For someone who so repudiated UFOs and their experiencers, Carl Sagan’s Contact is strangely compatible with the experiencer narrative

I just finished Contact, and I’m pretty surprised by the final act. While he didn’t quite pursue the science vs. religious faith narrative as far as the film did, I think he may have done something even stranger in the third act: he followed the UFO experiencer narrative. Does anybody else who has read the book also see these parallels?

Carl Sagan was a vocal critic of the phenomenon, and yet when the machine is turned on, several people are transported to a place beyond time. They travel all this distance only to arrive on a beach on earth (high strangeness) meet beings who are somehow associated with dead loved ones (using their physical forms in this case) and are I mparted with a sort of ineffable cosmic wisdom. They are then returned on an impossible timeline with only their corroborating stories as evidence. This is then followed by an official cover-up and insinuations that the team may be mad.

Certainly, there are differences, for instance, there 5 simultaneous experiences as opposed to individuals who tell similar stories across unrelated encounters. And meeting beings associated with the dead is an inconsistent but persistent theme in abduction narratives. But by and large, this narrative is consistent with esoteric themes in ufo encounters identified by Vallee and others. It also bears some tangential resemblance to NDEs (traveling through a tunnel, seeing dead loved ones, etc.)

What gives? I thought Sagan was a devoted atheist? And as Diana Pasulka and others have described, there are linkages between the phenomenon, hypothesized NHIs and the genesis (if you’ll excuse the pun) of religions.

I was surprised by this part of the book