March 19, 2026 • 48 mins
In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce and Brent take on Contact (1997), Carl Sagan’s beautiful, brainy, and decidedly UFO-free journey into alien possibility. But beneath the film’s awe, wonder, and cosmic longing lies a more provocative question: what did Sagan really think about the mystery of contact — and was there more going on beneath his public skepticism than most people realize? Using the film as a springboard, the hosts explore the strange space where science, belief, Hollywood, and hidden history all seem to overlap.
This episode also carries an unexpected personal edge. Bryce recalls his own face-to-face encounter with Sagan after a live television appearance, and he and Brent reflect on why the famed astronomer later found his way into the mythology of Dark Skies. Along the way, they touch on the long and complicated road that brought Contact to the screen, the emotional legacy Sagan left behind, and one of the most famous quotations he never actually said. Thoughtful, surprising, and just a little subversive, “Sagan Makes Contact” looks at one of popular culture’s most revered science storytellers from a distinctly Sound, Light & Frequency point of view.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
If they still have a disinformation campaign going on. Is
it trillions of dollars?
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Oh boy? Right?
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Where does it go? Where do those tentacles lead? What
are the levers that they're pulling? It really raises a
lot of questions.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
All I can say is whether they spent millions or
billions or trillions on it. Whatever they were buying with
it sucked us into it. I'm Bryce Sable. Have you
(00:45):
ever wondered if there's a secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs?
Speaker 1 (00:49):
I'm Brent Friedman, and you are listening to sound, light
and frequency.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
And in this episode, we're going to take a trip
through a wormhole and make contact within inner dimensional alien.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
One who happens to look a whole lot like Jody
Foster's father.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
We're talking about Contact today, which we're using as kind
of a portal. It's a film, of course, but we're
using it as a portal to talk about all kinds
of things, like what it's about SETI, the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence, but also about what that means, whether there's
life out there in the universe, what does it mean
for UFOs. We've got some personal stories, but what's interesting
(01:37):
for those of you who maybe haven't seen Contact, or
haven't seen it for a while. Remember this is the
one where Jody Foster plays someone who's listening for signals
from space. She finds one and then the games begin,
which we'll be talking about. But what I find fascinating
about it, Brent, as we bring you in here, is
(01:58):
that maybe, maybe, just maybe the aliens don't come to us,
is what Carl Sagan, who wrote the book and then
inspired the film, But maybe they bring us to them.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, that is one of the key differences between that
and certainly a lot of the movies we've seen, particularly
the last movie we did, which was Close Encounters. But
there's some other really interesting distinctions that Contact has, which,
by the way, one of my favorite movies, not just
in this genre but of all time. I've probably seen
it twenty times. There are no UFOs in Contact, there
(02:31):
are no aliens, there's an energy being that presents itself
as an Nhi. There's a really interesting spiritual element within
the show as well. And most importantly, Interdimensional Travel might
have been one of the first movies that introduced interdimensional travel.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
It's really gone down in history where it has improved
with every year. People really have found this film. Instead
of moving on from it, they found it and re
embraced it. Just so everyone literally does understand what we're
talking about. If you were to give Contact, the film
that was directed by Robert Zamechis and came out in
nineteen ninety seven, if you're due the log line for it,
(03:11):
this is what I think it is. When a brilliant
SETI scientist deciphers a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence, she
must fight political opposition, personal doubts, and humanities fear of
the unknown to become Earth's first ambassador to the stars.
It's a little high falutin, but it is one sentence,
so therefore it's a log line. Yes, well done.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Well, We've already talked about a number of unique qualities
that Contact has, But one of the most important connections
that I think we can make is to Carl Sagan,
who was not just the author, but was also somebody
that was known in pop culture for his views on
the search for extraterrestrial life. And also Bryce, if I'm
(03:52):
not mistaken, you have a personal connection to Carl Sagan.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I can't wait to talk about this one. I'm not
going to do it quite yet, but I did meet
Carl set and I was the host of a show
about the Voyager to Encounter with Saturn. He was my
guest and we got into an argument in the parking
lot afterwards about whether UFO should be acknowledged by him
or not, which we'll get to but before we do.
You know what I think is so fascinating about this
(04:18):
is every movie has a story behind the story, but
this one is really kind of complex and kind of
interesting and compelling. This started in nineteen seventy nine when
Carl Sagan and his wife Andrew and decided that they
would write a treatment for a feature film because he'd
(04:39):
been you know, he was the host, he was recording Cosmos,
which was this huge TV phenomenon at the time, and
they thought, well, let's capitalize on this. We can sell
a movie because we're hot right now. So they wrote
one hundred page treatment for a feature film and it
was picked. That's a script, yeah, and people that have
(04:59):
read I haven't been get my hands on it, but
people that have read it have often described it as
pretty much a script in narrative form. And it went
into development, as we call it in Hollywood development hell,
where it sat around. It really didn't sit around, but
for seven years, it didn't get instantly made. And over
the course of the lifetime of this film, Brent and
(05:19):
you and I can relate to this because we have
rewritten people, and we have been rewritten. But there were
like a dozen screenwriters who took a crack at this
script over the years.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
A dozen in seven years actually sounds small to me.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
It might even be well, actually that's just the first run, okay,
because all right, so Carl Sagan at some point decides,
you know, this isn't going as fast as I would
like it to have gone, so he decides to write
the book. And Carl Sagan, after my little encounter in
the parking lot, which, as I said, we're going to
get to, Carl Sagan decides to write this book. And
(05:54):
he does, and it becomes a really big popular book.
And I own one of the original copies it and
I read it at the time and I thought, wow,
this is really a great piece of writing, and it's
really mind blowing and I enjoyed it. So then that
book gets optioned and it goes back into the development process.
Now remember we're starting in nineteen seventy nine. The book's
(06:14):
coming out in nineteen eighty five. It's a big hit,
and it goes back into development. Producers change, directors change.
At one point Spielberg's going to direct it, At another
point George Miller's going to direct it. It ends up
with Zemechas of course, it goes on and on. They
rack up the dozen writers, and finally it does get
(06:35):
made in nineteen ninety seven, and it has been a football.
It's been kicked around, everybody's said their vision of it,
and I think the thing that is kind of interesting
for me because usually I'm sure you probably agree, but
when Hollywood writes a project that much, it tends to
level it down to almost nothingness, and you just kind
(06:55):
of go, that's a really nobody's vision. It's not yeah,
it's like nobody's vision. But in reality, I think we're
both fans of this film.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Absolutely. It was one of the first films, I believe,
in this genre that introduced the whole concept of religion
and spirituality and made that a focus. But then the
irony is correct me if I'm wrong, Sagan was an
atheist totally, and so the fact that it was so
front and center and the storytelling was interesting but also
not just that he was an atheist, but he didn't
(07:26):
believe in UFOs.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Is that correct? Yeah? But quick story though about Sagan
being an atheist. Okay, So the movie is really kind
of a bit of a back and forth about science
versus religion, and I think that that's really compelling. Science
is represented by the Jodie Foster character, Elier Away, who
(07:48):
is a scientist. If she can't prove it, tough luck
where she got. On the other side, Matthew McConaughey playing
a guy named Palmer something Palmer Joss, which is quite
a feature name, I guess, and McConaughey is this religious guy,
and so they go back and forth. They even sleep together.
They're not in the book, but I guess in Hollywood
they thought somebody better have sex or it's not a movie.
(08:11):
So they do sleep together, and that's compelling in its
own right, I guess. But Matthew McConaughey told this story
once where he said Sagan ended up on the set
and he mesmerized everybody by going on and on about
the size of the universe and everything, and everybody is
just like, oh my god, this is so interesting and
(08:33):
so compelling. And then at the end of it, Sagan goes,
and that's why I'm an atheist. And Matthew McConaughey's take was,
what you just lost me. That's why I'm not an atheist.
You had me all along thinking that's proof for God.
So to me, that says something about it worked if
it allowed people who were atheists and then also strong
(08:54):
believers in God to say it's got me thinking, it's
got me talking. And even Jody Foss I believe, said
that at the time she was an atheist, but it
made her think. So a bunch of atheists making a
movie about God via science, yeah, very very interesting. I
think that the division between science and religion is one
(09:15):
of the core dividers in our culture today and has
been for a long time. And yet this movie does
something interesting. It bridges those gaps and says the commonality
between science and religion is faith right, right, because science
cannot prove everything right and much cannot be proven with religion,
(09:36):
and it requires faith, it requires a belief. This goes
back to that concept of taking the leap of faith. Right.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
That's just like what Roy Neary did at the end
of Close Encounters. That's what Elie araway has to do
in order to get to that final destination is take
this massive leap of faith that this craft they've built
is actually going to carry her safely to wherever the
destination is.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
What's fascinating, by the way, is that on the leap
of faith topic is that there are other films that
have invoked messages from space. We've already talked about Charlie
Sheen doing The Arrival where he literally has the same
role as Jody Foster has the guy picking up that
first message. But then if you think about it two
(10:19):
thousand and one in Space Odyssey, there's a message coming
from Jupiter that they pick up. I believe the X
Files second season premiere had a message from space. The
Three Body Problem, which was just made into a Netflix
series last year, starts with us sending a message to
space and then it getting returned in a violent way.
(10:40):
And by the way, sending a message into space is classic.
Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan met his wife Andrewian and I
hope I pronounced her name correctly, but they met while
designing the gold plate that went on the Voyager spacecraft
that showed the naked man and woman and tried to
(11:00):
explain to an alien race what humanity was. It had
music on it. In some respects, you can say it's
kind of naive because you're assuming that if anybody, first
of all, nobody will ever find it. But if they did,
you don't know who they are. And that's why Stephen
Hawking a few years back back in twenty ten, I think,
said we should be careful before we start sending messages
(11:20):
into space, because maybe the people who get it won't
be so nice to us if they show up. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Well, but that also reminds me of another connection here,
which is when you talk about Carl Sagan and participating
in the Voyager project. I know Sagan didn't work for
the government, but he was part of the ad hoc
committee to review Project Blue Book back in nineteen sixty six,
and I'm guessing he was brought onto that because he
was a known skeptic. Well, I think probably it's time
(11:50):
for the great Parking lot Ufo debate between me and
the esteemed Carl Sagan. Here's what happened. Sagan had a
stablished himself as kind of a skeptic. As you pointed out, Brent,
He'd gone on many shows he had talked about how
he thought the universe was teeming with life, you know,
the famous billions and billions of planets out there and
(12:12):
that kind of thing, and thank you. So anyway, he
said that the problem was UFOs. He didn't buy because
he didn't see the evidence and they couldn't be here
because the distances were too great, which is we'll get
into more in a moment, but we both know that
he started out in his young life as a kid,
and then into the sixties where he actually did talk
(12:34):
about how UFOs could be aliens from space, and then
he had a change of heart. All right, so that's
the backdrop. Okay, all right, it's nineteen eighty one, it's August,
and Voyager two is having an encounter with Saturn, which
means it's going to do a close flyby of Saturn.
It's going to send back photos. Everybody's very excited. I
was an anchor reporter at the PBS station in Los
(12:56):
Angeles KSET, and I had been put in charge of
caring and hosting a show called Saturn and Beyond. So
I thought, what can I do to make this exciting,
you know, to get some audience here? And I thought well,
Carl Sagan the year before had just recorded and produced
Cosmos at that same station. I thought, if anybody has
(13:19):
something that they owe the station, it's Carl. I mean,
he spent an entire year or more there recording it.
So I put a call through and ask him if
he would appear as our live guest, and he said yeah.
So he came out that night. He was the guest.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
It was pretty cool. We got to talk about how
what was going on, and you know how great the
guy is. You know, he was just phenomenal on TV.
Tell me what you remember about Carl's persona, what's your
take on how he was?
Speaker 1 (13:48):
I mean, when I became aware of Carl Sagan, he
struck me as the prototypical scientist, Like I believed every
word that came out of his mouth. He seemed incredibly learned,
if not a genius, and there was a bit of
arrogance to him, but probably well earned because like I said,
(14:10):
he seemed like a very smart guy. But he seemed
like an ambassador for space travel. That's how he came
off to me.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
And the guy who sort of has taking his place
is Neil the grass Tyson, who is not nearly as
charming as Carl Sagan and not nearly as nice. I mean,
Neil de grass Tyson sort of just laughs at people
that have any belief or experience or whatever with the
UFO topic. And Sagan never was that. Sagan was a
really cool guy. I mean, it was really happy to
(14:38):
have him on the show. I didn't know at the
time that he was a pothead. He smoked a lot
of pot he wrote he was on he was high
most of the time he was writing that famed feature treatment.
This is a seventies, late seventies, right, And by the way,
this is not a story about me and Carl Sagan
getting high in the parking lot, which might get a
even better story. But okay, So we did the show.
(15:00):
It went great, and then he was charming and he
went out and shook hands with the crew and everything,
and as the sort of the host producer, I thought,
you know, it's kind of my job to be a host,
So I said, can I walk you to your car?
And I think he had a he's going to do
nightline out at JPL, so he had to sort of
get out of there and get going. So I walked
(15:21):
him out to the car and as I'm walking this
guy out to the car. I don't know why this
exactly came to my head like something I should do.
But I said, you know, I'm not sure I agree
with you on this UFO issue. And he's like, now,
I don't have the exact words of everything here. My
memory is not that good. But he kind of looked
at me like, oh, yes, you know one of those
(15:42):
very skeptical things that I said, Well, look, you're a
famous for saying there are billions and billions of stars
out there in the universe. You've even said the universe
is teeming with life and that some of it has
to be intelligent, and that it's clearly more advanced than
we are, even by maybe a million years. But you
also insist these other beings could never be here on
Earth because the distances are too vast. And he looks
(16:05):
at me and he goes he had been smiling up
at this point. He got a little less smiling and
he goes, what's your point? And I went, well, you know,
it's just that if you're going to look for radio
signals from other civilizations, I mean, if they're so far
advanced from us, maybe they know physics better than we do.
Maybe they're already here. And if you're going to be
(16:26):
looking for radio signals which you haven't received yet, why
wouldn't you want to look into the evidence that we
already have here on earth for people who have seen
things and pilots from the military and commercial and you know,
you know where this goes. It was just me and
Carl standing there going volley return, volley return, volley return,
(16:48):
and I have to say he didn't budge at all.
I mean, I didn't convince Carl Sagan that he should
be studying UFOs, and he didn't convince me by the
way that they weren't real. And he was trying enough.
And then about fifteen minutes in he said, well, I've
got to get to JPL and he got in a car,
which the one thing I don't remember what the car was, Brent,
I remember it was a super cool roadster kind of thing. So, okay,
(17:12):
my last image of Carl Sagan is he gets in
this hot sports car and he goes motoring off with
the top down off to JPL. And I've never forgotten
that because he had a way. I guess I would
just say this. He could have been really mean about it,
but he wasn't. He didn't agree with me, but he
(17:33):
didn't make me feel small, which Neil deGrasse Tyson would
do if you got in a debate with him. It
was just cool. But I just felt like, this isn't
there's something not right here, that something's not quite right,
because he, as a scientist, should want to look at data,
and there was plenty of data from pilots, et cetera,
(17:56):
which is going to lead to part two of this story.
I guess which you were part of.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Well, I was just gonna say for being such a
nice guy, he kind of got the treatment from us
when we put him in Dark Skies as a character.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
I feel really bad about this story we're going to
tell because you know, in full disclosure, I guess we
should just say during the production of Contact, during the
early production, Carl Sagan died. He had a virulent cancer.
He'd been fighting it for like three or four years
and he passed away. Which we didn't know that he
(18:29):
was ill when we made him a character in Dark Skies,
but he was. Yeah, I had no idea, me neither.
I mean, it makes me feel bad in retrospect. Anyway,
tee it up and you run with it.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
So here's the thing. Later on in the first season
of Dark Skies, we were looking to, you know, bring
in other characters and storylines from pop culture, and even
though there was no proof that Carl Sagan worked for
the government said he was involved in Project Blue Book,
we decided, well, let's say that he did work for
(19:06):
the government secretly and that informed his positions, and so
we brought him in as kind of the chief scientist
working for Majestic twelve.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
You know, Brent, I have to say, he's in the
final two episodes, right. One episode is called Strangers in
the Night and he's in that one that's where he
gets recruited, and he's in our final episode called Bloodlines.
Here's the thing that I thought was so interesting about
it though, because it actually mirrors something close to what
I think might have happened, which is in our episode
(19:37):
where Carl Sagan is recruited, he gets picked up by
the Majestic twelve folks and he's freaking out because he's saying,
this is kidnapping. You know, you're kidnapping me. And our
Carl Sagan was played by a wonderful actor named Joe
Erla and he's very interesting he's not doing a complete impersonation.
It's good. He's a good actor. So he's playing Carl
and he says, you've kidnapped me. They head of Majestic
(20:00):
twelve says to him, I want you to understand you're
in absolutely no danger, doctor Sagan. We have information you
probably want to hear, and if you want to hear it,
we'll be happy to tell you. But at that point
you're going to be working for us. If you want,
I can pull the car over right now and let
you out, and if I do, you'll never find out
(20:20):
what we know. And the choice is entirely yours. And
of course, who can take store number one? And he says,
tell me what you know. They bring him in on
the whole alien scenario, and his job is to be
their chief scientist, as you said, but also to become
the chief skeptic to America, falling in the footsteps of
(20:46):
Donald Menzel, who had done it in the fifties, who
was a Harvard astronomer who it looks like may have
been a part of the Majestic twelve organization. He's listed
on the documents, but he was America's most public skeptic
and debunker right.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Well, so here's the interesting thing. Everything we just talked
about is obviously purely fiction. We have no idea what
Carl Sagan was doing with his personal life, what choices
he was making to gain knowledge or not gain, you know,
and why he was a skeptic. All of these things
are not available to us. But put aside Sagan's personal
(21:22):
beliefs and even a potential government allegiance, Contact the movie
raises some interesting questions because I think one of the
things I'd like to do is turn this back on Hollywood,
and the question is who decides what movies get made
in Hollywood?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Now?
Speaker 1 (21:37):
You look at what you described as the Journey of Contact,
starting off, as you know, a treatment written in the
late seventies, I think seventy nine. You said that, then
went through a bunch of development hell, and then that
prompted Carl and Ann to write the novel, which then
got optioned and eventually turned into a movie. And so
I guess the question is did it become a movie
(22:01):
just out of what they call on the biz luck
and timing right or is there something else going on?
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Now?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
And here's the thing, Look, it's ridiculous to say that
every movie or every TV series is part of this
managed disclosure that a lot of people believe is going on,
or disclosure or disinformation. But is there potentially a macro
narrative that's taking shape over the course of decades right
that you have to pull way back to be able
(22:30):
to see the pattern emerging. So if this is what
I want to do, if you look at the connections
between the last movie we did, Close Encounters of the
Third Kind, came out in seventy seven, and Contact, which
came out in nineteen ninety seven, a lot had changed
culturally and specifically with regards to space travel, because in
(22:51):
eighty six was the Challenger disaster, which took the wind
out of a lot of people's sales and made space
travel a little less romantic and a little bit more scary.
And there's plenty of dissimilarities between these two movies. You know,
you've got physical aliens versus interdimensional beings, you've got physical
nuts and bolts craft versus interdimensional travel. But there is
(23:15):
this recurring theme between those two movies, and frankly a
lot of the movies in between, which is nhi are
more involved than humans, but like us, there are benevolent
and malevolent Nhi. And so now you say, well, from
one movie to another, if you say, well, if there
was an agenda, they wouldn't be saying in one movie,
(23:37):
well there's they're all good, right, it's it's it's et,
it's it's the little Gray Space brothers from Close Encounters,
or they're all bad like Independence Day or going back
to Charlie Sheen the Arrival. Right, So, how do we
how do we account for this? And is there something
to be gained by looking at that larger kind of
(23:58):
view of the narrative that's slowly been evolving over time
in Hollywood through a series of movies and television shows.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Great question, and because I have absolutely no good answer
to it right now, we're going to go to another
break and give me a time to figure out what
to say, so we'll be right back. I still don't
have a great answer, Brent, but I do have some context.
It is interesting in nineteen ninety seven, Contact, you'd have
(24:29):
to say, is about good aliens or good in NHI
non human intelligence, whatever they are exactly, although they're clearly
aliens from the Contact point of view. But what was
going on in the in the mid nineties from around
ninety three. On let's face it, you had the X Files,
which had captured everyone's imagination, and there was a giant
(24:50):
conspiracy and the aliens weren't necessarily the good guys. I
had a movie come out at that time called Official Denial,
where the name actually the aliens were pretty good because
I us in that movie. But then you had our
own show, Dark Skies. You had the Arrival Machine, where
they were not good people. They were trying to take
over our planet through nefarious means. You had Independence Day,
(25:13):
the blockbuster of ninety six, where well, everyone knows an
Independence Day, we fight aliens and we blow things up
and all that. What's interesting is in ninety six, well,
you and I were doing Dark Skies. Time magazine did
a cover story about this. They were saying that the
alien story had gotten so big that everybody was in
(25:36):
on the act, and we were one of the shows
that was highlighted for doing that. Absolutely. I know I
was quoted in it. I can't remember what the quote was,
and it probably wasn't all that important, but it was
in it. So what's interesting, though, is most of the
product that was part of this explosive new reckoning in
the nineties was bad aliens, aliens that want our own
(26:00):
planet and want it for reasons where it wasn't exactly
good for us, you know. Even Actually, if you go
back to ninety three when X Files debuted, you also
had Fire in the Sky, the Travis Walton case, which
we'll be doing a show on later in the season.
But that was not good. The aliens weren't good there either,
(26:20):
at least as they were portrayed in the film. And
then along comes Contact that says, you know what, not
only can the aliens be good, they can still have
their own agenda, but they can be on our side
more or less, or at least like they're the Big Brothers,
sort of almost Spielbergian, the benevolent Space Brothers kind of thing.
(26:43):
And I find that whole context very interesting. And at
the same time, I will also say this, I don't
know if this says something about Eufology or Contact as
a feature film, but most people think you can't make
a good alien movie without aliens and some sort of conflict.
But in reality, Contact is considered a very very good
movie and nothing gets well, actually there is, something gets
(27:06):
blown up. The first version of the spaceship, the build
gets blown up yep, So I guess they had to
blow something up. But otherwise it's very calm, and I
don't know if that's part of an agenda or not.
So I think I've just stalled and I haven't answered
the question. What is your answer? Well, I appreciate the stall.
You took us on a nice detour there. I want
to go back to something our friend JC said to
(27:29):
us and our infamous encounter with them in your backyard.
He said that the disinformation campaign right was strong, and
that what he was doing was working with the group
from Oni to counter that with a disclosure program, right,
and that what their goal was was to work with
(27:50):
Hollywood to slowly.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Disclose kind of. I think that was the drip, the
first concept of drip feeding disclosure over time using the
veil of fiction, right. So I think this is a
key idea, is if again, if that were true, and
we go back and we look at just a spectrum
(28:13):
from seventy seven to ninety seven before we kind of
really widen the iris in the three episodes we've talked
about so far, one of the central messages that you
could glean from looking at just that two decades of
Hollywood data, is that there is a message, right, There
is a core message that is above all of the
(28:33):
narratives or all of the plots, and that is we
are not alone. But the visitors are not that different
from us except for their mental and physical capabilities. Rights,
that's where they are above us. But in terms of
being like us, there are good ones, there are bad ones.
There are ones who are trying to help lesser rass
(28:55):
there are some that are predatory, right, And so that actually,
going even back to Sagan's idea of billions and billions
of stars out there, it would make sense that there's
not just one other race in the entire galaxy or universe.
There's got to be many of them. And what I
(29:19):
feel like Contact did well is it expanded the conversation
and it said it doesn't have to just be from
planets right that are twenty six light years away. It
can be something where it could be much further. And
by the way, when we get there, it's not even
a physical place. Jodi Foster as character Ellie, goes to
(29:42):
a place that has been digitally recreated or virtually recreated
from her memories from a painting that she did as
a kid. Right, which says a lot about the power
of these aliens or these non human intelligences that can
pose as her dead father right to connect with her.
That is a level of sophistication and be even beyond benevolence,
(30:05):
and which is, by the way, the last point I'll
make I think part of where I look at contact
and I see that it introduced this concept of spirituality again,
not as kind of the central tension between science and religion,
but also attributing spiritual qualities to the aliens, to the
point where today there's a discussion that it's either angels
(30:26):
right or aliens right.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Certainly in the religious community, that is true. You know
what I just realized where you were talking, You and
I are such undisciplined podcasters that we managed to get
this far into a program and not actually explain to
people what the plot of this movie was. So I'm
just going to fill in one thing before we go
any further, which is they get a message from space.
(30:50):
We're condensing here, but Ellie gets this message from space.
It goes public. It's not kept secret, it's not the
government keeping it secret. They tell her everybody what it is,
and then they all get to work to try to
figure out what it says, and what it is is
a detailed schematic for some kind of machine, not necessarily
a spaceship. Nobody knows what it does, but they build one,
(31:15):
and a terrorist blows up that first version, and then
a rich guy sort of Elon Musk who's dying in
space played by John Hurt, has built a second one,
and it turns out that our main character, Ellie, gets
to get on that craft. It does a bunch of
(31:35):
whirrying and stuff when they turn it on, and nobody
is quite sure what's going to happen. Then in an instant,
it stops and there's Ellie and everybody goes, I guess
nothing happened. Only that's where it gets interesting.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Right, because everything she experiences we experience. But everyone back
on Earth saw the ball fall in two seconds and
assumed nothing happened. There was no encounter.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
And what's so great about that, though, is the eighteen hours.
They find out that there's eighteen hours of recording of
this digital noise. But it's not like it did only
take seconds. It took eighteen hours, But nobody believes her.
And I've always wondered because eighteen is such a specific number. Remember,
(32:23):
back during Watergate, Nixon Head is eighteen and a half
minute gap in the Watergate tapes, and now this is
the eighteen hour gap. I don't know if they were
making any political statement about that, but interestingly enough, that's
not in the book, the eighteen hour thing. It's not
in the book. The first screenwriter put that in, and
it actually works very well, and there's been controversy over time.
(32:46):
In those dozen drafts or different writers, there were many
different endings to it. It was possible to have an
ending where it was very clear that she had gone someplace,
and they sort of ended on one where it looked
like the guy in the government didn't want to admit
she'd gone someplace. And she probably went someplace. I mean,
most people came to the belief that she had gone someplace,
(33:09):
but she had gone there in a way that violated
the laws of physics, Which takes me back to Carl
Sagan and the argument in the parking Lot. Yeah, he's
written a book and allowed a movie to be made
about it where what happens in it violates the laws
of physics, as at least he knew them at the time.
And yet that's the building block of the entire book.
(33:32):
So I found that interesting. She gets there wherever she
goes through. At first, in the first drafts, it was
a black hole, you know, she traveled through a series
of black holes. And then as I understand it, Sagan
revised that when he did a little more investigation into wormholes.
Now between you and me, I could I couldn't tell
(33:53):
a black hole from a wormhole if you, you know,
put him in front of my nose here.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
But I think, parent, I think a wormhole has lighting
because I could see inside of it exactly.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
That's good difference, good point of view. And by the way,
the sequence where she actually travels through this collection of
wormholes is very similar in its impact emotionally to what
happens in two thousand and one, that sequence that blew
everybody's mind at the end, and it's really powerful, and
(34:24):
you think about what's happening. She gets there and the
guy who isn't really her dad but looks like her dad. It's,
you know, a very efficient way to play an alien.
You get an alien, but you hire David Morse to
play it. But David Morse, her father, says that the
alien race or the consciousness he represents didn't build this. Yes,
(34:45):
somebody else built this subway through wormholes, and they don't
know who it was, which really blows your mind.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yes, and it's all his point is, it's all just
a test, right for different civilization to see if they're
ready to rise to a higher level, and I suppose
become non human intelligence, right, because that alien you're describing
that turns into her father, the first glimpse of it
is just this weird vacillating light energy. It's an energy
(35:16):
being that just manifests and take the form of her father.
One of the other things I want to talk about too,
is that that whole experience with her everyone else seeing
the objective reality, right of the ball falling to the
ground right in the big device that they made.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
And by the way, just to clarify, Brent, because people
are not the machine that Ellie aka Jodie Foster is
in is a giant metal sphere. Yes, I'm sorry. And
so when that ball drop, the ball drops, it literally
falls into the water or something that it falls, Yes.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
It falls, and in just a matter of seconds, and
that's the objective reality everyone sees. However, this movie introduces
the concept of subjective reality right, which then takes into
account quantum physics and how reality is dependent upon how
you observe it and who the observer is. And so
(36:15):
I think that's a really interesting thing because her experience
correlates with what many people who have experienced the phenomenon say,
which is they had a very unexplainable experience that felt
surreal and strange and was totally unique to them. And
by the way, that correlates to many abduction experiences where
(36:37):
there is no actual evidence right, Ellie came back, and
other than the fact that we experienced it with her,
she had no tangible evidence she could present, right. And
so this is another thing that is a common theme
through all of the movies we've talked about so far,
or all of the movies and TV shows, which is
that there is a government cover up going on regarding
(37:02):
the truth about UAP and the phenomenon. That is touched
upon in Dark Skies obviously certainly in Close Encounters where
they try and stage a whole quarantine to keep everyone
from learning the truth. And in this movie we have
the whole congressional hearing at the end, where it's not
just that the government is trying to cover something up.
(37:22):
They go through a public humiliation process, right to make
her look stupid, right, and to cast doubt on her story. Meanwhile,
they have that eighteen hour videotape that you had, that
you mentioned, and they have evidence that something happened. But
also key is they don't even know what it was now,
(37:45):
they can't even explain it.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
It's what it does well is as a movie. And
I don't know if there's any science behind this, but
as a movie, it does take you back and forth
where you get to say, what's really going on here
at the end, because as you point out, we do
experience it with her. We go on that trip, that
journey whatever it is, through the wormholes and we see it.
So you go, okay, that was real. Then they make
(38:09):
you the people are questioning it, and it's like, no,
she didn't really do that. She had all this happen
in her mind. Okay, so now that's the explanation. And
then they find the eighteen hours and now suddenly you're like, well,
wait a minute, could that be what really happened? And
then they point out, well, you know, just if you're
going to put something in a giant electromagnetic machine, you
(38:32):
could probably screw up the time and space on a
digital recording, so maybe it didn't actually happen. And then
you put her inside this hearing where they do everything
they can to tell people not to take her as
a credible witness, and then at the end of the
movie you realize she was certainly very changed by it.
(38:53):
But again, if you wanted to believe that it didn't
really happen, I guess you could still believe that. And
if you wanted to believe that it did you, I mean,
either way you can go. And Robert Semechis, in interviews
that he's done about this film over the years, has
clearly said he wanted the ending to be that way,
to be a little hard to figure out, and he
(39:15):
got it. But he also said, and I find this
very interesting. I'm curious what your thoughts were. He said
he thought it prevented his film from being the big
film it really could have been. It was a big film,
but it was released the same weekend as Men in Black,
and it came in number two. And his take was,
if only he'd said it was totally real, that that
(39:37):
would have given an audience more to grab on to
do you think.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
So, I absolutely do think so. I think it probably
would have been embraced more in the mainstream. And the
same way that the end of Close Encounter is unambiguous. Right,
he gets on the ship, right, there's no like, there's
no oh, he hit his head and he's imagining maybe
that he's going on to the ship. He gets on
the ship at the end, and we're left to believe
(40:02):
that he's off on some wild space adventure as an
ambassador for mankind. The ambiguity at the end of this movie,
I really appreciate. It's one of the reasons that I
love rewatching it because it keeps changing my point of view,
Like you know, so, I think that's great, But I
think that did probably prevent it from catching on in
the mainstream. But something else that I think is fascinating
(40:25):
here is that this idea that the government in that movie,
the simple concept that they were not willing to disclose
all of this to the public. When by the way, Bryce,
and I say this because you wrote the book on disclosure,
literally with Richard Dolan, they have a disclosure sequence in
(40:47):
early on in Contact that is a montage event that
lasts about a minute, right, it has absolutely almost no
impact at all in culture, everyone's like, oh, okay, there's
intelligent life. That's great, but let's get this machine built
and see where it takes us.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
It is extraordinary. I did well. I'm glad you brought
that up because I wanted to at least get to that.
While this movie is not inherently euphological as some of
the ones that we'll be talking about over the next
weeks to come, it does talk about disclosure in a
way where you could ask, is that really people are
going to respond because it raises a question, is what's
(41:25):
potentially and inherently difficult about disclosure when we realize that
they're looking at our nuclear power plants and our nuclear weapons.
Is that what is disturbing about disclosure? Or is what's
disturbing about disclosure is just people coming to the conclusion
that we're not alone. And I think what Contact seems
to say is the mirror act of learning we're not
(41:48):
alone is not going to freak everybody out. Of course,
the fact that they're way out there and there of
no inherent threat that probably is a little more so.
I will say this. You mentioned it was very direct,
but it was short. Apparently in George Miller's version of things,
(42:08):
there was a much stronger bit about disclosure. It went
on longer, and it went down different alleyways and so forth.
I think George Miller's version was going to be more
like Twin Peaks, I think, or something. It just was
a different It was a different take on the material,
and clearly, as I understood it, he was going down
(42:30):
a different road about disclosure that it would be a
little more disturbing to people. Let's take a quick final
break here and come back with some concluding thoughts. What
do you say about that? I'm all in all right
as we round the corner to wrap this thing up, though,
I just one of the things that I responded to
as we've been talking about that ending is it does
(42:50):
go back and forth. You can believe it, you cannot
believe it. It's about the nature of reality and that
kind of thing. And there's just something that there's a
line that really stands out to me in this film
that I want to pose to people because it kind
of does a very good job of allowing you to
think about what we're up against when we talk about
(43:10):
the phenomenon Ellie has gone through this thing. Well, actually,
I think it's before she's gone through this thing. But
she's talking to Palmer Joss, the Matthew McConaughey character, and
he says to her, do you love your father? And
she's kind of taken aback, like what why are you
asking me? That he goes, do you love your father?
(43:33):
And she goes, well, yes, and he says, prove it.
And I kind of liked that because it does take
you back for a second. It's like, well, of course
it's a fact that she loves her father, but where's
the proof. Yes, where is that proof that you got
(43:54):
a Christmas card from him, or you send him a present,
or that you told people you loved him. That's not proof,
that's evidence. That's evidence. But then again, all of that
evidence could be questioned by somebody that says subjectively, well
I think I love my father more. I do a
lot more for him than you've done, so I'm not
(44:15):
sure that you do love him. There are going to
be films we talk about that I'm not going to
recommend everybody go out and watch for sure, they're coming,
but this isn't one of them, because this is a
thoughtful one. It is aged pretty well for being thirty
years old. It's got great acting in it. Zamechis does
a good job on it. The only knock I have
(44:35):
on Zamecha's doing it is the soundtrack sounds to me
just like the Forrest Gump soundtrack. I just can't get
it out of me. Every time I watch Contact, I'm like,
wait a minute, is Tom Hanks coming into this film soon?
Because it just feels like that. But it makes you
think about those things, and I have spent the better
part of my life in contemplating the phenomenon, thinking about
(44:59):
this science person religion thing. And the reason I find
it so compelling is that there are a whole lot
of scientists who believe science proves God. They believe that
when you see how intricate the universe is and how
large it is, and how the rules of physics and
things work, that that wasn't just random, that maybe there's
(45:22):
a God that had a part of that. So I think,
as over the episodes that will be in our future here, Brent,
it's good to think about that because there are some
people that think, as you pointed out, that we're not
talking about perhaps extraterrestrials, we're talking about angels and demons.
And it goes back to the Bible with Ezekiel's wheel
(45:46):
and all that really being a flying saucer. So it's
a thoughtful, important film. I happen to think people are
sometimes wasting their time with SETI when they should be,
in fact looking into the data from pilots about real
actual UFOs. But we'll leave that for future episodes. I
enjoyed it, and I'll tell you something, and only did
(46:09):
I enjoy it when I first saw it because I
had read the book. I enjoyed it when you and
I watched it. We screened it here at my house
in preparation for this, and I enjoyed watching it that
second time because I saw so many things in it
that I totally missed seeing in the theaters. Yes.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
No, it's like I said, I've seen it at least
twenty times. I see something different each time, and I
think twenty times what I leaved that earlier.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah, so I reserved that those numbers are Godfather numbers
for me. But go ahead, Oh no, Godfather is more
like forty or fifty. Oh my godness, all right, Okay,
keep going.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
I know I'm a man of repetition, so I think
for me, the key thing was, as I said before,
that this incorporation of spirituality right even to a degree
you could start to say, is it the introduction of
the afterlife being tied to aliens?
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Right?
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Because the alien appears as her dead father, right, And
so that whole idea that we go searching for extraterrestrial life,
we go searching for aliens, and what do we find?
We find ourselves? Right, That the universe itself is this mirror,
and the more we stare at it looking for answers,
the more we learn about ourselves and our own reality.
(47:24):
And I think that that was the first movie that
even abstractly made me start to think about the UAP,
you know, phenomenon in a whole new way that I
had never thought before.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Well amen to that, brother. I feel like we could
probably talk about this world of contact, not to mention
the movie for a long time more. I'm sure it'll
come up more as we discuss things, But for right now,
I'm ready to sign out. And it's been a pleasure
seeing you for this one, and I just leave everyone
with this thought. Watch the Skies, Watch the Skies, Sound
(47:59):
Light and Frequent See is an iHeart podcast produced by
Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for
Steller Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna
Stump and Hamilton Lighthouser. And your hosts and executive producers
are Bryce Abel, That's Me and Brent Friedman Watch the
Skies
If they still have a disinformation campaign going on. Is
it trillions of dollars?
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Oh boy? Right?
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Where does it go? Where do those tentacles lead? What
are the levers that they're pulling? It really raises a
lot of questions.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
All I can say is whether they spent millions or
billions or trillions on it. Whatever they were buying with
it sucked us into it. I'm Bryce Sable. Have you
(00:45):
ever wondered if there's a secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs?
Speaker 1 (00:49):
I'm Brent Friedman, and you are listening to sound, light
and frequency.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
And in this episode, we're going to take a trip
through a wormhole and make contact within inner dimensional alien.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
One who happens to look a whole lot like Jody
Foster's father.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
We're talking about Contact today, which we're using as kind
of a portal. It's a film, of course, but we're
using it as a portal to talk about all kinds
of things, like what it's about SETI, the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence, but also about what that means, whether there's
life out there in the universe, what does it mean
for UFOs. We've got some personal stories, but what's interesting
(01:37):
for those of you who maybe haven't seen Contact, or
haven't seen it for a while. Remember this is the
one where Jody Foster plays someone who's listening for signals
from space. She finds one and then the games begin,
which we'll be talking about. But what I find fascinating
about it, Brent, as we bring you in here, is
(01:58):
that maybe, maybe, just maybe the aliens don't come to us,
is what Carl Sagan, who wrote the book and then
inspired the film, But maybe they bring us to them.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, that is one of the key differences between that
and certainly a lot of the movies we've seen, particularly
the last movie we did, which was Close Encounters. But
there's some other really interesting distinctions that Contact has, which,
by the way, one of my favorite movies, not just
in this genre but of all time. I've probably seen
it twenty times. There are no UFOs in Contact, there
(02:31):
are no aliens, there's an energy being that presents itself
as an Nhi. There's a really interesting spiritual element within
the show as well. And most importantly, Interdimensional Travel might
have been one of the first movies that introduced interdimensional travel.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
It's really gone down in history where it has improved
with every year. People really have found this film. Instead
of moving on from it, they found it and re
embraced it. Just so everyone literally does understand what we're
talking about. If you were to give Contact, the film
that was directed by Robert Zamechis and came out in
nineteen ninety seven, if you're due the log line for it,
(03:11):
this is what I think it is. When a brilliant
SETI scientist deciphers a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence, she
must fight political opposition, personal doubts, and humanities fear of
the unknown to become Earth's first ambassador to the stars.
It's a little high falutin, but it is one sentence,
so therefore it's a log line. Yes, well done.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Well, We've already talked about a number of unique qualities
that Contact has, But one of the most important connections
that I think we can make is to Carl Sagan,
who was not just the author, but was also somebody
that was known in pop culture for his views on
the search for extraterrestrial life. And also Bryce, if I'm
(03:52):
not mistaken, you have a personal connection to Carl Sagan.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I can't wait to talk about this one. I'm not
going to do it quite yet, but I did meet
Carl set and I was the host of a show
about the Voyager to Encounter with Saturn. He was my
guest and we got into an argument in the parking
lot afterwards about whether UFO should be acknowledged by him
or not, which we'll get to but before we do.
You know what I think is so fascinating about this
(04:18):
is every movie has a story behind the story, but
this one is really kind of complex and kind of
interesting and compelling. This started in nineteen seventy nine when
Carl Sagan and his wife Andrew and decided that they
would write a treatment for a feature film because he'd
(04:39):
been you know, he was the host, he was recording Cosmos,
which was this huge TV phenomenon at the time, and
they thought, well, let's capitalize on this. We can sell
a movie because we're hot right now. So they wrote
one hundred page treatment for a feature film and it
was picked. That's a script, yeah, and people that have
(04:59):
read I haven't been get my hands on it, but
people that have read it have often described it as
pretty much a script in narrative form. And it went
into development, as we call it in Hollywood development hell,
where it sat around. It really didn't sit around, but
for seven years, it didn't get instantly made. And over
the course of the lifetime of this film, Brent and
(05:19):
you and I can relate to this because we have
rewritten people, and we have been rewritten. But there were
like a dozen screenwriters who took a crack at this
script over the years.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
A dozen in seven years actually sounds small to me.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
It might even be well, actually that's just the first run, okay,
because all right, so Carl Sagan at some point decides,
you know, this isn't going as fast as I would
like it to have gone, so he decides to write
the book. And Carl Sagan, after my little encounter in
the parking lot, which, as I said, we're going to
get to, Carl Sagan decides to write this book. And
(05:54):
he does, and it becomes a really big popular book.
And I own one of the original copies it and
I read it at the time and I thought, wow,
this is really a great piece of writing, and it's
really mind blowing and I enjoyed it. So then that
book gets optioned and it goes back into the development process.
Now remember we're starting in nineteen seventy nine. The book's
(06:14):
coming out in nineteen eighty five. It's a big hit,
and it goes back into development. Producers change, directors change.
At one point Spielberg's going to direct it, At another
point George Miller's going to direct it. It ends up
with Zemechas of course, it goes on and on. They
rack up the dozen writers, and finally it does get
(06:35):
made in nineteen ninety seven, and it has been a football.
It's been kicked around, everybody's said their vision of it,
and I think the thing that is kind of interesting
for me because usually I'm sure you probably agree, but
when Hollywood writes a project that much, it tends to
level it down to almost nothingness, and you just kind
(06:55):
of go, that's a really nobody's vision. It's not yeah,
it's like nobody's vision. But in reality, I think we're
both fans of this film.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Absolutely. It was one of the first films, I believe,
in this genre that introduced the whole concept of religion
and spirituality and made that a focus. But then the
irony is correct me if I'm wrong, Sagan was an
atheist totally, and so the fact that it was so
front and center and the storytelling was interesting but also
not just that he was an atheist, but he didn't
(07:26):
believe in UFOs.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Is that correct? Yeah? But quick story though about Sagan
being an atheist. Okay, So the movie is really kind
of a bit of a back and forth about science
versus religion, and I think that that's really compelling. Science
is represented by the Jodie Foster character, Elier Away, who
(07:48):
is a scientist. If she can't prove it, tough luck
where she got. On the other side, Matthew McConaughey playing
a guy named Palmer something Palmer Joss, which is quite
a feature name, I guess, and McConaughey is this religious guy,
and so they go back and forth. They even sleep together.
They're not in the book, but I guess in Hollywood
they thought somebody better have sex or it's not a movie.
(08:11):
So they do sleep together, and that's compelling in its
own right, I guess. But Matthew McConaughey told this story
once where he said Sagan ended up on the set
and he mesmerized everybody by going on and on about
the size of the universe and everything, and everybody is
just like, oh my god, this is so interesting and
(08:33):
so compelling. And then at the end of it, Sagan goes,
and that's why I'm an atheist. And Matthew McConaughey's take was,
what you just lost me. That's why I'm not an atheist.
You had me all along thinking that's proof for God.
So to me, that says something about it worked if
it allowed people who were atheists and then also strong
(08:54):
believers in God to say it's got me thinking, it's
got me talking. And even Jody Foss I believe, said
that at the time she was an atheist, but it
made her think. So a bunch of atheists making a
movie about God via science, yeah, very very interesting. I
think that the division between science and religion is one
(09:15):
of the core dividers in our culture today and has
been for a long time. And yet this movie does
something interesting. It bridges those gaps and says the commonality
between science and religion is faith right, right, because science
cannot prove everything right and much cannot be proven with religion,
(09:36):
and it requires faith, it requires a belief. This goes
back to that concept of taking the leap of faith. Right.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
That's just like what Roy Neary did at the end
of Close Encounters. That's what Elie araway has to do
in order to get to that final destination is take
this massive leap of faith that this craft they've built
is actually going to carry her safely to wherever the
destination is.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
What's fascinating, by the way, is that on the leap
of faith topic is that there are other films that
have invoked messages from space. We've already talked about Charlie
Sheen doing The Arrival where he literally has the same
role as Jody Foster has the guy picking up that
first message. But then if you think about it two
(10:19):
thousand and one in Space Odyssey, there's a message coming
from Jupiter that they pick up. I believe the X
Files second season premiere had a message from space. The
Three Body Problem, which was just made into a Netflix
series last year, starts with us sending a message to
space and then it getting returned in a violent way.
(10:40):
And by the way, sending a message into space is classic.
Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan met his wife Andrewian and I
hope I pronounced her name correctly, but they met while
designing the gold plate that went on the Voyager spacecraft
that showed the naked man and woman and tried to
(11:00):
explain to an alien race what humanity was. It had
music on it. In some respects, you can say it's
kind of naive because you're assuming that if anybody, first
of all, nobody will ever find it. But if they did,
you don't know who they are. And that's why Stephen
Hawking a few years back back in twenty ten, I think,
said we should be careful before we start sending messages
(11:20):
into space, because maybe the people who get it won't
be so nice to us if they show up. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Well, but that also reminds me of another connection here,
which is when you talk about Carl Sagan and participating
in the Voyager project. I know Sagan didn't work for
the government, but he was part of the ad hoc
committee to review Project Blue Book back in nineteen sixty six,
and I'm guessing he was brought onto that because he
was a known skeptic. Well, I think probably it's time
(11:50):
for the great Parking lot Ufo debate between me and
the esteemed Carl Sagan. Here's what happened. Sagan had a
stablished himself as kind of a skeptic. As you pointed out, Brent,
He'd gone on many shows he had talked about how
he thought the universe was teeming with life, you know,
the famous billions and billions of planets out there and
(12:12):
that kind of thing, and thank you. So anyway, he
said that the problem was UFOs. He didn't buy because
he didn't see the evidence and they couldn't be here
because the distances were too great, which is we'll get
into more in a moment, but we both know that
he started out in his young life as a kid,
and then into the sixties where he actually did talk
(12:34):
about how UFOs could be aliens from space, and then
he had a change of heart. All right, so that's
the backdrop. Okay, all right, it's nineteen eighty one, it's August,
and Voyager two is having an encounter with Saturn, which
means it's going to do a close flyby of Saturn.
It's going to send back photos. Everybody's very excited. I
was an anchor reporter at the PBS station in Los
(12:56):
Angeles KSET, and I had been put in charge of
caring and hosting a show called Saturn and Beyond. So
I thought, what can I do to make this exciting,
you know, to get some audience here? And I thought well,
Carl Sagan the year before had just recorded and produced
Cosmos at that same station. I thought, if anybody has
(13:19):
something that they owe the station, it's Carl. I mean,
he spent an entire year or more there recording it.
So I put a call through and ask him if
he would appear as our live guest, and he said yeah.
So he came out that night. He was the guest.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
It was pretty cool. We got to talk about how
what was going on, and you know how great the
guy is. You know, he was just phenomenal on TV.
Tell me what you remember about Carl's persona, what's your
take on how he was?
Speaker 1 (13:48):
I mean, when I became aware of Carl Sagan, he
struck me as the prototypical scientist, Like I believed every
word that came out of his mouth. He seemed incredibly learned,
if not a genius, and there was a bit of
arrogance to him, but probably well earned because like I said,
(14:10):
he seemed like a very smart guy. But he seemed
like an ambassador for space travel. That's how he came
off to me.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
And the guy who sort of has taking his place
is Neil the grass Tyson, who is not nearly as
charming as Carl Sagan and not nearly as nice. I mean,
Neil de grass Tyson sort of just laughs at people
that have any belief or experience or whatever with the
UFO topic. And Sagan never was that. Sagan was a
really cool guy. I mean, it was really happy to
(14:38):
have him on the show. I didn't know at the
time that he was a pothead. He smoked a lot
of pot he wrote he was on he was high
most of the time he was writing that famed feature treatment.
This is a seventies, late seventies, right, And by the way,
this is not a story about me and Carl Sagan
getting high in the parking lot, which might get a
even better story. But okay, So we did the show.
(15:00):
It went great, and then he was charming and he
went out and shook hands with the crew and everything,
and as the sort of the host producer, I thought,
you know, it's kind of my job to be a host,
So I said, can I walk you to your car?
And I think he had a he's going to do
nightline out at JPL, so he had to sort of
get out of there and get going. So I walked
(15:21):
him out to the car and as I'm walking this
guy out to the car. I don't know why this
exactly came to my head like something I should do.
But I said, you know, I'm not sure I agree
with you on this UFO issue. And he's like, now,
I don't have the exact words of everything here. My
memory is not that good. But he kind of looked
at me like, oh, yes, you know one of those
(15:42):
very skeptical things that I said, Well, look, you're a
famous for saying there are billions and billions of stars
out there in the universe. You've even said the universe
is teeming with life and that some of it has
to be intelligent, and that it's clearly more advanced than
we are, even by maybe a million years. But you
also insist these other beings could never be here on
Earth because the distances are too vast. And he looks
(16:05):
at me and he goes he had been smiling up
at this point. He got a little less smiling and
he goes, what's your point? And I went, well, you know,
it's just that if you're going to look for radio
signals from other civilizations, I mean, if they're so far
advanced from us, maybe they know physics better than we do.
Maybe they're already here. And if you're going to be
(16:26):
looking for radio signals which you haven't received yet, why
wouldn't you want to look into the evidence that we
already have here on earth for people who have seen
things and pilots from the military and commercial and you know,
you know where this goes. It was just me and
Carl standing there going volley return, volley return, volley return,
(16:48):
and I have to say he didn't budge at all.
I mean, I didn't convince Carl Sagan that he should
be studying UFOs, and he didn't convince me by the
way that they weren't real. And he was trying enough.
And then about fifteen minutes in he said, well, I've
got to get to JPL and he got in a car,
which the one thing I don't remember what the car was, Brent,
I remember it was a super cool roadster kind of thing. So, okay,
(17:12):
my last image of Carl Sagan is he gets in
this hot sports car and he goes motoring off with
the top down off to JPL. And I've never forgotten
that because he had a way. I guess I would
just say this. He could have been really mean about it,
but he wasn't. He didn't agree with me, but he
(17:33):
didn't make me feel small, which Neil deGrasse Tyson would
do if you got in a debate with him. It
was just cool. But I just felt like, this isn't
there's something not right here, that something's not quite right,
because he, as a scientist, should want to look at data,
and there was plenty of data from pilots, et cetera,
(17:56):
which is going to lead to part two of this story.
I guess which you were part of.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Well, I was just gonna say for being such a
nice guy, he kind of got the treatment from us
when we put him in Dark Skies as a character.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
I feel really bad about this story we're going to
tell because you know, in full disclosure, I guess we
should just say during the production of Contact, during the
early production, Carl Sagan died. He had a virulent cancer.
He'd been fighting it for like three or four years
and he passed away. Which we didn't know that he
(18:29):
was ill when we made him a character in Dark Skies,
but he was. Yeah, I had no idea, me neither.
I mean, it makes me feel bad in retrospect. Anyway,
tee it up and you run with it.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
So here's the thing. Later on in the first season
of Dark Skies, we were looking to, you know, bring
in other characters and storylines from pop culture, and even
though there was no proof that Carl Sagan worked for
the government said he was involved in Project Blue Book,
we decided, well, let's say that he did work for
(19:06):
the government secretly and that informed his positions, and so
we brought him in as kind of the chief scientist
working for Majestic twelve.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
You know, Brent, I have to say, he's in the
final two episodes, right. One episode is called Strangers in
the Night and he's in that one that's where he
gets recruited, and he's in our final episode called Bloodlines.
Here's the thing that I thought was so interesting about
it though, because it actually mirrors something close to what
I think might have happened, which is in our episode
(19:37):
where Carl Sagan is recruited, he gets picked up by
the Majestic twelve folks and he's freaking out because he's saying,
this is kidnapping. You know, you're kidnapping me. And our
Carl Sagan was played by a wonderful actor named Joe
Erla and he's very interesting he's not doing a complete impersonation.
It's good. He's a good actor. So he's playing Carl
and he says, you've kidnapped me. They head of Majestic
(20:00):
twelve says to him, I want you to understand you're
in absolutely no danger, doctor Sagan. We have information you
probably want to hear, and if you want to hear it,
we'll be happy to tell you. But at that point
you're going to be working for us. If you want,
I can pull the car over right now and let
you out, and if I do, you'll never find out
(20:20):
what we know. And the choice is entirely yours. And
of course, who can take store number one? And he says,
tell me what you know. They bring him in on
the whole alien scenario, and his job is to be
their chief scientist, as you said, but also to become
the chief skeptic to America, falling in the footsteps of
(20:46):
Donald Menzel, who had done it in the fifties, who
was a Harvard astronomer who it looks like may have
been a part of the Majestic twelve organization. He's listed
on the documents, but he was America's most public skeptic
and debunker right.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Well, so here's the interesting thing. Everything we just talked
about is obviously purely fiction. We have no idea what
Carl Sagan was doing with his personal life, what choices
he was making to gain knowledge or not gain, you know,
and why he was a skeptic. All of these things
are not available to us. But put aside Sagan's personal
(21:22):
beliefs and even a potential government allegiance, Contact the movie
raises some interesting questions because I think one of the
things I'd like to do is turn this back on Hollywood,
and the question is who decides what movies get made
in Hollywood?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Now?
Speaker 1 (21:37):
You look at what you described as the Journey of Contact,
starting off, as you know, a treatment written in the
late seventies, I think seventy nine. You said that, then
went through a bunch of development hell, and then that
prompted Carl and Ann to write the novel, which then
got optioned and eventually turned into a movie. And so
I guess the question is did it become a movie
(22:01):
just out of what they call on the biz luck
and timing right or is there something else going on?
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Now?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
And here's the thing, Look, it's ridiculous to say that
every movie or every TV series is part of this
managed disclosure that a lot of people believe is going on,
or disclosure or disinformation. But is there potentially a macro
narrative that's taking shape over the course of decades right
that you have to pull way back to be able
(22:30):
to see the pattern emerging. So if this is what
I want to do, if you look at the connections
between the last movie we did, Close Encounters of the
Third Kind, came out in seventy seven, and Contact, which
came out in nineteen ninety seven, a lot had changed
culturally and specifically with regards to space travel, because in
(22:51):
eighty six was the Challenger disaster, which took the wind
out of a lot of people's sales and made space
travel a little less romantic and a little bit more scary.
And there's plenty of dissimilarities between these two movies. You know,
you've got physical aliens versus interdimensional beings, you've got physical
nuts and bolts craft versus interdimensional travel. But there is
(23:15):
this recurring theme between those two movies, and frankly a
lot of the movies in between, which is nhi are
more involved than humans, but like us, there are benevolent
and malevolent Nhi. And so now you say, well, from
one movie to another, if you say, well, if there
was an agenda, they wouldn't be saying in one movie,
(23:37):
well there's they're all good, right, it's it's it's et,
it's it's the little Gray Space brothers from Close Encounters,
or they're all bad like Independence Day or going back
to Charlie Sheen the Arrival. Right, So, how do we
how do we account for this? And is there something
to be gained by looking at that larger kind of
(23:58):
view of the narrative that's slowly been evolving over time
in Hollywood through a series of movies and television shows.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Great question, and because I have absolutely no good answer
to it right now, we're going to go to another
break and give me a time to figure out what
to say, so we'll be right back. I still don't
have a great answer, Brent, but I do have some context.
It is interesting in nineteen ninety seven, Contact, you'd have
(24:29):
to say, is about good aliens or good in NHI
non human intelligence, whatever they are exactly, although they're clearly
aliens from the Contact point of view. But what was
going on in the in the mid nineties from around
ninety three. On let's face it, you had the X Files,
which had captured everyone's imagination, and there was a giant
(24:50):
conspiracy and the aliens weren't necessarily the good guys. I
had a movie come out at that time called Official Denial,
where the name actually the aliens were pretty good because
I us in that movie. But then you had our
own show, Dark Skies. You had the Arrival Machine, where
they were not good people. They were trying to take
over our planet through nefarious means. You had Independence Day,
(25:13):
the blockbuster of ninety six, where well, everyone knows an
Independence Day, we fight aliens and we blow things up
and all that. What's interesting is in ninety six, well,
you and I were doing Dark Skies. Time magazine did
a cover story about this. They were saying that the
alien story had gotten so big that everybody was in
(25:36):
on the act, and we were one of the shows
that was highlighted for doing that. Absolutely. I know I
was quoted in it. I can't remember what the quote was,
and it probably wasn't all that important, but it was
in it. So what's interesting, though, is most of the
product that was part of this explosive new reckoning in
the nineties was bad aliens, aliens that want our own
(26:00):
planet and want it for reasons where it wasn't exactly
good for us, you know. Even Actually, if you go
back to ninety three when X Files debuted, you also
had Fire in the Sky, the Travis Walton case, which
we'll be doing a show on later in the season.
But that was not good. The aliens weren't good there either,
(26:20):
at least as they were portrayed in the film. And
then along comes Contact that says, you know what, not
only can the aliens be good, they can still have
their own agenda, but they can be on our side
more or less, or at least like they're the Big Brothers,
sort of almost Spielbergian, the benevolent Space Brothers kind of thing.
(26:43):
And I find that whole context very interesting. And at
the same time, I will also say this, I don't
know if this says something about Eufology or Contact as
a feature film, but most people think you can't make
a good alien movie without aliens and some sort of conflict.
But in reality, Contact is considered a very very good
movie and nothing gets well, actually there is, something gets
(27:06):
blown up. The first version of the spaceship, the build
gets blown up yep, So I guess they had to
blow something up. But otherwise it's very calm, and I
don't know if that's part of an agenda or not.
So I think I've just stalled and I haven't answered
the question. What is your answer? Well, I appreciate the stall.
You took us on a nice detour there. I want
to go back to something our friend JC said to
(27:29):
us and our infamous encounter with them in your backyard.
He said that the disinformation campaign right was strong, and
that what he was doing was working with the group
from Oni to counter that with a disclosure program, right,
and that what their goal was was to work with
(27:50):
Hollywood to slowly.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Disclose kind of. I think that was the drip, the
first concept of drip feeding disclosure over time using the
veil of fiction, right. So I think this is a
key idea, is if again, if that were true, and
we go back and we look at just a spectrum
(28:13):
from seventy seven to ninety seven before we kind of
really widen the iris in the three episodes we've talked
about so far, one of the central messages that you
could glean from looking at just that two decades of
Hollywood data, is that there is a message, right, There
is a core message that is above all of the
(28:33):
narratives or all of the plots, and that is we
are not alone. But the visitors are not that different
from us except for their mental and physical capabilities. Rights,
that's where they are above us. But in terms of
being like us, there are good ones, there are bad ones.
There are ones who are trying to help lesser rass
(28:55):
there are some that are predatory, right, And so that actually,
going even back to Sagan's idea of billions and billions
of stars out there, it would make sense that there's
not just one other race in the entire galaxy or universe.
There's got to be many of them. And what I
(29:19):
feel like Contact did well is it expanded the conversation
and it said it doesn't have to just be from
planets right that are twenty six light years away. It
can be something where it could be much further. And
by the way, when we get there, it's not even
a physical place. Jodi Foster as character Ellie, goes to
(29:42):
a place that has been digitally recreated or virtually recreated
from her memories from a painting that she did as
a kid. Right, which says a lot about the power
of these aliens or these non human intelligences that can
pose as her dead father right to connect with her.
That is a level of sophistication and be even beyond benevolence,
(30:05):
and which is, by the way, the last point I'll
make I think part of where I look at contact
and I see that it introduced this concept of spirituality again,
not as kind of the central tension between science and religion,
but also attributing spiritual qualities to the aliens, to the
point where today there's a discussion that it's either angels
(30:26):
right or aliens right.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Certainly in the religious community, that is true. You know
what I just realized where you were talking, You and
I are such undisciplined podcasters that we managed to get
this far into a program and not actually explain to
people what the plot of this movie was. So I'm
just going to fill in one thing before we go
any further, which is they get a message from space.
(30:50):
We're condensing here, but Ellie gets this message from space.
It goes public. It's not kept secret, it's not the
government keeping it secret. They tell her everybody what it is,
and then they all get to work to try to
figure out what it says, and what it is is
a detailed schematic for some kind of machine, not necessarily
a spaceship. Nobody knows what it does, but they build one,
(31:15):
and a terrorist blows up that first version, and then
a rich guy sort of Elon Musk who's dying in
space played by John Hurt, has built a second one,
and it turns out that our main character, Ellie, gets
to get on that craft. It does a bunch of
(31:35):
whirrying and stuff when they turn it on, and nobody
is quite sure what's going to happen. Then in an instant,
it stops and there's Ellie and everybody goes, I guess
nothing happened. Only that's where it gets interesting.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Right, because everything she experiences we experience. But everyone back
on Earth saw the ball fall in two seconds and
assumed nothing happened. There was no encounter.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
And what's so great about that, though, is the eighteen hours.
They find out that there's eighteen hours of recording of
this digital noise. But it's not like it did only
take seconds. It took eighteen hours, But nobody believes her.
And I've always wondered because eighteen is such a specific number. Remember,
(32:23):
back during Watergate, Nixon Head is eighteen and a half
minute gap in the Watergate tapes, and now this is
the eighteen hour gap. I don't know if they were
making any political statement about that, but interestingly enough, that's
not in the book, the eighteen hour thing. It's not
in the book. The first screenwriter put that in, and
it actually works very well, and there's been controversy over time.
(32:46):
In those dozen drafts or different writers, there were many
different endings to it. It was possible to have an
ending where it was very clear that she had gone someplace,
and they sort of ended on one where it looked
like the guy in the government didn't want to admit
she'd gone someplace. And she probably went someplace. I mean,
most people came to the belief that she had gone someplace,
(33:09):
but she had gone there in a way that violated
the laws of physics, Which takes me back to Carl
Sagan and the argument in the parking Lot. Yeah, he's
written a book and allowed a movie to be made
about it where what happens in it violates the laws
of physics, as at least he knew them at the time.
And yet that's the building block of the entire book.
(33:32):
So I found that interesting. She gets there wherever she
goes through. At first, in the first drafts, it was
a black hole, you know, she traveled through a series
of black holes. And then as I understand it, Sagan
revised that when he did a little more investigation into wormholes.
Now between you and me, I could I couldn't tell
(33:53):
a black hole from a wormhole if you, you know,
put him in front of my nose here.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
But I think, parent, I think a wormhole has lighting
because I could see inside of it exactly.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
That's good difference, good point of view. And by the way,
the sequence where she actually travels through this collection of
wormholes is very similar in its impact emotionally to what
happens in two thousand and one, that sequence that blew
everybody's mind at the end, and it's really powerful, and
(34:24):
you think about what's happening. She gets there and the
guy who isn't really her dad but looks like her dad. It's,
you know, a very efficient way to play an alien.
You get an alien, but you hire David Morse to
play it. But David Morse, her father, says that the
alien race or the consciousness he represents didn't build this. Yes,
(34:45):
somebody else built this subway through wormholes, and they don't
know who it was, which really blows your mind.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yes, and it's all his point is, it's all just
a test, right for different civilization to see if they're
ready to rise to a higher level, and I suppose
become non human intelligence, right, because that alien you're describing
that turns into her father, the first glimpse of it
is just this weird vacillating light energy. It's an energy
(35:16):
being that just manifests and take the form of her father.
One of the other things I want to talk about too,
is that that whole experience with her everyone else seeing
the objective reality, right of the ball falling to the
ground right in the big device that they made.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
And by the way, just to clarify, Brent, because people
are not the machine that Ellie aka Jodie Foster is
in is a giant metal sphere. Yes, I'm sorry. And
so when that ball drop, the ball drops, it literally
falls into the water or something that it falls, Yes.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
It falls, and in just a matter of seconds, and
that's the objective reality everyone sees. However, this movie introduces
the concept of subjective reality right, which then takes into
account quantum physics and how reality is dependent upon how
you observe it and who the observer is. And so
(36:15):
I think that's a really interesting thing because her experience
correlates with what many people who have experienced the phenomenon say,
which is they had a very unexplainable experience that felt
surreal and strange and was totally unique to them. And
by the way, that correlates to many abduction experiences where
(36:37):
there is no actual evidence right, Ellie came back, and
other than the fact that we experienced it with her,
she had no tangible evidence she could present, right. And
so this is another thing that is a common theme
through all of the movies we've talked about so far,
or all of the movies and TV shows, which is
that there is a government cover up going on regarding
(37:02):
the truth about UAP and the phenomenon. That is touched
upon in Dark Skies obviously certainly in Close Encounters where
they try and stage a whole quarantine to keep everyone
from learning the truth. And in this movie we have
the whole congressional hearing at the end, where it's not
just that the government is trying to cover something up.
(37:22):
They go through a public humiliation process, right to make
her look stupid, right, and to cast doubt on her story. Meanwhile,
they have that eighteen hour videotape that you had, that
you mentioned, and they have evidence that something happened. But
also key is they don't even know what it was now,
(37:45):
they can't even explain it.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
It's what it does well is as a movie. And
I don't know if there's any science behind this, but
as a movie, it does take you back and forth
where you get to say, what's really going on here
at the end, because as you point out, we do
experience it with her. We go on that trip, that
journey whatever it is, through the wormholes and we see it.
So you go, okay, that was real. Then they make
(38:09):
you the people are questioning it, and it's like, no,
she didn't really do that. She had all this happen
in her mind. Okay, so now that's the explanation. And
then they find the eighteen hours and now suddenly you're like, well,
wait a minute, could that be what really happened? And
then they point out, well, you know, just if you're
going to put something in a giant electromagnetic machine, you
(38:32):
could probably screw up the time and space on a
digital recording, so maybe it didn't actually happen. And then
you put her inside this hearing where they do everything
they can to tell people not to take her as
a credible witness, and then at the end of the
movie you realize she was certainly very changed by it.
(38:53):
But again, if you wanted to believe that it didn't
really happen, I guess you could still believe that. And
if you wanted to believe that it did you, I mean,
either way you can go. And Robert Semechis, in interviews
that he's done about this film over the years, has
clearly said he wanted the ending to be that way,
to be a little hard to figure out, and he
(39:15):
got it. But he also said, and I find this
very interesting. I'm curious what your thoughts were. He said
he thought it prevented his film from being the big
film it really could have been. It was a big film,
but it was released the same weekend as Men in Black,
and it came in number two. And his take was,
if only he'd said it was totally real, that that
(39:37):
would have given an audience more to grab on to
do you think.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
So, I absolutely do think so. I think it probably
would have been embraced more in the mainstream. And the
same way that the end of Close Encounter is unambiguous. Right,
he gets on the ship, right, there's no like, there's
no oh, he hit his head and he's imagining maybe
that he's going on to the ship. He gets on
the ship at the end, and we're left to believe
(40:02):
that he's off on some wild space adventure as an
ambassador for mankind. The ambiguity at the end of this movie,
I really appreciate. It's one of the reasons that I
love rewatching it because it keeps changing my point of view,
Like you know, so, I think that's great, But I
think that did probably prevent it from catching on in
the mainstream. But something else that I think is fascinating
(40:25):
here is that this idea that the government in that movie,
the simple concept that they were not willing to disclose
all of this to the public. When by the way, Bryce,
and I say this because you wrote the book on disclosure,
literally with Richard Dolan, they have a disclosure sequence in
(40:47):
early on in Contact that is a montage event that
lasts about a minute, right, it has absolutely almost no
impact at all in culture, everyone's like, oh, okay, there's
intelligent life. That's great, but let's get this machine built
and see where it takes us.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
It is extraordinary. I did well. I'm glad you brought
that up because I wanted to at least get to that.
While this movie is not inherently euphological as some of
the ones that we'll be talking about over the next
weeks to come, it does talk about disclosure in a
way where you could ask, is that really people are
going to respond because it raises a question, is what's
(41:25):
potentially and inherently difficult about disclosure when we realize that
they're looking at our nuclear power plants and our nuclear weapons.
Is that what is disturbing about disclosure? Or is what's
disturbing about disclosure is just people coming to the conclusion
that we're not alone. And I think what Contact seems
to say is the mirror act of learning we're not
(41:48):
alone is not going to freak everybody out. Of course,
the fact that they're way out there and there of
no inherent threat that probably is a little more so.
I will say this. You mentioned it was very direct,
but it was short. Apparently in George Miller's version of things,
(42:08):
there was a much stronger bit about disclosure. It went
on longer, and it went down different alleyways and so forth.
I think George Miller's version was going to be more
like Twin Peaks, I think, or something. It just was
a different It was a different take on the material,
and clearly, as I understood it, he was going down
(42:30):
a different road about disclosure that it would be a
little more disturbing to people. Let's take a quick final
break here and come back with some concluding thoughts. What
do you say about that? I'm all in all right
as we round the corner to wrap this thing up, though,
I just one of the things that I responded to
as we've been talking about that ending is it does
(42:50):
go back and forth. You can believe it, you cannot
believe it. It's about the nature of reality and that
kind of thing. And there's just something that there's a
line that really stands out to me in this film
that I want to pose to people because it kind
of does a very good job of allowing you to
think about what we're up against when we talk about
(43:10):
the phenomenon Ellie has gone through this thing. Well, actually,
I think it's before she's gone through this thing. But
she's talking to Palmer Joss, the Matthew McConaughey character, and
he says to her, do you love your father? And
she's kind of taken aback, like what why are you
asking me? That he goes, do you love your father?
(43:33):
And she goes, well, yes, and he says, prove it.
And I kind of liked that because it does take
you back for a second. It's like, well, of course
it's a fact that she loves her father, but where's
the proof. Yes, where is that proof that you got
(43:54):
a Christmas card from him, or you send him a present,
or that you told people you loved him. That's not proof,
that's evidence. That's evidence. But then again, all of that
evidence could be questioned by somebody that says subjectively, well
I think I love my father more. I do a
lot more for him than you've done, so I'm not
(44:15):
sure that you do love him. There are going to
be films we talk about that I'm not going to
recommend everybody go out and watch for sure, they're coming,
but this isn't one of them, because this is a
thoughtful one. It is aged pretty well for being thirty
years old. It's got great acting in it. Zamechis does
a good job on it. The only knock I have
(44:35):
on Zamecha's doing it is the soundtrack sounds to me
just like the Forrest Gump soundtrack. I just can't get
it out of me. Every time I watch Contact, I'm like,
wait a minute, is Tom Hanks coming into this film soon?
Because it just feels like that. But it makes you
think about those things, and I have spent the better
part of my life in contemplating the phenomenon, thinking about
(44:59):
this science person religion thing. And the reason I find
it so compelling is that there are a whole lot
of scientists who believe science proves God. They believe that
when you see how intricate the universe is and how
large it is, and how the rules of physics and
things work, that that wasn't just random, that maybe there's
(45:22):
a God that had a part of that. So I think,
as over the episodes that will be in our future here, Brent,
it's good to think about that because there are some
people that think, as you pointed out, that we're not
talking about perhaps extraterrestrials, we're talking about angels and demons.
And it goes back to the Bible with Ezekiel's wheel
(45:46):
and all that really being a flying saucer. So it's
a thoughtful, important film. I happen to think people are
sometimes wasting their time with SETI when they should be,
in fact looking into the data from pilots about real
actual UFOs. But we'll leave that for future episodes. I
enjoyed it, and I'll tell you something, and only did
(46:09):
I enjoy it when I first saw it because I
had read the book. I enjoyed it when you and
I watched it. We screened it here at my house
in preparation for this, and I enjoyed watching it that
second time because I saw so many things in it
that I totally missed seeing in the theaters. Yes.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
No, it's like I said, I've seen it at least
twenty times. I see something different each time, and I
think twenty times what I leaved that earlier.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah, so I reserved that those numbers are Godfather numbers
for me. But go ahead, Oh no, Godfather is more
like forty or fifty. Oh my godness, all right, Okay,
keep going.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
I know I'm a man of repetition, so I think
for me, the key thing was, as I said before,
that this incorporation of spirituality right even to a degree
you could start to say, is it the introduction of
the afterlife being tied to aliens?
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Right?
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Because the alien appears as her dead father, right, And
so that whole idea that we go searching for extraterrestrial life,
we go searching for aliens, and what do we find?
We find ourselves? Right, That the universe itself is this mirror,
and the more we stare at it looking for answers,
the more we learn about ourselves and our own reality.
(47:24):
And I think that that was the first movie that
even abstractly made me start to think about the UAP,
you know, phenomenon in a whole new way that I
had never thought before.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Well amen to that, brother. I feel like we could
probably talk about this world of contact, not to mention
the movie for a long time more. I'm sure it'll
come up more as we discuss things, But for right now,
I'm ready to sign out. And it's been a pleasure
seeing you for this one, and I just leave everyone
with this thought. Watch the Skies, Watch the Skies, Sound
(47:59):
Light and Frequent See is an iHeart podcast produced by
Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for
Steller Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna
Stump and Hamilton Lighthouser. And your hosts and executive producers
are Bryce Abel, That's Me and Brent Friedman Watch the
Skies
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