The story is told in flashback by Dr. Jeremy Stone, testifying to an unseen committee. After a satellite, a Federal government of the United States project code-named Scoop, crashes near the small rural town of Piedmont, New Mexico, almost all of the town's inhabitants die quickly. A military satellite recovery team tries to recover the satellite but is stopped in mid-sentence. Suspecting that the satellite brought back an extraterrestrial life, the military activates an elite scientific team it had previously assembled for this type of emergency.