This deplorable film not only makes a mockery of science, religion and common sense, but also insults its audience by presenting as documentary fact scenes which were painfully and obviously shot to lend the pathetic proceedings some dramatic clout. The dubious tales of Eduard ‘Billy’ Meier, one-armed Swiss UFO contactee, come under the scrutiny of stilted and leaden sequences which, by failing to throw into question the veracity of Meier’s claims, raise suspicions about the suspect morals of those taking part.

Modern reality and documentary films similarly stage vast quantities of their contents, partly in order to jazz up subject matters their makers consider dull and uninteresting, but also, like in this case, to add a sense of ‘dramatic sophistication’ to the production: media professional interpret their audiences’ enjoyment of fictional cinema and television, with continuity-based and often showy editing styles, as resulting in a handicap inhibits their abaility to decipher the necessarily elliptical cutting of most documentary form. Here, cutaways and reverse-angles are dispersed with a carefree, insolent air that identifies Contact as an unfortunate forerunner of modern media practices.

Contact: An Investigation Into the Extraterrestrial Experiences of Eduard Meier at the IMDb