Not only did Muller support Sagan’s enthusiasms and offer him his first chance to see real science in the works, he also strongly influenced the showmanship in Sagan that would later make him so famous. Muller was himself something of a showman in his lectures. Later in life, Sagan credited one lecture of Muller’s in particular with having made a strong impression on him. He even considered dramatizing a lecture of the kind in his film, Contact. The topic of this lecture was extraterrestrial life. Muller opened the talk by announcing that he had just returned from a trip to some other planets, on which he had found life forms, and that he wanted to show some slides of those alien beings. There followed, Sagan recalled, slides “of the most astonishing creatures . . . much more bizarre than you can ever think about, much more bizarre than anything in science fiction.” After stunning his audience with this array of exotic beings, Muller delightedly announced that he had made a terrible mistake; he had shown them the wrong slides and what they’d been looking at were the microscopic organisms found in a drop of normal Earth pond water. Muller’s intent, Sagan recalled, was to impress on his audience just how amazing life right here on Earth is, and he definitely made his point.
