A man saves a suicidal woman from drowning herself in the ocean. She fights against his attempt to bring her back to land, yelling at him to leave her alone. When he manages to pull her to the beach, she tells him that she doesn't want to be seen. He recognizes her from the news, but she wants to tell him her story herself: At age seventeen, she sees a flying saucer above Central Park. In front of a crowd of witnesses, it drops down and clings to her forehead for a few moments. When it lets go, she falls down, temporarily paralyzed, and the saucer falls next to her, no longer working. The police and FBI arrive and take the girl to the hospital. Under heavy security, the military begins interrogating the girl. She tells them that the saucer spoke to her, but she won't reveal what she heard. Later, the military places her in jail. A therapist visits the girl to figure out why she's keeping the saucer's words a secret. He asks her about her whole life story, then agrees that she can keep the conversation secret if she wants to. She is put on trial for possibly being an enemy of the state. The government thinks that the flying saucer's words might be crucial to national security, but she continues to keep the words secret. The jury finds her guilty of contempt of court and she goes back to jail for a few more days. Due to all the publicity the girl received from the trial, her mother kicks her out of the house. Upon leaving jail, she gets a job at a restaurant and a place of her own, but she is frequently followed and receives persistent questions about the saucer's words. She loses her job because of the suspicion that she is a spy. She decides to move to the shore and work a night job. Over the years, journalists periodically revive her story, but she manages to remain discreet. She begins reading a lot and writing letters that she puts in bottles and throws out to sea. She hopes that maybe one of her letters could help somebody but becomes disillusioned with the idea. Eventually, she decides to kill herself. Back on the beach, she tells the man that telling the truth at the beginning wouldn't have helped her, because they wouldn't have believed her. She asks him if he's going to ask about the saucer's words, but he already knows them and recites them back to her. He reveals that he found one of her messages in a bottle in the ocean, and has been trying to find her ever since. She had written down the saucer's exact words in each of the bottles. She tells him that the saucer's poetic description of loneliness helped her to feel less lonely, so she wrote the messages in the bottles in the hopes that another lonely person would read the saucer's words. The man reveals that his ugliness turned him into a social outcast, and her message helped his loneliness. He tells her that she's beautiful.