In the 1997 film Contact, the alien signal originates from Vega. Dr. Ellie Arroway and her SETI team detect the transmission while monitoring radio signals at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Its apparent source is Vega, a bright star roughly 26 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra.
The signal first reveals a repeating sequence of prime numbers, a pattern unlikely to be produced by a natural astronomical source. It later contains a recording of Adolf Hitler opening the 1936 Berlin Olympics, demonstrating that the senders have been observing Earth. Hidden within the transmission are thousands of pages of data that eventually decode into instructions for building a mysterious transportation machine.
A common mix-up is confusing Vega with the destination of Ellie’s journey. The movie identifies Vega as the signal’s apparent origin, but Ellie ultimately travels through the machine to an unknown location and encounters an alien being who appears in the form of her deceased father. The film was directed by Robert Zemeckis and adapted from Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel.