Odysseus a hvezdy (1976)

The film is set across two different time periods. The story begins in 2000. A boy is so passionate about flying that he attempts to take off using wings he has built himself. When he jumps down from a mountain, he has an accident and is saved only thanks to modern surgery. When he wakes up, he is lying on a round bed in a very futuristic room. His father remembers an adventure he had at the same age, in 1975. Mischa and Martin live in Prague and are close friends. They enjoy tinkering, especially with radio kits, radio communications, and microphones. Their parents do not approve of this hobby, because things often blow up. Father Kraus works in a quarry on a highway construction project. After a blast, he brings home a stone for his rock garden. During the night, the stone suddenly begins to glow. Strange phenomena follow, alarming the whole neighborhood. Films nobody has put on are playing on the television; radio contact with planes suddenly cuts out, and they are diverted from their course; colorful glass balls on the garden fence shatter; and the cacti in Father’s garden bloom in the middle of winter. Mischa is convinced that the stone comes from another star. His father thinks this is a figment of his imagination. The mystery might never have been solved if not for the cat Odysseus. During the night and the following day, the events are investigated by a radio-monitoring van. Mischa’s sister Katja puts the stone in the aquarium; suddenly, she can understand the language of the fish and makes line drawings. By the next day, however, all the fish are dead. The children take the stone to school, but whenever they approach a bus or a car with it, the vehicles stop working. During a visit to a natural history museum, the stone glows again. They decide to smash it and find a black sphere inside. The following night, it becomes active again in Mischa’s room and begins to expand into a transparent blue ball of energy, measuring the room. Among other things, it scans the cat Odysseus. The floating sphere leaves the room. Outside, moths fly around inside it, drawn by its light. Later, the children find the black sphere outside again and are picked up by the police. The police do not believe their story, dismiss it all as science fiction, and later take them home, bringing the story of 1975 to an end. Back in 2000, we learn that Katja’s drawings are actually star maps. The sphere has been cut in half, but nothing has been found inside it. Suddenly, a picture message arrives saying that an extraterrestrial sphere is on its way to establish contact, so the father immediately sets off there. Scientists examine the sphere more closely and discover inside it the moths that were drawn to it in 1975 and have since become extinct on Earth. These events also have an effect on the room. Suddenly, after 25 years, the cat Odysseus appears, without having aged. At the end, the two halves of the sphere join together and form the transparent blue ball of energy. The boy understands what is happening and goes inside it with the cat Odysseus. First contact with an extraterrestrial presence has been made.