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In 2002, Chapman University hosts a televised interview with Dr. Abigail "Abbey" Tyler to tell her story in regards to an alien abduction incident at Nome, Alaska in October 2000. Two months prior to the events, in August 2000, Abbey's husband, Will, is mysteriously murdered one night while sleeping in his bedroom. This causes Abbey to have to raise her two childen, Ashley and Ronnie, alone. Ashley, about eight, has been suffering from conversion disorder since her father was killed and is blind. Ronnie, about twelve, blames his mother for his father’s death. Dr. Campos, a doctor from Anchorage, encourages Abbey to take some time off from work, but she refuses, stating that Will’s research meant a lot to him and that she needs to continue it.
Abbey returns to Nome and tapes some sessions with three different patients, all of whom have the same experience: they have difficulty sleeping, and every night that week, they have each seen a white owl at their window staring at them. Abbey puts a patient named Tommy under hypnosis to try to help him remember what happens at night. In result, he screams and leaps off the couch, but Abbey wakes him up. When Abbey asks Tommy to inform her about what he saw, he refuses to do so and leaves. Later that night, Tommy holds his family at gunpoint in their home, demanding to speak to Abbey. After a brief conversation with Abbey in which he says he must do this, he mumbles something in a strange language, and then shoots his wife in the head, then the children, and himself. Local Sheriff August interviews Abbey demanding to know what Tommy said. August is very skeptical over Abbey's explanations and suggests that her hypnosis directly caused Tommy's violence.
The next morning, Dr. Campos arrives in Nome to see Abbey in regards to what happened to Tommy. He joins her in a hypnosis therapy session with another patient named Scott in which Scott starts shaking, foaming at the mouth and making distressed gurgling sounds. This causes Abbey to suggest an alien abduction as a possible theory, however Dr. Campos is very skeptical. Abbey's secretary rushes into the office, saying Abbey must listen to something. Abbey had asked her earlier to make a transcript of her tape recorded notes from the previous night, where she made speculations on the phenomena. The girl hands her the tape and says "I won't listen to it again" and leaves the room. They turn on the tape; Abbey hears the same notes she recorded the night before, but then the tape goes quiet. Heavy, frightened breathing is heard, then suddenly hysterical screaming that doesn't stop. Over the screaming, an eerie metallic voice is heard speaking a strange language. Abbey is shocked by the recording and goes home, listening to it over and over, trying to make herself remember. She then finds scratch marks in the floorboards that match up with her broken fingernails.
She decides to contact a man who specializes in ancient languages and he comes to Nome and identifies the words in the tape as Sumerian, one of the most ancient languages in the world. The words "Examine" and "Destroy" are translated from the tape. He then tells her that if she were to go into any Sumerian exhibit, she will find strange etchings on stone tablets of creatures that look suspiciously alien, as well as pictures that are undoubtedly rocket ships.
Later, Abbey gets a phone call from Scott’s wife. He is hysterical. He has an unexplained bruise on his upper arm, and wants to be hypnotized again, to get the voices out of his head. Under hypnosis, he bolts up, screams and levitates while speaking in Sumerian. Sheriff August goes to Abbey’s house and tells her Scott’s neck is broken and he is paralyzed. Convinced she has caused the injury, he begins to arrest her, but Dr. Campos arrives and pleads for clemency. The sheriff relents, but says she cannot leave her house, and places an officer outside her residence. At 3:33 am, Deputy Ryan wakes up, sees something in the sky, and then rushes in the house. Abbey’s daughter, Ashley, is found to be missing. A hysterical Abbey says she saw a beam of light come down and that they took Ashley through the ceiling. The sheriff thinks she is insane and removes her son from her custody.
To get Ashley back, Abbey decides that she must make contact with these beings, and the only way to do that is to be hypnotized, to try to remember what she saw. Dr. Campos and Dr. Odusami tape her session, and once hypnotized, she remembers seeing the white owl, looking down at her, smiling. Then she says it is not really an owl, and begins screaming. She also screams various words in Sumerian including “I am.... God,” yet it is not her voice. Something is injected into her shoulder and she remembers drills, and the tape goes blurry again. Abbey wakes up in a neck brace in the hospital. Sheriff August is with her and speaks very calmly. He asks her how her husband died. She tells August he was murdered. The sheriff then pulls out two photos: one of a gun and one of a man with a bullet hole in his temple. It is revealed to her that Will (Julian Vergov) committed suicide, because whatever he was after drove him to the edge. She tries to maintain that Will would never do that, that he was murdered in their bed, stabbed to death by unknown intruders. She concludes she must have unknowingly created a delusion to repress the actual events of that night because they did not make sense.
During the interview, Abbey says all three of them were abducted, and then returned. They have no memory of where they went, but when asked if the entity was God as it claimed, she remembers a feeling of total hopelessness and doubts it.
The interview in 2002 ends and the camera zooms out to show that Abbey is in a wheelchair, as her neck was also broken. The movie ends saying that Abbey was cleared of any wrongdoing, particularly in the disappearance of Ashley, and that she was never found. Her son, Ronnie, still blames her for Will and Ashley and is estranged from her. Abbey left Alaska and now lives on the East Coast of the continental U.S.
Nome has had the highest number of unsolved disappearances in all of Alaska, and the FBI has visited them much more than any other Alaskan city in the last fifty years.
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