The film opens with recovered footage from the McPherson home, framed by expert analyses and official commentary about a case that remains unresolved after the Fall of 1997. Teenage Tommy [Kristian Ayre] McPherson is filming his family during Thanksgiving, when a sudden power cut plunges the dinner into darkness and shifts the mood from warmth to uneasy tension.
Outside, Tommy and his older brothers Kurt [Aaron Pearl] McPherson and Brian [Michael Buie] McPherson venture into the yard to investigate a smoking fuse box and a transformer that throws off bright, sparking bursts. Their curiosity leads them to a strange object lying in a nearby field. As they watch from a distance, two aliens emerge from the artifact and deploy a ray-gun on a cow, a moment that leaves them shaken and terrified. The three men hurry back toward the house, urging their increasingly skeptical family to flee while there is still time. Lights crackle in the sky, and a furtive figure is seen outside a window, but the family remains unconvinced until Tommy forcibly plays them the tape that records the event.
Suddenly, a high-frequency screech rips through the house, incapacitates everyone except five-year-old Rosie [Katlyn Alexandra Ducharme] McPherson, and leaves the adults disoriented and frightened. When the noise fades, Kurt tries to evacuate everyone in his truck, only to discover that its battery has melted in the rush of fear. Noises echo from the roof as Tommy spots an alien slipping through an open attic window. Kurt leads the ascent with his shotgun while Tommy slips away to his room, where an alien ambushes him. The creature places him in a trance, examines his camera, and then departs, leaving Tommy with no memory of the encounter.
Tommy is jolted awake by Kurt's shouts, as Kurt has managed to trap another alien in an adjacent room. A laser fires, and Kurt answers with his shotgun, forcing the beings to retreat downstairs. A ball of light then enters the house and plunges Renee [Emmanuelle Chriqui] McPherson into a coma, intensifying the danger threatening the family. In a final, desperate attempt to reach safety, Kurt and Brian rush outside to swap the truck battery, aiming to drive the family to safety and to get Renee to a hospital.
Minutes pass with gunshots outside and lights that flicker on and off. Those who remain inside report a cascade of vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, but Rosie seems immune to the onslaught. In the midst of chaos, Tommy sets the camera aside, and Rosie, left momentarily alone, quietly removes the shells from the remaining shotgun. A burning sensation travels up the backs of the necks of the adults, revealing triangle-shaped burns that signal a disturbing mark of contact.
Panic grows as more shots crack through the night and strange lights appear in the surrounding woods. Two eerie figures materialize at the edge of the trees, prompting the family to flee back into the house and barricade themselves inside. The camera drops, and the screen goes black as the muffled sounds of the disturbance echo through the walls. Tommy offers a tearful account of the night, wondering if he will live to see tomorrow, and his search through the room culminates in a final, haunting moment: he comes face to face with an alien, the image seizing him as the tape abruptly ends with him standing in a trance.
