In the film adaptation of scientist Carl Sagan’s 1985 science fiction novel Contact, radio astronomer Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) makes first contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence from the Vega star system. This scene portrays the media and folk-religious response, as tens of thousands of people flock to the Very Large Array in the New Mexico desert; their gathering may have seemed outlandish in the late ’90s but appears far more plausible today.
