Man, Contact is excellent. It gives me a bit of a "Seinfeld" effect where in the modern day it feels like it leans heavily on tropes but the movie itself is likely one of the founders of those tropes, if that makes sense
Spoiler Alert
The book went further by accusing Arroway of engineering a fraud instead of the "you want us to have faith" bit from the movie. But that made no sense in the context of the story. The radio signal unequivocally came from Vega and the message contained instructions for technology completely unknown on Earth. It made no sense to dispute that contact was made and something happened.