Ultraterrestrial

Reid Harper, a bestselling novelist, has never believed in aliens. But since childhood, he's been haunted by dreams of a dark shape in the sky - and the sense of something watching. When an anonymous flash drive full of classified files lands in his lap, those dreams collide with reality. The data shows UAP patterns clustering around nuclear sites and defense facilities. With the help of Kate - his grounded partner - and her eight-year-old daughter Ella, Reid begins mapping the sightings. What starts as a late-night curiosity quickly deepens into obsession. A symbol recurs across the documents, in a comic book Kate's father once gave her, and in Reid's own dreams. The more connections they uncover, the less safe they become: a gray sedan trails their car, cameras loop and glitch, and one night Reid and Kate lose hours - waking up at home with no memory of how they got there. Searching for answers, they reach out to subject-matter experts. One claims it's a breakaway human civilization. Another believes it's something older - a nonhuman intelligence that's been here all along. Then a second flash drive arrives, fully unredacted. Kate realizes someone inside the program wants the truth out... and someone else wants to bury them for it. The encounters escalate: molten orbs in the backyard, time lost, visions of a dead Earth. The message is clear - not hope, but warning. When Reid is taken inside a hidden NovaDyne facility, he sees the artifact up close. It isn't a craft, or even a weapon. It's a control interface - part of a containment system designed to keep humanity grounded. A lock on the gate. Reid comes to understand: disclosure was never about the others. It's about us - and the danger of what we've already stolen. As surveillance tightens and violence closes in, Reid races to finish his manuscript - part history, part confession. But when the orbs return to his own backyard, the warning becomes personal. He vanishes... only to be returned minutes later, aged, bloodshot, and changed forever.