Business is slow for Burlington, Vermont, private investigator John “Hack” Loomis, so when Loomis’s assistant Connie Noble asks him to look into the disappearance of her friend Belle Ryerson, Loomis agrees. Belle went missing after attending a meeting of a local UFO group run by a charismatic psychiatrist who treats people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens, and also by a disarmingly beautiful woman who claims to be in contact with an alien mother ship. As Loomis’s investigation takes him and Connie to the edge of the lunatic fringe and beyond, they find themselves in danger from people far more frightening than true believers.