The Alien State

Page 1 2 3 4 Controllers rotated the dishes on command for one scene, but having the Foster character hear the signals through headphones is a departure from reality.

"You can't just plug into the bases of the antennas," Finley said.

Still, the filmmakers went to great lengths to keep from flying too far off into fantasy.

"We tried to imitate real life as much as possible," Starkey said.

The facility's control room was duplicated on a California soundstage and the reality sought by the filmmakers extended to the computer monitors, desks and papers stuck on the walls.

The children Foster speaks to at the end of the film were real New Mexicans, too. Elementary students from Magdalena were selected over children from two other schools, said Judy Tanner, school principal.

"The producers liked the look of the school and the kids," Tanner said. "We were treated very well."

Contact actually is the second film to use the VLA as a backdrop. 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) opens with a sunrise over the facility, then cuts to the film's star, Roy Scheider, evidently polishing one of the antennas. A Russian scientist arrives and the two have a discussion over the fate of the spaceship seen in the film's precursor, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The 2010 crew was there for about a week, Finley said. "They had a reasonably large crew. The lunch was catered and they invited the VLA staff."

The Contact extraterrestrials trailed earlier intergalactic visitors in the state. In 1976, an alien dropped in looking for water in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth. For the director, New Mexico - represented by White Sands National Monument, Fenton Lake, Artesia, the old mining town of Madrid and Albuquerque's Civic Plaza - is an important aspect of the film.

"It had such a unique character in terms of the whole of the United States," Roeg said. "It didn't fit into, necessarily, the general world picture of the United States landscape."

The influence of northern Mexico on architecture and people particularly attracted Roeg. This boosted the stranger-in-a-strange-land theme of an alien who, in turn, finds himself inside an alien landscape.

"Every foreigner has their picture of the United States and it doesn't necessarily, well, it hardly ever, envisages New Mexico," Roeg said. "After seeing the extraordinary landscape of the White Sands, it prompted me to think of this: Strangers always see something that is unfamiliar, you know?"

Roeg had not visited the state before making the film. Location scouts had suggested he take a look. The entire film, except for a few scenes set in Los Angeles, was shot in New Mexico, he said.