In the year 2001, Dave Bowman was taken by the Jupiter monolith and transformed into a powerful being. Now, in the year 2010, Dr. Heywood Floyd, the man held responsible for Discovery’s failure, is going to Jupiter. He and his crewmates must reactivate the psychotic HAL-9000 computer, so they may learn what happened, and they must find out the meaning of Dave Bowman’s last transmission… “My God, it’s full of stars…”

Cableman Roy Neary is one of several people who experience a close encounter of the first kind, witnessing UFOs flying through the night sky. He is subsequently haunted by a mountainlike image in his head and becomes obsessed with discovering what it represents, putting severe strain on his marriage. Meanwhile, government agents around the world have a close encounter of the second kind, discovering physical evidence of otherworldly visitors in the form of military vehicles that went missing decades ago suddenly appearing in the middle of nowhere. Roy and the agents both follow the clues they have been given to reach a site where they will have a close encounter of the third kind: contact.

Contact, based on the novel of the same name by Carl Sagan, is the story of a free thinking radio astronomer (Jodie Foster) who discovers an intelligent signal broadcast from deep space. She and her fellow scientists are able to decipher the Message and discover detailed instructions for building a mysterious Machine. Will the Machine spell the end of our world, or the end of our superstitions? Will we take our place among the races of the Galaxy, or are we just an upstart species with a long way to go?