust than faith.

So it's an issue of her reliability, rather than religious faith in her statements.

The big problem is that her statements are of something very extraordinary, that she went on a trip through our Galaxy in a wormhole network and had lots of interesting experiences in her trip. As opposed to her account being her conscious invention, or something that came to her in a hallucination or a dream state.

Sort of like George Adamski claiming in his book Inside the Spaceships that he traveled aboard spacecraft run by human(oid) members of a Solar-System-spanning Star-Trek-ish United Federation of Planets.

We all know Carl Sagan's dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A case in point was meteorites. Many eighteenth-century scientists refused to believe that they were extraterrestrial rocks and lumps of iron, instead preferring to believe that they were ejected by volcanoes or blown by winds or struck by lightning. But in 1803, there was a report of a meteorite fall near L'Aigle, France, and the French Academy of Sciences sent Jean-Baptiste Biot to investigate. He found numerous independent witnesses and a large number of similar but unusual rocks strewn over a sizable area. He successfully demonstrated that an extraterrestrial rock had fallen, breaking up into many smaller ones as it did so.

So in Contact, would Ellie's account pass that kind of test?

Admittedly, UFO-contactee accounts typically fail miserably. They are sort of like Gene Roddenberry claiming that Star Trek is literal future history.

But if all one has is Ellie's account or George's book, what would one be able to do?

I found the religious dismissal of her claims to be grossly hypocritical. I thought that was Sagan's point. Only Joss seems to get that.

Raising the bar very high for beliefs other than theirs.

 

[lpetrich]

There's other evidence to consider too. In the book/movie, we still received a signal from the stars that we managed to decode and use to build one incredible ass machine. Anyone could (theoretically) learn the mathmatics and decode the signal themself. Everyone could work together to build a giant machine. There's a LOT going on there, even if the end was less than climactic.

So there was good independent evidence of advanced ET's, even if not of what she described in her trips. So there's still the problem of being dependent on her.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

We all know Carl Sagan's dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A case in point was meteorites. Many eighteenth-century scientists refused to believe that they were extraterrestrial rocks and lumps of iron, instead preferring to believe that they were ejected by volcanoes or blown by winds or struck by lightning. But in 1803, there was a report of a meteorite fall near L'Aigle, France, and the French Academy of Sciences sent Jean-Baptiste Biot to investigate. He found numerous independent witnesses and a large number of similar but unusual rocks strewn over a sizable area. He successfully demonstrated that an extraterrestrial rock had fallen, breaking up into many smaller ones as it did so.

I knew that. Forgot I knew it, but I did know that.

So in Contact, would Ellie's account pass that kind of test?

In the film, yes and no.

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The White House knows she is telling the truth. They however did not release the full information or play all of the static, which would have indicated a longer trip than the mere split second that contact was lost.

Admittedly, UFO-contactee accounts typically fail miserably. They are sort of like Gene Roddenberry claiming that Star Trek is literal future history.

But if all one has is Ellie's account or George's book, what would one be able to do?

Honestly, I think the film made a mistake at the end when it gives you a tad bit more info. I think when they are driving away from the hearing the film should have ended. There were signs it was real, signs it could have been imagined.

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A dream: the imagery of Pensacola, her "father" appearing, vague information from whomever, you can see the rings rotating while transitioning to another portal.

Real: The chair she was in was crushed, but she wasn't in the chair, nor did she get hurt from the chair.

I found the religious dismissal of her claims to be grossly hypocritical. I thought that was Sagan's point. Only Joss seems to get that.

Raising the bar very high for beliefs other than theirs.

Exactly. Ellie recognizes the issue. She knows she can't prove what she saw, but she felt what she saw was true.

 

[lpetrich]

Carl Sagan and Contact - creation.com: Defiance of God and promotion of ET

Lots of grumbling, like this one over Ellie stating that she had an experience:

Comment: At first glance it seems surprising that Sagan would put such a ‘mirror image’ of Christian testimony into the mouth of his atheist scientist—until we remember how powerful a contribution Christian testimony is to the preaching of the Gospel. Sagan was a pragmatist and knew that testimony to an experience trumps conjecture about a theory 24/7. He therefore used this powerful spiritual-warfare technique to substantiate, not the blessings of life in Christ, but the omnipotence and omnipresence of alien life. In doing this, he contradicted his own creed that “Science asks us to take nothing on faith, to be wary of our penchant for self-deception, to reject anecdotal evidence.”

What sore losers. They complain that she is beating them at their game of evading the credibility problem by passionately asserting the truth of their beliefs.

That site also has an article, Did God create life on other planets? - creation.com arguing that ET's cannot exist.

 

[credoconsolans]

Yeah, I was kinda disappointed with the climax of the movie Contact.

Ellie pushes and pushes to be the traveler, convinced she is the best for the job, atheist objective scientist, but

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she ends up an emotional blithering idiot. The interior of the capsule she's in starts to go translucent - she experiences this before launch! When Kent can still hear her! She starts to see the wormholes, for lack of a better word - but she says nothing. She ends up at a blue star system Vega and all she says is "It's beautiful, they should have sent a poet." Really? No details on what the system looks like so future observers might corroborate her report? She actually lands in a system that's inhabited. Her detailed description of this system? One sentence,"They're alive."

She doesn't know if she will make it back alive. Has no clue, so it's vitally important that she record her experiences in case she ends up a corpse.

Nope.

She ends up possibly talking to an alien, possibly just talking to her own mind, since she never asks important questions.

Instead of cutting off the alien - "Can we not talk about Pensacola? Since you don't know who invented the system, what is it's basis of its operation?" - she gets taken in with the emotional impact of the appearance of her father - and little girlish adherence to obeying him - and effectively silenced and kept from using her brain.

It was a mess. Made me wish Drumlin had lived to take the trip. He might have come back with something more than just "body surfing with dear old dad".

It seemed to me they made Ellie's character Carl Sagan's classic caricature of a UFO contactee. Sagan wrote in Parade magazine that when people wrote to him and told him they were in contact with extraterrestrials and for him to ask the aliens thru them "anything", Sagan always posited some difficult astronomical problem.

The result of that was that he never heard back from the self-described contactees. But if he asked a simple emotional question, "Should we be good?" The contactees came back with reams of responses.

That's Ellie. No scientific answers from aliens, just "be good" to you can grow up.

The movie ends on a

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faith note, even though she wasn't allowed to even listen or study her own tapes and what was their explanation for the crushed chair? But at least the book had more 'evidence of aliens' to deal with.

 

[lpetrich]

That's even worse than I thought. Here's that quote from Carl Sagan:

Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in “contact” with extraterrestrials. I am invited to “ask them anything.” And so over the years I’ve prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, “Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.” Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat’s Last Theorem. So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like “Should we be good?” I almost always get an answer.

From his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

 

[Ford]

I think I can weigh in on this one, since I'm staring at a collection of Sagan's works resting on the shelves of my bookcase.


The movie made some changes to the source material, as all movie adaptations do, but the basics are still very much there. The author of the source material - Carl Sagan - was not just a scientist but a bit of a celebrity who used his popularity to provoke general audiences into different ways of thinking. He wasn't this rigid "hard science" guy and he wasn't above stretching the truth a bit to tell a compelling story.


And "Contact" is a story. A work of fiction. Sagan's first and only novel. So I'm willing to forgive him for stepping outside the boundaries of hard science. I'm also reasonably certain that Ellie is kind of a version of Sagan. A protagonist who is a scientist, but who also has a deep sense of wonder at the universe revealed by science. Her reactions to seeing those wonders up close is the sort of thing I'd expect out of a guy like Sagan. He was not a dispassionate observer. He was a passionate advocate for science.


Watch the first episode of "Cosmos" and you'll see...he invites you to take a journey in a "ship of the imagination" across the cosmos...complete with stirring music and Sagan staring off into the void...enraptured by the beauty of it all.


Ellie isn't some backwoods redneck who had a "UFO encounter" with some swamp gas. She's a scientist who had an encounter with a very real extraterrestrial intelligence. The twist is that there's not enough compelling evidence to convince anyone of what she knows. The destruction of and/or lack of evidence is, IMO, Sagan taking the perspective of the aliens. They've made contact with a race of apparently quite violent beings (the Hitler transmission as evidence) and have sent along instructions to build the machine. If the human race is as dangerous as it appears (and remember this was when we had lots of nuclear weapons hanging around, something Sagan felt very passionate about) then it makes sense to give them the opportunity to make one sojourn out into space to have a brief meeting, then make it very, very difficult to repeat the journey if the meeting goes bad.


Can humans make the machine work? Or perhaps more importantly, can the human race deal with the "Contact" itself? Ellie represents the human race pretty well, so they send her back, but hedge their bet by covering their tracks. Now it is up to humanity - if they can manage to avoid self destruction AND deal with the fact they're not alone in the universe - to start working on a way to get back into that system of wormholes and interact with the rest of the galaxy.

 

[James Brown]

I think it's relevant to mention that people weren't just skeptical of her claims. They claimed that she faked the whole thing.

 

[Underseer]

I watched the movie but didn't read the book, and I have to admit, I found that part of the story bizarre.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I watched the movie but didn't read the book, and I have to admit, I found that part of the story bizarre.

The actual bizarre thing is why did the US announce the existence of the second site. The United States had a secret base with Japan, no one knew it existed. The Government clearly wants to hide the truth because they want to corner the absurdly huge discovery. They don't want any other nations to be able to have access to it.

Of course, if they just kept it all secret, they wouldn't have needed to put on much of a show.

 

[CJW]

I think it's relevant to mention that people weren't just skeptical of her claims. They claimed that she faked the whole thing.

I think the claim was that Hadden faked the whole thing and she was just an unwitting dupe.

- - - Updated - - -

I watched the movie but didn't read the book, and I have to admit, I found that part of the story bizarre.

The actual bizarre thing is why did the US announce the existence of the second site. The United States had a secret base with Japan, no one knew it existed. The Government clearly wants to hide the truth because they want to corner the absurdly huge discovery. They don't want any other nations to be able to have access to it.

Of course, if they just kept it all secret, they wouldn't have needed to put on much of a show.

In the movie the second site was owned by Hadden, not the government.

 

[James Brown]

I think the claim was that Hadden faked the whole thing and she was just an unwitting dupe.

You might be right; it's been a while.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The actual bizarre thing is why did the US announce the existence of the second site. The United States had a secret base with Japan, no one knew it existed. The Government clearly wants to hide the truth because they want to corner the absurdly huge discovery. They don't want any other nations to be able to have access to it.

Of course, if they just kept it all secret, they wouldn't have needed to put on much of a show.

In the movie the second site was owned by Hadden, not the government.

Hadden built it. The US funded it.

 

[CJW]

In the movie the second site was owned by Hadden, not the government.

Hadden built it. The US funded it.

unwittingly - i interpreted it as Hadden double charged the government for the first one and used the additional funds to have a fully functional second one built - I think the government only thought they were funding the systems integration site - not a full blown machine.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Hadden built it. The US funded it.

unwittingly - i interpreted it as Hadden double charged the government for the first one and used the additional funds to have a fully functional second one built - I think the government only thought they were funding the systems integration site - not a full blown machine.

Absolutely not. Never. Not on your life!

Am I being over the top enough?

"They still want an American to go." Who is "they"? Also the crew in charge of the device is the same as the previous site.

 

[jab]

I never read the book, I saw the movie when it originally came out, and--unlike the original Jurassic Park movie--, this movie left me so not wanting to read the book. The movie wasn't awful, partly because Jodie Foster was still a very good actress at that point in her career; but I remember its overall affect as stiff, and kinda hokey, and I recall feeling disgusted by the uplift ending.

 

[Shadowy Man]

I think the claim was that Hadden faked the whole thing and she was just an unwitting dupe.

The big problem with the movie was when they asked her if the signal could have been faked she didn't say "no". Because it could not have been faked as presented in the movie.