A reporter named Philip Redfield (Ed Nelson) gets lost while driving on unfamiliar back roads, and stops in Peaceful Valley, New Mexico, to get directions and gasoline. He soon finds himself forbidden to leave the small, isolated town when he accidentally witnesses a secret mechanical device which can control and rearrange atoms, making things appear and disappear, assemble and reassemble. The town refuses to share this and other amazing technology that had been given to them by a "great man of science" from an unknown land and planet (implying super intelligence from an alien world) until "men learn the ways of peace." The town elders tell Redfield that their law states that he has either the choice of staying forever in Peaceful Valley as a citizen, where all of his needs and wants will