Conspiracy journalist Harlan Garrett is abducted to the deathbed of a brigadier general who admits to heading the team that salvaged a crash-landed UFO in 1962, and gives Garrett the leads he needs to find the remains of the ship and its occupants under lock and key at an army base in Maryland. But Garrett soon finds himself the quarry of an assassin, who is also stalking Danny Vander, an eight-year-old victim of alien abduction whose disturbing dreams of "stickmen" have a crucial connection to the theft of a nuclear device from an army munitions depot.