During a World War II bombing mission, a US Army Air Forces B-25 is damaged in combat. The navigator, Lieutenant Hamner Richard Basehart, panics and bails out, leaving the crew without a navigator. With the aircraft adrift, the five remaining crewmen—Mac Patrick Wayne, Tony Lou Antonio, Brandy Dennis Cooney, Gant Lawrence P. Casey, and an unnamed fifth crewman—believe they are still over water and parachute to safety. Tony, attempting to reach supplies, crawls toward the damaged plane, but the tail, precariously attached, snaps away and crushes him. The harsh Libyan desert sun relentlessly pounds the survivors, and one by one they perish from exposure. Their ghosts eventually drift back to the wreckage, anchoring themselves there for 17 years in a limbo-like moment between life and death, playing baseball and longing for return to their homeland only if their bodies can be recovered.
An oil-survey aircraft eventually spots the wreck and reports it to the United States Air Force. Sensing that investigators are about to close in, the five ghosts begin rearranging the scene, returning artifacts to their original spots in an effort to prove that they stayed with the aircraft and to spur a real search for their remains. Hamner, who survived the war and stayed in the service as a brigadier general, is questioned by investigators Lt. Col. Gronke William Shatner and Maj. Michael Devlin Vince Edwards. They press him for the truth about the crash and his apparent failure to turn the plane toward a Nazi-occupied landing point. He tries to dodge the question, claiming the crew bailed out over the sea, though the discovery of a harmonica belonging to Gant Lawrence P. Casey near the wreck contradicts that alibi and suggests the truth is more complicated.
Devlin is convinced something supernatural lurks behind Hamner’s account, and the tension between the men grows as old guilt surfaces. Devlin quietly recalls a personal memory: a crash in California that killed schoolchildren and shattered his own career, fueling his determination to uncover the full truth. As the investigation unfolds, the mysterious presence of the ghosts intensifies, and Hamner’s fear gives way to a stubborn resolve to protect his comrades’ memory—even as the evidence points toward a much darker truth about the event.
The pursuit leads the team to a dramatic realization: the bodies of the crew are missing, and the crew’s lingering specters are intimately tied to the fate of the crash site. A chase across the desert culminates at the scene of an abandoned life raft, which helps the investigators piece together what happened that night. The ghosts vanish one by one as each body is recovered and brought home, their spirits finally accompanying their remains back to the United States. Tony, however, is found to have died beneath the tail of the aircraft, leaving a solitary remnant behind at the crash site. A diary found near Mac’s body mentions Tony’s return to the aircraft, giving the team a glimmer of hope and prompting one last, thorough search of the area to uncover the full story and complete the mission of bringing the crew home.
