Was the movie First Contact the first time it was revealed that first contact was with the Vulcans?

As usual everthing revolves around Micheal Burnham and her family

 

2004

Plus one of the Vulcans that worked with T'Pol's great grandmother was supposed to have stayed on Earth for the rest of his life.

And Dax was on Earth in 2024. And Kira in the 1960s and late 2040s.

And technically, Troi counts too, as a half-Betazoid. A whole day before first contact with the Vulcans.

 

Q was on Earth in the old west, on Newton's apple tree, and during the failed formation of the first protein.

 

But does it count as first contact with an alien if you don't know you have met one?

 

I would say no, which is why Guinan, Dax, Kira, and the Carbon Creek Vulcans don't count

 

Exactly, this was the case of officially recognized first contact in diplomatic terms.

Kor

 

Something from a novel?

I would perfer this wasn't the case, too "small universe." Not only the captain, but no one aboard that ship should have any connection to Spock's family.

Yes.

If that's your criteria, then what we saw at the end of First Contact wasn't first contact.

It was a casual meeting between the crew of a research ship, Cochrane's people and the people living in a small community in the woods.

Likely after the interaction we saw at the end of the movie the Vulcan ship left, any official diplomatic contact happen later, maybe years later.

 

No, a couple of ENT episodes.

In one ep, we learn that Solkar was the first Vulcan ambassador to Earth. In another, Trip Tucker says something about "I don't remember anyone going after the Vulcan ambassador with pitchforks and torches when they landed".

 

But I don't think they explicitly didn't explicitly said within the episode that this Solkar was the same Solkar as Sarek's grandfather Solkar. That was stated in some other sources.

Edit: the ENT episode "The Catwalk" simply referred to the first Vulcan ambassador to Earth as Solkar. It did not specifically say that he was the same Vulcan who greeted Cochrane and co. in "First Contact." That idea came from the Trek card game and a behind-the-scenes interview with Mike Sussman. Source: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Solkar

Kor

 

Unless you want to go with all Vulcans through out history (untold billions) have completely unique names, there no real connection between the ship's captain and Spock.

Spock doesn't have to be Palpatine's grand-daughter.

 

Also, if we go strictly by what is on screen, we don't really have a reason to think that the guy who emerged from the lander and made the interstellar hand gesture was a) named Solkar at all, or even b) the captain of the T'Plana-Hath. Might be Vulcans don't believe much in sending the CO to wave hands at natives.

Of course, by that standard, we don't know about any T'Plana-Haths either. Not until the Battle of the Binaries.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The lander we saw if FC could have been one of the Vulcan ship's shuttles, commanded by some junior deckhand. The captain remained on the ship in orbit, far to busy to meet with the smelly primatives.

 

I'd love for the peculiar craft to be a lander rather than an interstellar starship. Its three engines are later reused in the Flash Gordonesque craft first seen in "Carbon Creek" and then in the Kir'Shara trilogy - and with that craft, we also face the choice of whether to call it the starship named in the former episode, or just one shuttlecraft of said. My preference is for those engine pods to be sublight movers, and for any warp-capable Vulcan vessel to instead feature rings or partial rings or other such curved surfaces...

The size of the craft involved need not be crucial: Vulcans might simply believe in midget starships, in addition to using gigantic ones. And indeed the craft at the beginning of "Carbon Creek", while carrying a warp engineer and apparently operating solo in the Sol system, is very small and has a crew of just four. But since we also see these gigantic Vulcan ships, it's easy to accept any of the three small designs as mere auxiliaries.

And of course "Broken Bow" would have us (or the heroes) believe that Vulcans don't use transporters for personnel movement, so they might be keen on launching shuttlecraft at the slightest provocation... Possibly crewed by the ship's Diplomatic Specialist in first contact missions, even if backed up by the Barbarology Specialist and Genocide Specialist just in case.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Even within the movie, Lily meets Worf before Cochrane meets the Vulcans.

"I am a Klingon."

 

Lily had to keep most of what she knew to herself. My fan theory being that she was the one that pushed for UESPA and later Starfleet to be at least partly militarized from early on. Sloane is at least as important as Cochraine to earth history.

 

Lily was instrumental in the creation of Section 31.

 

I had made up my own continuity when I was a kid and I'm pretty sure I had Earth's first encounter with aliens being from Alpha Centauri. This was probably a combination of the novel Federation but also from the book "Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD" where Earth also meets people from Alpha Centauri. I think the Vulcan reveal at the end was pretty cool though. In the original script the reveal it's the Vulcans comes in the very first scene.

I think at least one of the guys who came up with the story that became Yesterday's Enterprise, Trent Ganino or Christopher Stillwell, might have thought first contact wasn't with the Vulcans, because their original idea had the Vulcans never turning to logic and becoming a more violent warrior race by the present day but still facing the Federation and the Enterprise-D which shouldn't have existed if the Vulcans were instrumental in helping form the Federation to begin with.

As an aside, later on I was surprised when it was revealed that the Tellarites and Andorians were also Federation founders. I had eventually figured that humans and Vulcans fought the Romulans and then founded the Federation together, with Andorians being antagonists to the early Federation. I like the actual reveal a lot now.

 

Well, she probably was. In "Yesteryear", the Sarek family tree is extensive enough that nobody can keep track of the assorted cousins, and a "Selek" slips in just fine.

Quite possibly being Ambassador runs in the family (and requires marrying a Princess), and only the diplomats (including the local equivalent of double-zeroes, like T'Pol) get to travel. Them, and the soldiers - but those don't have to speak with the natives.

It's probably sorta the opposite: the "Carbon Creek" crew was the one being kept in the dark, or on a strict diet of need-to-know, about Vulcan's ongoing and extensive intelligence operation at Earth. The agents who found out that Sputnik 1 would be launched in 1957 would no doubt have reported on human body odor in detail.

Timo Saloniemi

 

As did the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology by Stan and Fred Goldstein, published by Wallaby/Pocket Books in 1980 as a TMP tie-in. It gave 2048 as first contact for AC, 2065 for Vulcan (on the old timeline of TOS being c. 2210).