Contact

At Arecibo, Ellie monitors 1221.

This is in the GPS L2 frequency band (1227.

6 +/- 10.

23 MHz), rendering it unusable for SETI because of the interference.

In the VLA control room when the message is first received, the Tektronix 420 oscilloscope is in the "Trigger - Edge Source" mode when Ellie decreases the vertical scale.

When the message momentarily stops, she glances back at the same scope and it is in the "Display - Style" mode.

It is impossible for Dr.

Arroway to have graduated from MIT Magna Cum Laude, as MIT gives no such distinctions.

The position of Ellie's headset microphone when she first gets into the sphere.

Joss implies to Dr.

Arroway that he's not familiar with Occam's Razor (which, as a divinity student, he should be), but this is his style of joking banter, and he never flat-out says he's not familiar with it.

Ellie gets out of bed after having sex, pulls her sweater on and walks to the end of the bed, clearly braless.

Seconds later as she leaves, she has somehow miraculously acquired a bra.

As Ellie steps down the stairs of the U.

Capitol after testifying, the limousines drive away on a road that is on the west side of the U.

Capitol.

In fact, there is no road there at all, only steps that lead down to a small reflecting pool.

This road was added via CGI.

During the press conference, you can see 'Bill Clinton (I)' (qv)'s hair move just a little from the breeze when he gave the real speech outdoors.

You can also see sunlight on it.

The canyon shown at the edge of the VLA does not exist where it is depicted.

The VLA is located on the Plains of San Augustine, a large flat basin bordered by mountains.

When Ellie first hears the signal, the crew is reflected in the glass doors as she goes up the stairs.

In a flashback to the early- to mid-'70s, we see a toy horse on young Ellie's nightstand.

The horse is made by Breyer Animal Creations in the mid to late 1980s.

When the VLA scientists receive the video transmission, the "zoom" slider on the computer screen is on 0.

Moments later, when they are asked to zoom out on the video, the slider is on 4, and the scientists move it to 0.

When Dr.

Arroway first hears the alien signal at the VLA, she shouts into her walkie-talkie the Right Ascension and Declination that the signal is emanating from.

Twice, she says, "Declination plus 36 degrees," but when she repeats it the third time, she accidentally says "Declination 36 hours.

" When Young Ellie runs to the bathroom to get medicine for her father, at the moment when we see her through the reflection of the pharmacy cabinet mirror reaching to open it, the red sleeve under her dark blue coat doesn't show in the mirror where instead we see a black sleeve.

When Ellie is flown to the Naval vessel in the VTOL plane, the wide-shot shows the plane as military grey.

In the following close-up, when she steps out of the plane, it has a colourful livery.

Ellie has two telescopes set up to watch the Leonid meteor shower (flashback).

Telescopes are useless to view meteors because of their tiny field of vision.

During the first test of the space travel device, in one shot you can see all three rings on the device starting to move and spin.

In the very next scene which is a wide shot, you can clearly see that none of the device rings are moving, yet they are supposed to be.

A camera is visible in Ellies glasses when she is talking for the first time with Palmer at Arricbo.

A satellite image of Earth is shown when Ellie first receives the alien signal in the evening, however, the satellite image suggest morning in New Mexico as the sun is centered off the U.

east coast.

At the end of the movie, it is revealed that Ellie's video recorder recorded 18 hours of static, suggesting she really did go somewhere.

It is peculiar that scientists in the movie neglected to include a simple clock in Ellie's equipment.

Surely they would have wanted to see if time inside the pod would slow down since that is what the theory of relativity says would happen when you travel very fast (relatively close to the speed of light).

Although in the movie the opposite occurs (time moves faster for Ellie) that clock would nevertheless have shown that 18 hours had passed inside the pod, while from the outside it seemed to pass straight through the machine, adding credibility to Ellie's story.

Ellie says to Palmer that her father died when she was 9.

Yet later in the movie Mr.

Hadden set her birth date to August 25th 1964, and her father's death to November 10th 1974, so she was 10 at the moment of his death.

The VLA in New Mexico does not listen for radio transmissions, but in fact takes radio "photographs" of space.

In their Visitor Center they acknowledge the filming of _Contact (1997)_ (qv) but debunk the premise of the film that their dishes could be utilized for the purpose described.

The radio and TV signals that are said to have reached the star Vega could not.

By SETI's own calculations, these signals are imperceptible from noise within 2 light-years; Vega is 25.

7 light-years away.

When the alien signal is heard for the first time, they state that the star Vega is about to set.

Yet outside the window the radio telescope array is clearly still pointing up at the sky, when it should be pointing to the horizon.

For no discernible reason, the tech that is holding Joseph's thumb back from the detonator pulls his hand back and after a moment gingerly places it on Joseph's forearm, allowing him to detonate the bomb.

The opening sequence contain impossible physics with the four planets (Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) that appear completely desynchronized as the sequence zooms out.

The Great Red Spot on the gas planet Jupiter appear larger and centered near the equator rather than slightly positioned at the middle lower line of the planet.

The suggestion that a man-made Earth-orbiting satellite could have been used to simulate a signal emanating from a star is absurd.

A satellite within Earth's or the Sun's gravitational fields can not carry enough fuel to maintain a position in front of a distant star for more than a fraction of a second out of every several hours.

And since the signal was tracked from several locations on Earth, the sky would have to be filled with hoax satellites to fool more than one listening station.

Moreover, the VLA alone would be able to confirm the distance of the signal from parallax.

- PLOTWhen the signal is transmitting the prime numbers, we are able to hear and count the transmission to number eleven.

However, after that, when the actors stop counting and start talking at once with each other, the signal never pauses after what would be the next prime number, thirteen.

Later it is revealed that the signal transmitted all the prime numbers to 101.

When Ellie receives the call from Mir, the Cosmonaut addresses her as "Comrade Arroway", a form of address that became outdated with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

However, it is still commonly used out of tradition.

When Ellie first hears the signal from space, she calls back to the guys with a walkie-talkie and they answer her as well.

But, when the guys press the talk button, her conversation doesn't stop emanating from the radio.

Which of course it would.

When the signal starts sending primes Fish is counting/marking 7 but on the scope in front of him seven has already been completed and eleven is mostly finished.

As Ellie drives madly after first hearing the signal, her face is visible in the rear view mirror from alongside the car.

Before Ellie first encounters the signal from Vega she is shown sitting on a cliff wearing beige jeans.

A few scenes later when she is shown running back into the observatory she is now wearing blue jeans.

Kent translates Hitler's opening speech wrongly as"I declare the games of Berlin on the occasion of the FIRST Olympic Games.

" However, what Hitler really - and correctly, too - says is".

The ELEVENTH Olympic Games.

The German word for 'first' is 'erste', and for 'eleventh' it's 'elfte'.

In the opening galactic pullback scene, the oldies in the soundtrack are out of sync with the indicated distance from Earth.

It takes only 4 hours for a radio transmission to travel from Earth to the edge of our solar system, yet 1960s music and news cues are heard as the "virtual camera" passes Jupiter.

During the close-up of Fish watching Palmer's Larry King interview, the TV screen is reflected in Fish's glasses.

In that reflected image Mr.

King is talking, but the audio from the TV is Palmer's voice.