"In the end, what you believe is yours to decide." These are the words of actress Milla Jovovich that open The Fourth Kind, a film based upon the work and supposedly real life video footage of the research completed by Dr. Abigail Tyler in Nome, Alaska. According to the film, Nome has had an extraordinary number of people go missing over the years for a town of its size and is of specific interest to the FBI. The anomalies present in Nome have been of particular interest to Dr. Tyler's husband, Will Tyler, who, in the midst of conducting a study into the possible reasons behind the disappearances, dies mysteriously and unexpectedly, leaving his two kids behind and Abbey with nothing but old notes, dictations, and a ton of questions. As Abbey picks up where her husband's study left off, she begins to discover disturbing similarities among her patient's experiences that soon lead her to believe the direct cause of many of the unusual occurrences in Nome may be due to forces that are not exactly of this world.

The film itself is presented in a way that purposefully meshes the real life experiences of Abigail Tyler (seen and heard through dated "actual" video and audio recordings) with a dramatized version to more fully recreate the events that occurred. There are frequent flashbacks to an interview at Chapman University with the real Abbey Tyler as she relates what exactly happened to her and how she felt before, during, and after her study. Upon first glance, Abbey does not look like a normal, healthy young woman. She looks as though something has eaten away at her soul over time, leaving her a sad and disturbed looking individual. As she recounts her stories and episodes of visits from patients, it begins to become clear why she looks so haunted.

Many of the patients Abbey has been seeing in Nome, a small Alaskan town accessible only by airplane, complain of a similar problem: trouble sleeping due to the presence of an owl outside their window and the creepy feeling that they are not alone, that something is right outside their door. After getting many of the same answers from different, unrelated people to the same questions she decides to take the study one step further. Using the technique of hypnosis, Abbey hopes to discover what exactly her patients are seeing and feeling while they attempt to sleep. Nothing can prepare her for what she is about to see.

As her patients relax and, in a trance-like state, begin to allow outside, subconscious forces to alter their minds, one by one they recall their experience: lying awake, trying to sleep, seeing the owl, then realizing it's not actually an owl. It's something much worse, much more powerful and terrifying. They begin to convulse and shriek, then almost immediately wake up, shaking in extreme and intense fear. While Abbey investigates her patients' strange and unnerving reactions she begins to have some disturbing experiences of her own while attempting to sleep, one of which results in an audio recording consisting of a bone-chilling, disembodied voice shouting something in Sumerian, an ancient, dead language over the petrifying sounds of Abbey's blood-curdling screams. After consulting an expert in the field of Sumerian and deciphering some of the voice's utterances and remembering the feeling of being taken away against her will by some force that night, Abbey's mind starts to turn to the only viable explanation that she sees left. She begins to consider the possibility that she, as well as her other patients, are the victims of encounters of the "fourth kind": alien abduction.

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