Alan White

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA's Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race.

A year after young engineering student Rip Cantrell discovered the first flying saucer buried deep in the sands of the Sahara, another saucer is brought up from the bottom of the Atlantic. The recovery is funded by a pharmaceutical executive who believes that the saucer holds the key to an anti-aging drug formula that space travelers would need to voyage between galaxies. But one of his technicians, Adam Solo, an alien marooned on Earth for a thousand years, steals the saucer, hoping to summon a starship to rescue him.

The passengers and crew on an Airbus en route to Australia suddenly begin coughing up blood and hemorrhaging violently as the plane plunges to the ground. There are no survivors. A luxury yacht in the South Indian Sea blows up, and a lone woman escapes the contagion that has inexplicably killed everyone else on the boat. A helicopter whose occupants have been stricken by an unknown illness crashes into a bridge in South Africa, killing motorists and pedestrians.