Science fiction novel (1985) by Carl Sagan
which portrays, with technical authenticity, the sequence of events that
might follow the receipt of an interstellar message. Some of the characters
are loosely based on actual members of the SETI
community, while the wormhole transport
system employed later in the novel was investigated theoretically by the
physicist Kip Thorne and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology.
A film of the same name, starring Jodie Foster, was released in 1997.1
In 2011, Foster, who played the character of Ellie Arroway in Contact,
donated an undisclosed amount to the appeal by the SETI
Institute to raise $200,000 to take the Allen
Telescope Array, used to search for extraterrestrial radio signals,
out of mothballs.
Reference
Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Simon & Schuster (1985).