In 1938, Civilian Conservation Corps cadet John Patton Jr. found the key to our darkest secret-an anomalous skeleton neither animal nor man. Uncertain of its implications, Patton hid the discovery away from the world-though never forgetting what he found.

Seventy years later, his grandson Gardner is forced to come to terms with his grandfather's past, a man he never knew but in whose footsteps he inevitably follows. When his cousin, controversial documentarian Bart Thompson, arrives for a seemingly routine shoot, Gardner is eager to lend a hand. He soon learns, however, that Bart isn't back just to make a movie-he wants to find the "discovery" their grandfather buried nearly seventy years before, and prove what he claimed was true.